Fiction as Maintenance

It's one of those days when you get out of bed, you make your coffee, and you know you've got things to do, but when yesterday was objectively a very good day, what do you do with the next day? How do you find that balance between the things that are essential and repetitive and just have to get done, and the things that feed you creatively? Trying to harmonize those two so that the work can feed your life and your life can feed your work is one of those dreams shared by many an artistic person. Many a person in general.

We talked yesterday about poetry. About what happens when you stop looking at a poem as a literal truth that must be understood perfectly and instantaneously and allow it to live as it is in the liminal spaces of our perception. There's something related going on in what I want to talk about today.

When I try to construct a coherent narrative about the real world, this physical world we think we can rely on, that narrative always begins to break down at some point. It starts to feel like an algorithm. Or even if it doesn't, even if it maintains some coherence and connection to the through line of history I was raised to believe in, I'll eventually hit a roadbump and ask if that narrative is the best one. 

Well then we have to ask ourselves if a story of perpetuating Armageddon is the story we want to tell.

I know that story very well. I've read it in many books. I've written it in a few. I've told it in fantasy settings. And when I let myself focus on a narrative where an endpoint is necessary for a new beginning, that's a narrative that begins to harm my brain. Let too many people in power begin adjusting the storyline of our collective lives and you find yourself at war with yourself, other people, or other nations. 

So I choose to mostly center myself in writing stories. 

Stories about imaginary places.

For a long time I used those stories to work out how I felt about things. I wrote five adventure novels chock full of American perceptions of femininity and masculinity, for instance. You can read some of my old novels and it's almost hilarious to see the contortions of mind I went through trying to find a clean throughline of story. We'll dig into that someday together.

But the more I wrote fiction, the more I started thinking about characters not as substitutes for real people, but as synecdoche.

This is a big word. It sounds like the name of a town in New York.

Synecdoche is a coherence of ideas that may not be literally connected. They may be related only by happenstance, or by time, or by a convergence of individuals. And sometimes a synecdoche is really just a metaphor. That's the big part.

For example, I draft each of these articles while standing outside holding a cup of coffee and speaking to my camera. Why does Linke hold a cup of coffee in every one of these videos? Because I need something to do with my hands. Why do I need something to do with my hands? So they're not flapping all over the place. Why do my hands tend to flap all over the place? Because when I need to focus, I narrate my way through things physically. I don't quite do a Sherlock Holmes mental palace, I don't have a literal structure I walk through in my brain, but to bring in another Benedict Cumberbatch character into the conversation I very much do a Doctor Strange-esque navigation of concepts using my fingertips. And if I do that two-handed, I feel too dynamic. Which brings in all the other elements of on-camera work which cause me to freeze up and not finish the drafts I need to compose each morning.

So: Coffee cup to suppress the hand gestures, to keep me focused on talking to you instead of getting lost in my own thoughts. Those hand gestures, that coffee cup: they're physical boundaries of my mental map. They are a physical manifistation of a synecdoche for larger and smaller elements within my mental processes. They ground me in the outline I loosely hold in my mind before I begin to compose. They help me keep threads between my present reading of novels I wrote in the past and my memory of the mental state I was in when I originally wrote them.

I come out here every morning and let my coffee grow cold while staring at the neighbor's goats, listening to my chickens and sheep, and trying not to think about who's going to press what next button or which passages of the New Testament may be quoted in war rooms around the world. 

Then I map all of that back down into my fantasy writing.

If I include billionaire megalomaniacs inventing death machines to make a few billion more dollars and own another island, that just feels like a James Bond plot. So I don't go there. But having a fantasy character who struggles with the constant draw toward apocalyptic solutions or planning for an NPC my players interact with who carries that weight... putting those elements into fiction, while making sure I maintain a gap between how I feel about any real-world event and what I'm actually writing about is incredibly grounding. 

I've been doing that my whole life. We all do that. That is literally the creative process. But when you start doing it intentionally and start mapping out the arcs you want your characters to follow, and then letting them grow naturally (just as the arcs we think will be followed in the real world will frequently be interrupted)... 

That's not only a path to writing better fiction.

I would argue it's a path toward better mental health. Better individual relationships. Perhaps a better world.

I choose to do this through fiction and very quiet faith. Because when I try to map it to a more expressive religion, or to real-world characters and events, the algorithm quickly takes over. But when I stay grounded in the metaphorical extremes of fiction, I find it easier to give grace here in the real world. To everyone, including myself.

I wonder how you all map real events into your stories. Whether those stories are fiction or true. And more importantly, whether you know the difference.

Because I truly believe that one of the greatest challenges facing us as a species is finding a better way to cope with the deep time of history and a better sense of where real history and storytelling about history collide, or overlap, or become too gray.

It's a cold day out here, y'all. But I'm not going to drown in it, especially because yesterday was so good and I'm looking forward to writing more stories today. 

Tell me about yours, if you choose to.