Storytelling and The Price
I was tempted to push this back again due to non-stop barrage of current events. Despite the uncertainty hanging like a pall over everything, I’m going to stick to what I meant to talk about in this month’s newsletter.
Nadia Bulkin’s essay, In Defense of The Price has been on my mind lately. Yes, partly because of the real world but also because generally fiction feels true when it reflects the real world back at you from a strange angle. Writing advice loves to hammer home that character choice, or character agency is important, but one the flip side of every choice is a trade-off. What is the character willing to sacrifice in exchange for making that choice? A character receiving a “happily-ever-after” ending because they made an unpopular but correct choice likely won’t feel earned - in part because it doesn’t align with our own memories of similar situations.
Most of all, The Price should be required of anyone, regardless of whether they “deserve” it or not. Nothing like ensuring that only the bad people have bad things happen to them to drain away any kind of tension.
I’m of course struck by how often I’ve deployed the irruption of the supernatural or eerie into my characters’ lives as something that is inscrutable. For example, in Vanishing, there was nothing Maria (or Maya or whatever her real name might be) could have done right to escape being devoured by the Lovecraftian entity that is U.S. immigration policy. In Up In the Hills, She Dreams of Her Daughter Deep In the Ground, the titular daughter’s motives are unclear (and possibly malicious). It’s Gloria - desperate to find meaning in what’s happened to her - who assigns some kind of motive to her daughter.
This is more or less the space where I want to write for a bit moving forward, but of course that brings with it its own price - at least among pro-paying genre fiction venues. I’m no stranger to each of my stories receiving dozens of rejections, but that hasn’t stopped me from submitting.
Truth be told, that’s my own price to pay for writing unsettling and Weird stuff. Oh well!
Speaking of Prices. . .
I want to clarify that I am currently okay, despite everything currently happening, but who knows what tomorrow may bring?
Outside of shitposting online, I generally keep much of my personal life isolated from my more public writing one. I tend to be a private person.
That said, I am a Federal employee.
‘Nuff said. IYKYK. That type of thing.
What that may mean is that this newsletter may become at the very least pay-what-you-want just to (hopefully) weather the storm if I end up furloughed as some kind of power play (as seems to be threatened) sometime in March when the Federal budget gets negotiated.
That’s about as much as I know in this uncertain moment; I’ve been concentrating on taking it one day at a time. I think we are off the edge of the map, so we’ve all got to take care of each other in whatever ways we can.
I’m not going to say I’m not frightened or volcanically angry but freaking out about the state of the world isn’t helpful, and the sad truth is: there may be no one else to save us but ourselves.
Let’s get to it.
One More Thing. . .
Over at Podside Picnic we plan to have episodes covering Theodor Sturgeon’s The Man Who Lost the Sea (Anson Mount’s narration here is excellent), another entry in (Joe) Dante’s Inferno with Matinee, as well as a return to Season 3 of the AppleTV show, For All Mankind. I’m planning on unlocking some premium episodes somewhat routinely.
And that’s all she wrote!