Here is a conversation that I am looking forward to inserting into my first novel. It will happen on the Stanford University Campus, and it will go something like this:
Susan: “…but how do we know that the government wasn’t somehow involved?”
Robert: “Are you kidding me?”
Susan: “It’s happened before…”
Robert: “Oh please! What are you? A conspiracy theorist?”
Susan: “Um, no…”
Robert: “Look, I’m not into that kind of thing, okay?”
Maggie: “What kind of thing are you talking about?”
Robert: “Conspiracy theories! You know…paranoid people who are always looking for some dark, smoke-filled room with black-suited guys sitting around a table, plotting some evil scheme!”
Maggie: “So, you want us to remove the verb ‘to conspire’ from the dictionary?”
Susan: “Yeah. Should we ban all history books that contain stories about conspiracies of the past?”
Robert: “Well, no…but that’s not the same thing at all!”
Maggie: “Really? How is it different?”
Why am I so excited about this scene? Well, partly because it will light a fire under the butt of my protagonist and move the story forward in a specific direction. But more than that, this is my opportunity to highlight a social barrier which is quite problematic.
Calling someone “a conspiracy theorist,” is an increasingly popular tactic of (yes, I’ll say it) thought control. In fact, there has been a concerted effort over the past forty years to convince Americans that people seeking power in our country are incapable of conspiring together. Label someone a “conspiracy theorist” and you’ve completely undercut their position. It’s the ultimate shut down!
As fiction writers, we must tread a careful line, if we wish to use our characters and their challenges to illuminate real world issues. Non-fiction writers are often dismissed as paranoid and fictional characters are, well, fictional…right?
Q: So, how can we get past the protective barriers of our readers?
A: How about writing a fictional story set in our near past, so your characters can ask questions about issues that are currently emerging into the mainstream media consciousness?
For example, imagine a character who works on Wallstreet and is placed in America of 2005. If this character were to come home from work and complain to her husband that her bosses at Lehman Brothers are being unethical and she’s scared about what’s going to happen…it would be hard to discount this person as a conspiracy theorist. Right?
By such a strategy, a writer who seeks to tell a great story AND inspire increased awareness in her readers could hope to navigate around the social barriers that make it hard to believe our own culture, our leaders, our “examples of success” could actually be that bad.
Only by opening a person’s mind to what their fellow humans are capable of, can we hope to increase awareness and empowerment, one reader at a time. Why do this? Because, if you’re successful, your readers just may leave the story with an eagerness to take action.
In our most recent transition study group, we did a few "what if" exercises that really captured everybody's imagination. For instance, what if one or another "staple" of our community disappeared. What would we do to compensate for it. In what ways does the loss of one support leg in our community effect others. In other words, if we were left, for instance, without a ferry, what would we need to do? Posing the real possibility of being withour ferry service leaves people arguing about whether that would ever really happen, and, as a result, never bothering to engage their imagination in contemplating the possibility. Even the most diehard sceptic will engage if the discussion is posed as an exercise. I'm not expressing this as concisely as I would like.
Hey Terry! I think I get what you're saying. If it's too close to real…we pull back, but if we are purposefully using "fantasy" than we give ourselves permission to go deeper. Several years ago, I proposed a class to the local homeschool/public school program. I wanted to take a group of kids through a guided imagination process. The idea was that one night, around 3am – when there are no ferries running – Vashon Island would magically become disconnected from the entire world. We would be surrounded by mist, cut off in every way, and anyone that left would end the mist and come right back out again, headed for the island. How would this go? Well, if we follow this thinking out…fairly quickly, we're dealing with (1) how would 10,000 people communicate with each other, (2) which resources would be squandered initially before we realized what we were up against, (3) how would we track/record our island resources and manage (or mismanage) them, (4) an entire shift in our "value economy,” and more. What has value now would quickly become worthless, and visa versa. The children would have created their own weekly homework assignments along the lines of calculating how much water their family needs to survive, how quickly do pigs and chickens reproduce, how many pounds of food we'd need to keep the island fed, and how could we produce electricity or drive motors in the absence of off-island energy resources. Sadly, Family Link turned it down because it didn't match with their semester focus on math and science. ??? Anyway, I agree with you…guided imagination exercises like this can be powerful and wake us up in all sorts of ways.