Disasters bring out the best in a lot of people. We see the pictures on TV or the web, and want to help; it’s a natural, human thing. Writers are human; we have those same reactions. We pull out our credit cards and donate to the Red Cross and Doctors Without Borders and other organizations. Then we head back to our computers or TV to search for more pictures and more information.
Not because we really need to know more. Because we’re vultures.
This is a part of being a writer that a lot of people know about, but don’t really think about or understand. That part of a writer’s brain that takes the most horrible things that happen, to themselves or to other people, and cold-bloodedly turns them into stories.
People know about it because writers tell stories on themselves all the time. “It wasn’t so bad when I broke my leg, because I knew I could use it in a book some time.” But they don’t really think about how it works in terms of big disasters or the books they love. When writers say “Everything is material,” we really, truly do mean everything.
I have friends who live in Tokyo. I haven’t heard from them, and I worry. And while I’m worrying and obsessively checking my e-mail, there is a little part of my brain recording everything in case I find a use for it in a book later. It’s not just recording how I feel and my obsessive checking-in; it’s also recording the photos and videos of walls of muddy water racing toward a town, of the piles of rubble left behind, of clear orange flames against muddy grey water as a building that used to be somebody’s home or business burns.
As I listen to the reports of missing trains and damaged nuclear reactors, that part of my brain is keeping track of what bits of news turn out to be wrong, and whether they’re under-estimates or over-estimates, and how other people are reacting both here and there. Because I might need it one day.
A lot of non-writers find this enormously disturbing. Looking at it with the non-writerly part of my brain, I find it enormously disturbing. Nevertheless, it is a part of the process that cannot be denied. Everything that happens to me goes into the mental compost from which my stories emerge, and one of the things that has happened to me more than once in my lifetime is watching a disaster play out at a distance.
This cannot be denied; but it can be abused. One can use a massive real-life tragedy as a cheap and easy way to wring emotions out of the reader…but doing so is, well, cheap. Tawdry. It will also rightly offend a lot of people, which is why everyone in the professional entertainment business tries to be sensitive and delay publication of the book or showing of the TV episode or movie that parallels a recent tragedy or disaster a little too closely, even when said books, episodes, and movies were written and filmed long before the actual disaster.
Using the same massive real-life tragedy as mere colorful background is as bad, if not worse. There is a difference between showing how one character experiences and copes with a disaster on a personal level, and showing that character waltzing through a mostly-unrelated story that just happens to take place during or after a major real catastrophe “because it is so cool!” (No, really, somebody actually said that to me once, ages ago – I think it was about Hurricane Andrew. It was a bad idea then, and it’s still a bad idea.)
Most of the writers I know do not do these things. Instead, the ones who use writing stories as a coping mechanism go ahead and write them, and then bury them in a drawer somewhere until a) someone proposes a charity anthology that they can give it to, or b) it’s fifteen or twenty years later and unlikely to hit raw nerves anymore. The rest of us let all those images and statistics and experiences sink into the story-compost in our backbrains, and in two years, or five, or twenty, we write the story of a meteor hitting a colony outpost on Mars or a malfunction in an undersea research base that draws on every disaster we’ve ever seen or heard – earthquakes, tidal waves, tornados, hurricanes, flash floods, bombings. And when readers compliment us on how real we made it feel, we just sort of give them a stiff smile and say thank you.
Because we know where we got it from. And the compost that grows the loveliest roses is the same stuff that starts off as ugly, smelly, horrible bits of things that even the most dedicated gardener doesn’t really want to examine too closely sometimes.
I remember being horrified at myself a few years ago – a new friend was sharing really ugly stuff from his life with us, and while 99% of me was fully engaged in listening and understanding, there was that small part in the back of my mind that was mechanically recording every part of this conversation, down to the smell of cigarette smoke on his coat, storing it all away for use later. It took me a little while to accept that this has always and will always be my reaction to anything big, sorrow or joy, that I encounter. It doesn’t change my genuine love and concern for people, and I would never, never use an actual person or specific event in a story, but a writer needs to understand the world and how it works, and more importantly, how people work in this world. And sometimes that means being 1% cold-blooded on occasion.
Oh thank goodness it’s not just me!
When writers say “Everything is material,” we really, truly do mean everything.
Of all the images that I’ve seen so far, the one that affected me the most was one of people at a bank of telephones and one woman kneeling in front of a telephone shaking and crying as she reached someone on the other end. And I made a mental note that when big disasters happen, the real story is in the lives of the people and their relationships with others.
My family are in Christchurch, New Zealand, I wasn’t there for the Sept 2010 earthquake. I had just moved back to Christchurch when the Jan 2011 floods hit Brisbane (where I had been living) and while I regret the loss of life and property, and wish I could’ve been present in both places to help my friends and family, part of me was also wishing I could have experienced these disasters.
I was in Christchurch for the Feb 2011 earthquake, and as awful and devastating as it has been, part of me is recording my reactions and those of others, the disconnect between media reportage and reality, the everyday heroism of people and how we slip up, the process of disaster management and what happens next. I would never wish that this had happened, that people died, but I am glad that I am here to experience this, to expand my understanding (watching Japan is so much worse now) and put it all in the writing compost.
I am very glad that other people feel the same way, and I’m not a horrible disconected person, just someone with a writer brain.
Boy, I was beginning to question myself, so I’m glad I read this post, Patricia. I do not read the news, and we don’t have TV. But, I’ve been on my computer daily reading all the updated news on Japan. I, too, am storing it all away in my memory bank. I’ll never use the actual what is happening, but what I am studying are the photos of the sorrow I see, of people, rubble, piles of cars. That’s where the real stories lie.