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Quite a while ago now, in the car, a friend and I were talking about the predictive/prophetic abilities of Octavia Butler as well as William Gibson, and I finally muttered that I increasingly feel that, if you're worried about something happening in the future, maybe don't write about it.
"Because then it will happen?" my friend asked. I nodded grimly and we both laughed.
By then I'd had the chilling thought—which I was at that moment scrupulously keeping to myself—that if we do live in a multiverse written by monkeys on typewriters, then every fiction might horrifyingly be true in at least one timeline, and what if 'belief' is what diverts a person into that channel on Interdimensional Cable? Wait, that is the plot of the Jerry O'Connell TV vehicle Sliders, right? Anyway. In a Celtic Cross spread, the Tarot does not differentiate between "his hopes and fears." Hopes and fears are the same coin.
A friend recently helped me with something because, he said, I'd functioned as an "oracle," he said, during particular transitory periods in his life. Later he would clarify: "At the time, you were slightly ahead of me," he said. Soon after my parents had passed away, we'd met up and I'd described a roadmap of exactly what losing one's parents would entail, how to navigate it, what to watch for. "It changed the trajectory of my life," he told me. I felt a frisson of fear because I began to wonder how I had changed it. What if, as an agony aunt, I had actually created fear, had generated agony? How does anything work at all?
If focusing on a worry is the same thing as wishing for it—praying for it—then maybe our goal is to "look for the helpers," as a certain wise man once said, because looking in the direction of integrity and trustworthiness will give those of us with flagging optimism some fresh, evidence-based reasons to start expecting miracles out of one another.
Put simpler, we are all trapped in a war of ideas, aren't we? What if a warning initiates the danger? Is this just another OCD thought? (I’m diagnosed, don’t worry; I’m allowed to ask this.) But what if a problem, projected into the world without a possible solution or strategy already-readily in hand, is just a self-fulfilling prophecy in disguise?
If nothing else, maybe the other reason to not write 'predictively' about a looming dystopian future is really just to stop giving the enemy a map of the territory, y'know? "Wow, what a great idea. No one will stop me; they’ll think this is just a work of fiction." Ugh, what if the exact wrong people are the ones taking your novel seriously.
Who knows. I sure fucking don't. (And let’s be clear. I am not blaming our greatest writers, or speculative fiction itself, for reality. I’m just issuing a challenge to myself; see blog post title.)
At this point—by which I mean quite a while ago, in the car with a friend—I talked about the strength of fiction writing, as opposed to nonfiction, documentary, and journalism, especially if you have real personal stakes such as a house or a family preventing you from sharpening your knives and going boldly forth. It takes all kinds, I guess.
"It's a plausible deniability, really," I'd said to this friend. In an increasingly authoritarian environment, you can either bare your teeth and say exactly what you mean, and damn the consequences, and never go home again. OR you can write a nice little fable. Book journalists will interview the author on public radio. What did you mean by this? Is this an analogy? "Oh, that's interesting," the author will say. "No, I don't really think about what I'm writing while I'm writing," the author will say pleasantly. "There's absolutely zero intention here." No one can prove the author wrong. If anything, the author is saying the real genius rests with the reader. It's all up to the reader!
The real question I was facing, at that moment, was how much longer and how much bolder I wanted to go. What shape would I like my life to take? Do I want to continue sharpening my knives, or do I want to be surrounded by children? (Not to be shielded, obviously, but to be safe-er for family and friends to be around. With this said, groupings of people are not 'safety'. Rather, groupings of people make larger, easier targets. Nations, people, bomb hospitals all the time. There is no safety.)
(Sidenote: As I was typing this, I was simultaneously in a battle of wills with a Nespresso machine. Everything was all set; the gadget just wasn't working for me. I gave up. "I am done," I said to it out loud, "I am picking my battles." My best friend walked in. I expressed dismay at the Nespresso machine. She asked me if I had pushed the button on top. Of course I had, several times. She pushed the same button. The machine immediately dispensed coffee. She handed me the coffee. I rolled my eyes.)
More recently this question snapped into clearer view. For a while now I'd introduced myself, in the suburbs, by my spouse's last name. There's no good reason for me to create terror in a small red bubble by being, myself, googleable. This isn't to say I'm not perfectly open about my beliefs in my everyday life; I am. A surprising number of people will agree with you about absolutely everything until you accidentally slip up and say 'socialism'. I do happily volunteer that I'm "so far to the left that we'll probably find something in common," which curls my best friend's hair every time I say it to anyone.
To this: I recently attended a small event in a close-knit community. I loved every mom I talked to. It was a revelation. I went home and typed up every grand thing that had happened. I'd witnessed, I'd seen, I'd asked, I'd listened, I'd loved, I wanted to preserve everything, and even to share everything.
But I can't—because I also want to preserve and protect and defend the people involved. For maybe the first time in my life, I am having to become a private diarist. I guess that's called just a diarist.
In other words, in order to preserve these beautiful moments that happen between and among people—and that truly deserve to be witnessed and remembered—I'll have to create composite characters, reset and recast. But I'd also have to do that even if I, especially if I, were ever to want to levy criticism against a bad actor with a lot of power or money.
I did major in fiction writing. If the university had offered creative nonfiction at the time, that would've been my major instead. Still, there were a lot of valid reasons I’d opted to major in fiction writing. One reason was, when I wrote autobiographically as a teen, my peers could not believe what I had written. (Hashtag things that actually happened.) It was just too dense, too much, for one young life, and I realized I was going to have to break my life down into much smaller pieces in order to be believable—digestible.
Increasingly, though, I find that real life is so much stranger than fiction—sometimes dreamlike, sometimes batshit insane—to the point that you almost need fiction in order to 'tone it down', to just take it down a notch. Nonfiction would test credulity.
“Spain and Japan. Those are the two places where magical realism seems to be really popular,” I said to a man in the bookstore today. I should have said “where that genre is seemingly produced.” Maybe France, too. And Mexico. We were standing in line for coffee, and I’d asked to read the back of a book he’d placed on the counter. He’d pushed it down the counter toward me, and I’d leaned to read the book’s back cover without actually touching it.
“And me!” the man said. “I’m another place it’s popular.”