Hopelessness is real. Suicide is real. Isolation is real. Depression is real. Global pandemic is real. The Collapse of the Environment is real. Problems So Big They Cannot Be Solved are real.
Besides, it’s easy to present the problem, show despair, then end on an unhappy, realistic note. It’s much harder to suggest a possible way out of the problem. It’s much, much harder to write positively with conviction.
In a recent blog of mine, I was looking at what made William Sydney Porter such a popular writer. Everyone knows who he is, but few people write like him anymore. (https://faithandsciencefiction.blogspot.com/2021/03/writing-advice-short-stories-advice-and.html)
You don’t know him? Oops. You probably know him better by his pen name: O. Henry.
Poet James Whitcomb Riley wrote of O. Henry, “One can readily see that he is the natural father of ‘the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating’, which moral reflection is the thread upon which most of his stories are strung.”
People LIKE reading O. Henry stories…at least they DID at one time. Creating such a story though, manipulating readers from sadness to gentle smiles IS HARD WORK. It doesn’t require a great deal of skill to write a dark story. I found this out myself when I wrote a short story with my son-in-law that ended like this:
Ryan sighed then said to Zilpha, “The only person I ever thought I could love became undead eighteen years ago.” He looked at Arroyo-Torres and said, “You’re sadly mistaken, Major. I wasn’t trying to destroy the Containment Area.” He turned his back on both of them and walked out the door and away from the Workhouse.
In front of him, stretching to an abandoned mall, the ground had shattered from the explosions of the dynamite and settled. But now, as Arroyo-Torres and Zilpha pushed their way out of the office, the rubble had started to move, heaving occasionally as if something were trying to push its way to the surface. Ryan said loudly, though to no one in particular, “I’m all that’s left of the Crew of the first International Zombie Containment Area,” he tapped the door frame. “I think zombies could be news,” he paused. “Maybe one of you can figure out how to use the roller before anything bad happens.” He turned around, flashed a feral grin then asked, “Or do you want me to get back to work?”
The main character was being retired just before his pension would have started. Management had no real use for him as “the zombie” problem had been dealt with and they were shutting it down.
Do people whose jobs aren’t deemed “important” and who are losing their only source of income while management and politicians keep right on working, sound like any recent response to a pandemic you know of?
Certainly I wasn’t advocating barkeeps, servers, and daycare workers blowing up anything. But I WAS advocating action. Trying to do something innovative. Not giving up hope. I can guarantee you that the conclusion to the story did NOT come easily. It required some deep thought and trying out other solutions until we hit on one that made good sense.
It’s my thoughtful opinion that the current dash into grim hopelessness is a reflection of a “starry-eyed” view of the future that once seemed to be dawning.
I’ve noticed this drift in my favorite magazine, ANALOG Science Fiction and Fact. The current issue has two points of data for my research. First of all is the Guest Editorial, by famed British SF writer, Ian Watson. I found it downright grim as he seemed to be stating with finality that Humans living anywhere except on the surface of the Earth is ridiculous. Forget it. Give up. Don’t even bother…It might have been ripped from the pages of your nearest Bible book that currently carries the milquetoast title, “The Revelation of St. John the Divine.” That’s a decided soft-pedaling of its original Greek title, “Apokalupsis Iesou Christou Tow Doula Autou Ioanne”, or The Apocalypse of Jesus Christ to His Slave John. We typically shorten that to The Apocalypse.
The second is the Fact article by Christina De La Rocha, “From Atmospheric Rivers to Super Typhoons: The Future Looks Bright for Weather Disaster Fans.” She concludes, “As climate change gains pace, so will the numbers and intensity of severe weather events coming hopefully only to a television screen near you.” Whew…sarcasm is a tack I often take myself, though I usually give it a humorous twist. That last sentence didn’t seem particularly humorous to me…
Neither one appear to offer any hope at all. Of course, that keeps the articles short and disturbing and scary. As anyone who has ever had children, it’s far easier to startle a baby than to calm them down. Which, I’m certain, is exactly what the editor ordered. (I’m not going to mention that the essay and article are in the vicinity of “preaching to the choir.” The people who should be the target don’t typically read ANALOG.)
