This Land is Our Land, Flaws and All

And what that means for our writing

Do you look forward to hitting the road? There’s something so freeing about speeding away from work and worries, knowing you’ll have a stretch of time in which you’re accountable to no one. You can’t eat the usual healthy food or do the usual healthy exercises. All you can do is stare ahead at an unspooling road, snack, and listen to things (compelling audiobooks, for instance).

Despite all that, my most recent road trip didn’t give me those expected feelings of release and freedom. It wasn’t merely that I wanted to get as fast as possible from here to there without all of the intervening days. No, it was something much bigger, much more dire than that.

It was the world. The sky. The very air I breathed. All of it, from start to end, was abnormally hot, even for midsummer. All of it, from start to nearly the end, was encased in a sultry orange smoke—the ashy leftovers of northern boreal forest. Sometimes it was faint, making the day appear a bit cloudy or the sun a bit more orange than normal. Much of the time it was thick, depositing an acrid taste in my mouth and a tickle in my throat. Sometimes it descended in such a heavy curtain that I could barely even see the road unspooling ahead. It cast a sad, dirty hue on the dead fields, the trailer parks for farm laborers, the near-melting pavement, the shrunken rivers. Always, it wrapped me in a sense of doom, of claustrophobic global apocalypse from which there’s no escape.

What does a writer do in such a grim situation? Turn inward, obviously. Figure out how to create a story from a terrible situation. Because not only do good stories require unfortunate events and flawed characters, but there’s always a way to write an escape. Or at least a way to discover a sense of hope. It’s not often easy to find, but it’s there.

Sure, I could fester in a swamp of anger and accusations, blaming the world—humanity, specifically—for all my problems. That’s the easy way out. Instead, I choose to craft situations that might seem dismal and characters that might seem heavily flawed. Yet I make sure these components have the promise of change. And the only way that’s gonna happen is if my characters realize that not only should they do something about the current state of affairs, but they can.

In this floundering world of ours, reading and writing stories with strong character arcs is what gives me hope. The winds of change are there, ready to blow away the smoke and cool the land, if we can persevere long enough to find them. Maybe the inspiration we derive from stories will give us the motivation to solve problems in the real world, too.

Happy Tales!