On stories and escapism

Fair warning: this is probably going to be one of the more personal posts I’ve written on this blog.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about stories.  ‘Oh?’ you ask.  Yes.  I’ve been coming to terms with my own appreciation for stories and storytelling and where that appreciation came from.  I’ve always enjoyed playing video games, watching movies, and occasionally reading books (though listening to audiobooks has superseded this as of late.)  Now, that’s probably not that uncommon of a thing to say.  Who doesn’t enjoy a good movie, book, or video game, am I right?

But the appreciation I have isn’t that broad.  With very few exceptions, my selections of what media to consume revolves around only a few things.  I love playing video games, but I’ve never been a huge player of multiplayer games, whether online or local.  I’ve played the single player campaign of The Last of Us probably around ten times in total between TLOU on PS3 and TLOU:R on PS4.  I have logged exactly zero minutes of multiplayer, which I’ve only heard great things about.  And I’m sure it’s a ton of fun.  It just doesn’t appeal to me.

It’s the same story with movies.  I’ll pass up (most) summer blockbuster action flicks because there usually isn’t much behind the visual effects and explosions WOOHOOOOOO!

It’s the same story with books.  I need something that’s going to stimulate me, that’s going to…

You know, what I need, what I ask for, in all forms of media, is something that grabs my interest and refuses to let go.  What I need is a compelling narrative.  What I need are interesting, relatable, human, believable characters.  What I need is a story worth telling.

I need my media to be story-centric to have a lasting impact.  Sure, I can gobble down episodes of It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia and enjoy it, but it’s equivalent to eating, I dunno… junk food?  There’s not much substance to it, but it makes me laugh a lot.  But it doesn’t have a lasting impact on me in the way a show like The Walking Dead or Hell on Wheels or House of Cards, etc. does.

I recently went and saw Interstellar in theaters for the second time.  It remains one of my favorite movies, and one of the best post-apocalyptic films to date (and yes, it is a post-apocalyptic film, but it never blatantly says it.)  I’ve seen a lot of pouty bloggers lamenting that it doesn’t really say anything worthwhile and that it’s just another manly-man-saves-the-world movie with the classic Nolan Syndrome, whatever-the-hell that means.  I don’t really give a rat’s ass about that noise.  I love the movie because it attempts to tell a tale of such grandeur and scope, and it mostly succeeds.  The emotional resonance of that movie is off the charts with me.  Plus, there’s the fact that I have a physics degree and it made the physicist in me geek out like none other.

(Light spoilers ahead.)  There’s a scene where Matthew McConaughey and his team experience the theory of relativity (namely gravitational time shift) in a more tangible way than has ever been illustrated in any form of media.  The team effectively loses 23 years of “earth time” in a couple of hours, and McConaughey sits down to watch 23 years’ worth of recorded video messages sent from home.  The raw emotion of that scene is so incredibly powerful.  That’s the kind of thing I look for if I want media to have an effect on me.

But why?  I’ve given thought about the question of why I want those things.  I have a close friend who doesn’t understand my fascination with shows like The Walking Dead in particular.  She doesn’t understand how I can be so enamored with a story that’s so hopeless and grim.  She doesn’t understand why I would want that in my life.  It’s something that I hadn’t given much thought before.  Why exactly am I (and apparently millions of other Americans, seeing as TWD is the number one show in the country) drawn to post-apocalyptic stories, which are depressing more often than not?

I can only answer for myself, but I think it’s a case of classic escapism.  As far as life stories go, mine is fairly mundane.  I had a decent childhood.  Didn’t have a ton of friends when I was younger, but had a loving and supportive family.  I went to college, got a degree, and have a career.  Thus far, my existence has been fairly “white bread.”  It’s been a pleasant, if somewhat dull, existence.  I lose sleep over this fact.

The last line of the graphic novel film adaptation “Wanted” is simple.  It follows a monologue about retaking control of your life, and James McAvoy breaks the fourth wall by looking directly into the camera and asking “What the fuck have you done lately?”

It’s a question that haunts me.

There’s a part of the human mind and imagination that wants something more than the pleasant, comfortable but boring existence, and that’s where escapism comes in.  Stories and tales of adventures grand and small with characters both larger-than-life and undeniably human and realistic.  When I get wrapped up in a story, I live vicariously through the characters.  I can’t tell you how many times I said “oh no, oh no no no no noooooo” out loud when Joel takes his nasty fall while playing TLOU the first time.  The same thing happened at the end of the second to last episode of season one of Sons of Anarchy, which I just started watching.

It’s a strange phenomenon, to become invested in fictional characters, but I think it’s traced to escapism.  I could be completely wrong, too.

I think this has become clearer to me while writing We Left As Dust.  In so many ways, it’s such a hopeless book.  I believe it’s going to have an upturn nearer the end of it, where some of the themes get more intimately explored.  Everything thus far is rather bleak, and asks the question of whether we’re cursed, as human beings, to inevitably destroy ourselves.  Can we overcome entropy?  Latter sections of the book are going to delve more into what it is to be human and struggle with these things, and what living really means.  And the fact that living and surviving aren’t necessarily analogous.

This post has been incredibly scatterbrained, with several segues and random thoughts, but it’s kind of been a stream of consciousness thing so that makes sense, I suppose.  This is a topic I might come back to later on, but I just felt like I needed to do some word-vomiting and get it out.  So bear with me, because that’s what this was.  Me puking my thoughts all over the place.

I should probably try to make this post more coherent.  But I won’t.

–J.

So I’m not good at blogging with any regularity…

Roughly two months since my last post.  Yikes.  Keeping a blogging schedule with any semblance of regularity clearly is not a strong suit of mine.  So, for that, I apologize.

Well, what has been going on in the last two months?

Work on the book is progressing as usual.  As far as keeping a regiment with writing, at least I’ve been somewhat successful where the book is concerned.  I try to write several days a week, spending a couple nights at my favorite coffeehouse sucking down the sweet nectar, the lifeblood of creativity, the elixir of originality: black coffee.  I’m pretty sure I’m going to need to give this place a shout-out in the section of the book where you thank people.  “Thank you to everyone who believed in me.  And to Spyhouse, where 90% of the book was written.”

Part II of the book is progressing nicely.  Whereas Part I finds the protagonist mostly interacting with one other person, Part II thrusts him into group settings often, something he isn’t entirely comfortable with, being the proverbial “lone wolf” type.  I’m also messing around with some point-of-view stuff.  Though the story is told in near-third-person perspective (excluding Declan’s journal entries) I’ve been shifting it slightly between characters.  In a recent encounter, Declan is incapacitated for awhile, and while he’s unconscious, the point-of-view changes to the two people he’s with, and the lens of the story shifts accordingly.  It’s interesting to write that way and gives you a bit of variability in perspective without switching around in first-person, which can be jarring.

I’m completely committed to finishing my book, but I’m starting to think that the other two books, written by two friends of mine, will never be completed.  I hope I’m wrong and that they eventually get finished, because they each tell some interesting stories in a manner and style different from my own.  I like the concept of a shared universe between three books written by three separate authors that have collaborated, and I hope it comes to fruition, but we’ll see.  They’re far, far behind me at this point and haven’t been writing with the frequency that I have.

Well, this was rather scarce on the news items, but it is what it is.  tl;dr version: the book is still coming along nicely, I’m not sure the other two authors’ books will ever be finished, and I suck at writing blog posts regularly.

Til next time, y’all (whenever that’ll be)

–J.