So, to answer Bruce’s set of questions, “Dark and Gritty: necessary? Unnecessary? Merely a trendy fictional fashion statement, or clinical evidence that too many writers out there have profound unresolved Daddy issues? Is there any room left for fiction that leaves readers with a positive or at least hopeful view of the world, the future, life, and the people who live it?”
I don’t think it’s trendy or that there are unresolved Daddy issues. (Though there may very well be. I’ve got a few of those I’m still dealing with!) I think that “dark and gritty” is a response to the world around us.
I think that “positive and hopeful” views of the world are on a strictly “let’s just wait and see.” In fact, I think we’ve reached a point where we, as a world, are a bit fatalistic. Sort of like how the world came crashing down around American ears after the ebullience of post-WWII ran into images of shadows burned into Japanese walls not destroyed by exploding A-bombs; race issues finally drawn out of the closets they’d been thrown into (which closets were also painted shut, boarded up, after which the entire wall was re-studded and sheet rocked over); assassinations of public figures; air pollution; silent springs; the population explosion; poverty and sexism pushed into the light instead of hidden in a closet on a different wall from the one where racism had been hidden…and those were only the biggest issues to rise from the shadows of WWII.
In the shadow of all of the events since then – from exploding space shuttles to the scars left by colonialism, and (maybe) at the end of a pandemic; we are now dealing with the first set of problems as an underlayment (put over the original flooring of expansion, slavery, and the rape of the environment), after laying carpet over racism, sexism, terrorism…that carpet of prosperity has gone threadbare…
But here I am, doing exactly what I think we have to stop doing. Ahem.
Excuse me while I go refigure the endings of some of my recent stories and examine how I might offer even the HINT of a solution to some of my characters, because I think we CAN get back to being a literature that both raises issues (disguised as story plots) and offers solutions to be pondered, sometimes tested, and maybe implemented.
A coda to the above: Shortly after I wrote this, I read (in the same issue of ANALOG with the articles I referred to above!) the short story “Recollections” by Elise Stephens, an author who has landed in Stupefying Stories in the past. In it, the situation is textbook “dark and gritty,” but she doesn’t allow the story to overshadow hope, in a quintessential O. Henry way. If a good short story is indeed ‘the moral reflection that life is made up of sobs, sniffles, and smiles, with sniffles predominating’, then in “Recollections,” Elise Stephens managed to do just that.
3 comments:
Your opening made me remember a rejection message from George Scithers that I saw too many times when I was first starting out. "You've stated a problem. Now find a solution!"
I don't think that critique was original with him. I think he got it from Campbell. But it is incisive: it's much easier to see a problem and be overwhelmed by the sight than to think, "Okay, how do we deal with this?"
I put a lot of my stories on the shelf for a year or more before finding solutions. I can find answers, but it ain't always easy. I don't want the solution to be ex deus machina, but I don't want the story to have an unhappy ending either. The way I look at it. Life is unhappy enough. If I can't always solve my own problems, I can at least make things a little easier for my characters.
I do like O'Henry. I have never been a fan of Gift of the Magi, though. I have never liked reading about basically good people getting screwed for the purpose of a twist.
Sometimes the bleakness in modern stories and television and film seems tacked on for shock value. The original versions of the Outer Limits and Twilight Zone had their share of bleak endings, but many episodes also offered hope. Not so with the reboots. The eighties version of TZ was far better than people remember with a lot of funny and hopeful episodes, but 90s Outer Limits and the two most recent Zones are all about screwing with the characters. Bleak and unhappy and often illogical endings all for the sake of the twist. When characters do everything right, do they really have to be steamrolled by the evil ex deus machina.
And speaking of which, don't even get me started on the absurdly downbeat ending to Ex Machina.
People gripe about "deus ex machina" endings but they're as old as story-telling itself. The term comes from a modern(ish) Latin transliteration of an ancient Greek theatrical term, ἀπὸ μηχανῆς θεός, literally, "god from the machine." Ancient Greek and Roman stages had trapdoors and rafters to enable actors portraying gods to pop up onstage or drop down from the heavens as if by magic.
2500 years later, we're still dealing with a plot gimmick that was created to make use of a then state-of-the-art special effect. Remember that the next time you see something in an SF story that owes its origins to Star Trek.
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