This week I've been struggling to write stories. When you write for children, characters act in good faith, bad actors can be turned around with a kind word and everyone gets a happy ending. It's how stories work. But when they're juxtaposed with real world events as monumentally tragic as the war in Ukraine, it becomes harder to affirm those reassuring messages.
In my stories good triumphs over evil, the school bully can be won round, and everyone ends up happy. They're the values we try to reinforce in children through the stories we make for them. But when the real world comes crashing in it becomes harder to knuckle down and repeat those reassuring moral tales. In my stories adversity is only ever temporary; and being kind, friendly and warm hearted will usually get you everywhere - but it's not true is it? Not really...
I want children to believe that it's true. I want to live in a world where it's true. I want children to see those values modelled and then try and exemplify those values in their own behaviour. But when the grown ups repeatedly prove that it's actually the amount of money you have and the size of the gun in your pocket that gets you where you want - what's the point? Am I actually doing a disservice to children in reinforcing the kind of positive behaviour that so often triumphs in stories but so rarely does in real life? Let's face it, if Harry Potter were a real story Voldemort would win every time.
As I watch the news coverage of the war in Ukraine I see familiar story patterns being used again and again to couch a very real narrative in almost fictional terms. We have goodies and baddies, hourly plot twists on 24/7 news coverage, I 've learned the names of people and places I've never heard of before, I've learned more about the movements of a 40 mile convoy of Russian tanks than I ever wanted to.
This morning, while listening to the news, it sounded like the news reader was actually frustrated that the convoy hadn't moved for days, as if they couldn't wait for the next horrific plot twist, as if this was all happening in some sort of bingeworthy Netflix drama rather than a terrible reality, as if they needed the script writers to hurry up the plot and cut to the action.
The news is being couched as a story. The Ukranians are plucky underdogs standing up to a big bad bully. In reality they're a population living through hell. Why do we have to turn reality into a narrative like this? Does couching this conflict in story terms make the horror easier to digest? Does it make it feel one stage removed from our lives? This isn't happening to people like us, it's happening to characters we know and are familiar with - the poor victim, the mean bully, the plucky resistance fighter...
Does it make us believe that 'everything will be all right in the end'? And if it does is that really the best message to be giving people? We should be facing this horror, collectively, as grown ups in all it's calamitous barbarism, rather than viewing it as the 'all is lost' moment in a Marvel franchise, the moment just before the heroes save the day by being the good guys.
In every story I've ever written, at this moment, the underdog would rally and they would win. It's what should happen. Through creating stories where it repeatedly does, have we nurtured a population who believe it will, regardless of the reality of the situation, because that's how stories work and this war is being reported as one. It's not helpful.
At a time where I am finding it harder to tell stories, the news seems determined to turn reality into one. We all love a happy ending, we all expect a happy ending, the news wants us to believe it might just happen, but we all know the truth, time to treat us like grown ups.
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7 comments:
Hi Ciaran,
Thank you so much for rhis post amd your thoughts about the the illusion of the story structure. I felt as if the pandemic shut-downs were covered int hte same sort of way. (And I won't even start on the boosterish hero language used by some.)
It certainly feels as if the simple way we shape stories for children doesn't work as neatly or easily now, if you lift your eyes above the bunker.
I wondered if I was the only one recoiled from the drive for the satisfaction of a good story ending, and the misuse of this story-fed need to drive almost very aspect of news, both real and fake. One can almost tick the way any story or interview or more will go - including the "tell us how you feel" questioning.
Can't tell you how relieved I am to read this wise post, even as I hope you'll manage to look after yourself and find a way to keep your own spirits going.
"Will there be singing?"
"Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark times."
And even that comes from a story
Forgot to add my thanks for the useful link.
It's a damn good post. One of the best I've ever read.
This is such a good post. Thank you. I think there is so much to think about in it. I remember reading somewhere recently that the graphic novel by Art Spiegelman 'Maus', disturbs people because it honestly and unflinchingly doesn't give a happy ever after ending to the Holocaust. I don't completely know how we navigate this challenge not to impose unhealthily happy endings in children's books - people like Morris Gleitzman in 'Once' and the following books also manage somehow not to sugarcoat or sentimentalise real horror and 'tidy up' the Holocaust, whilst somehow leaving the reader with Hope. That's such a huge skill. I totally agree that there is something so unhealthy about an imposition of the expectation of happy endings on unfolding world events, as if we just have to watch and don't have to do anything against evil - it will all turn out fine and we don't have to stand up and be counted, or if we do, we will always win. I think our culture isn't good at accepting the reality of suffering and evil, and as adults we need to face this head on. At the same time, I think that children do still need us to write stories with Hope and to help them imagine other more positive realities, and also for entertainment, when they need to escape from awful situations (often, as in wars, that adults have put them in). I thought this by Frank Cottrell Boyce, on the role of culture was so good. When he talks about how the story of Heidi helped a young Romany child growing up in Switzerland, it gives me a sense of the role of a writer for children, and that writing positive stories with happy endings , or even the possibility of Hope, even in terrible times, is still an important thing to do for children, who don't have the agency to fight against bigger evils. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/15/frank-cottrell-boyce-proms-lecture-what-point-culture-in-brexit-britain
https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/jul/15/frank-cottrell-boyce-proms-lecture-what-point-culture-in-brexit-britain I am not sure if this link works. I hope it does.
Anne, thanks so much for that link - it's a marvellous piece. Frank C-B expresses thoughts that I hadn't clearly formulated - such as: 'I don’t write to help inspire people to become writers. I write to inspire them to become readers. Because I believe good readers make better engineers, and bakers, and surgeons, and parents and partners and are just a lot happier.' And: 'A book is not a learning resource. It's the knife that picks the lock of your isolation. It's a box of delights.' And I've always loved Heidi, too.
Ciaran, I absolutely empathise with much that you say in your piece. But I'm not entirely sure that I feel the same about the media reporting. Perhaps we're just seeing different bits - but I think that Lyse Doucet and Clive Myrie, for example, have been excellent. And Steve Rosenberg in Russia - how brave is he?
I think it's overly gloomy to say that stories end happily and reality ends unhappily. There are many victories in reality. Stories exist to remind us that these exist.
This same problem is confronted by Frodo and Sam in Mordor, when they see a distant star and realise it is the same light that is in Galadriel's glass, the same light that came from the jewel that Beren stole from the first Dark Lord, against all the odds, and so are reminded that the great stories never end. Fanciful, we migh5 say, till we remember that Tolkien lost nearly all his friends in the Great War and nearly died on the Somme. If he can go on to write that, then it tells us that stories are not merely unfounded optimism. They are a source of truth.
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