Reality informs everything we write. We grow up in the real world. We learn the real names of things, we navigate our way through real life and real school and real relationships. Our lives are lived solidly in the real world, and we can’t help that, as writers, our fiction is shaped by it.
And yet…
Books (and TV and film) are by their very nature escapist mediums. They let us turn off our brains to escape reality for an hour (or three) and immerse ourselves in someone else’s version of the world.
During the great Depression, movies were one way people took a break from the daily grind of their lives. Seeing one was relatively cheap, and for as long as the images were flickering on the screen while the film spun from one reel to the other, you could forget about your troubles. Filmmakers knew this, and (mostly) took pains not to make films about how horrible real life was. Instead, they made films about a magical land in the sky, about a lawyer who took his fight to Washington, and about an evil witch who sent a princess into a death-like sleep.
Not unlike the thirties, the last decade has been a tumultuous period. A shock election, two horrible wars, a worldwide pandemic, assassination attempts, corruption, and lies lies and more lies… these are all things I’m seeking to escape when I sit down with a good book, or when I put something on to watch on TV. I have no desire to relive all these dark and depressing events.
This is why the TV show Emily in Paris was one of our favorite pandemic-era discoveries. It was light and fluffy and optimistic, and didn’t remind me of the dark and gloomy times we were living in.
As a writer, I choose which bits of the real world to spin up into my fiction. We authors are like painters, choosing which hues to add to our brush and in what proportions, blending them deftly into something that we hope will captivate our readers. When I’m writing a generation ship sci-fantasy, or a colonization tale set on a faraway world, there’s no need to talk about US elections and pandemics and all the rest. Doing so would be an unwelcome distraction.
But when I’m writing a contemporary magical realism tale, things get a bit murkier.
In the River City Chronicles, my first River City novel, I skated around this. The action took place in 2015, before most of the recent troubles. But when I decided to dive back into their world to see where my characters ended up in Down the River, avoiding these dark topics was all but impossible. After all, who wasn’t impacted in some way by the pandemic? Who doesn’t have strong feelings about US politics these days?
Simply ignoring all of these things would leave a gaping hole in the story, and would be a betrayal of both my characters and my readers.
So I decided I had to work it all in somehow. But I also didn’t want to make these real life events the focus of the story.
Instead, I took a couple tacks. First, I decided that one of the characters, Ella, who already had been facing significant health challenges, succumbed to Covid and passed away a couple years before the events of Down the River, which takes place this year after the original book’s 2015 timeline. This gave her partner Ben a recovery arc, and set him up to meet someone new in book two.
Second, I decided to use another of my viewpoint characters, Dave, to deal with recent events a little more head-on. When a health crisis forces him to re-evaluate his life, he takes a tour of the places that were most important to him, and in the process reviews the difficult recent years and the impact they had on himself, his husband Marcos, and their adopted daughter Marissa.
Having acknowledged this dark reality, I won’t dwell on it going forward, but will touch on it again periodically throughout the story, and how it has impacted each of my characters.
Not every writer will choose the same path. Some will decide to ignore the troubles of our recent past. And that’s okay. We all need some time off from litigating these issues, and such stories provided a much needed break.
But for my own part, I’m glad I decided to weave our recent history into the tapestry of the River City.
And when you read it for yourself, I hope you will agree.