It’s been a difficult week for pretty much everyone with a eyes to see and a heart to break. The news has been full of pain, loss and huge amounts of fear. Innocent people all over the world have had their lives forever changed and broken by humans who fail to see the humanity in us all.
Writers are just like human beings…in fact some of us are human beings. And this week I have been struggling come to terms with the wonderful things happening in my life, while horrible things happen outside it.
The wonderful things in my life—apart from the awesome kid and husband—have been one of those real milestones for a writer. The book Tee and I wrote Social Media for Writers is now available. I’m truly proud of what we have written, and I hope it helps a lot of people.
It’s huge for a technical book (clocking in at around 70,000 words—nearly a novel!), and it has something for everyone; best practices for people already in social media, and appendices for those that want some helping getting into the pool.
We also just finished the audio version, which concentrates on best practice, since screen shots really don’t work in audio! That should be out in the next few weeks and it was fun putting that together.
Then there was the massively exciting results of the Kickstarter we ran for the Ministry of Peculiar Occurrences. We funded two novel and a novelette in a one month campaign. As a writer you can’t ask for more validation than people laying down their hard-earned money for a book you haven’t even written yet. Thanks to our readers, we are going to produce stories, they are going to have awesome covers, and it is going to be an exciting year in 2016.
And yet, I feel guilty about these things when so much is going on around us—especially this last week. The bombings in Beirut and Paris. The attack in Nigeria. Even for those people not directly affected by these horrific events, it feels like a stone cast into dark pool—the ripples touch us all. Compared to these things a couple of books coming out doesn’t seem like much.
Yet as I thought about it, I realized every little positive thing we do in the world, is fighting back against those that would destroy it. Every act of kindness and creativity must do something to balance this all out.
And perhaps if we writers are honest, maybe this is why we write in the first place. A little creative spark in a dark world. If we add them all up, don’t they make a greater light, and maybe we can reach minds lost in hate… Probably not all of them I know, but the act of creation is powerful.
Writing is more than that too.
When we write, we create worlds in which we have control—in which bad things might happen, but we have a say in how they end. In our reality right now there seems to be no one with answers or any chance at control.
That might seem like escapism…which it is in part. The human mind has always craved a place to go where things make a kind of sense, a place of magic and heroes. That is why legends contain all those things, and why our ancestors after a back-breaking day in the field huddled around a fire to listen to a bard tell a tale. That ability to transcend time and place is incredible.
However, stories are more than a place to hide and dream. They are also places to gain strength and understanding in. Probably we will never understand why bad things happen to good people, but we can build heroes there and fight back towards the light. We create better versions of ourselves in stories.
Perhaps, that visualization of ourselves helps us in the real world too. We need to read stories about the nobody person, who fights on against the odds and wins. We want to read about the victim who chooses to change her own narrative and make herself into a survivor.
Stories matter. They always have, and they always will. It might not seem much to fight back with, but stories have opened peoples minds and eyes since we found language.
As the initial panic and pain wears off, we are finding stories in the rubble.
As they emerge, they bring hope that we can find meaning and strength in the chaos. This man who lost his wife, and yet refuses to hate her killers…now that is a story worth holding onto.
Such strength is something we need to write about, repeat, and hold up against what those that bring terror want to achieve.
Keep making, keep hoping, and keep your heart open to others even if it hurts.