Writing When the Sky is Falling
When I was a child, my mother read me a bedtime story called Chicken Little. It began with an acorn falling from an oak tree and hitting Chicken Little on the head.
“Help! Help!” the bird cried out. “The sky is falling!”
Her feathered friends Henny Penny, Ducky Lucky, Goosey Loosey, Gosling Gilbert and Turkey Lurkey joined her in raising the alarm, overlooking the far more immediate threat that was posed to them by Foxy Loxy.
Yes, and? I thought, upon hearing this. Their distraction made perfect sense to me, a child who had once spent all summer indoors for fear of ants. The sky was set to flatten those birds. Of course they weren’t worried about a measly fox.
Except that the sky wasn’t falling, my mother reminded me. The birds just thought it was, and their panic almost got them killed.
My mother was right. And yet, twenty years later, I still sympathize with Chicken Little.
“We’re walking into World War Three . . .”
“The robots are taking over . . .”
“Climate catastrophe is coming . . .”
To name a few fears.
“You see?” I say, when faced with new evidence for any of them. “I told you so.”
“Yes, well,” my partner responds, good-humoredly. “Even a stopped clock is right twice a day, isn’t it, my love?”
Max doesn’t believe that the sky is falling. Thank God, I need him to balance me. For all the (slightly) more optimistic reports that he points to, though, I am not sure it matters whether doom is impending or not, so long as we feel like it is.
Fear is a crippling emotion. It shrinks our focus right down to the here-and-now, fight-or-flight moment in which it takes hold. It renders us – no, reminds us that we are – animals, with no grand designs on the future. We are creatures of today, without room to think beyond our survival.
Is it any wonder, then, that I – and many other writers – have been struggling to feel motivated, of late? Writing a novel takes endurance. It pays in delayed gratification, if we are lucky. These days, as we suffer with morbid addictions to refreshing our newsfeeds, flow states are hard to come by. There seems little point in even trying to access them, when we know that a book takes time and we aren’t feeling confident about our supply of that.
“We’re walking into World War Three . . .”
“The robots are taking over . . .”
“Climate catastrophe is coming . . .”
Yet close your eyes – tighter, squeeze those fears out – and think. As dispiriting as dread often is, it can bring us clarity, too.
Let’s imagine the worst-case scenario. The sky, in some form, is falling. You are working on a book that no one will ever get to read. It no longer serves you to wonder how many copies this book will sell or what people will think of it. All you have is today.
And so, the question becomes, what will you be glad to have spent this day writing? What kind of story do you feel compelled to tell, knowing that it will just be for you?
Perhaps it is the story of a fond memory, a confession that you need to get off your chest, or a morality tale from some key lesson that you have learned. In any case, I’ll bet it is not ‘what the market wants’.
None of us would want money in art, would we? In an ideal world, where we didn’t have bills to pay. We would be free to create with our hearts rather than with our heads. We would be able to enjoy the creations of others, uncorrupted by capitalism. No more franchise blockbusters or cynical remakes.
Perhaps, in this way, a world in which it feels like the sky is falling is an ideal one. When faced with death, most of us turn pure in our intentions. We don’t spend our last phone calls on the people we have loathed or felt obliged to, but on those we have loved. We hold hands. We make amends.
Call it the confessionalist in me, but I think we should be doing something similar as writers. I don’t mean to suggest that I am writing about sunshine and flowers – far be it from me to produce anything so pleasant or calming – but I am writing with more intentionality. Wanting to feel satisfied when I shut down my laptop for the day, and not just like I have ‘made progress’. Towards what? We are living in such uncertain times that I am not sure any of us can say.
What we can do is take comfort in the fact that stories are as old as time. They have survived every disaster to befall the world so far – since cave art and oral tradition – and they will survive the next. Perhaps not strictly your stories, and perhaps not strictly mine. But don’t honest accounts of our human experiences belong, in some ways, to all of us?
“Help! Help!”
Is the sky really falling? Oh, god. Don’t ask me, the child who once spent all summer indoors for fear of ants. Let’s just agree that we hope not, shall we? And keep writing. For ourselves and for each other, for today.