April 28, 2011
Imagining Worse to Imagine Better
I’m nearly 24 years old and I spend half of my time with my mind off in places that, for the most part, exist only in my imagination. I experience random bursts of emotions that have nothing to do with my present situation. I cry over the deaths of people who, for all intents and purposes, are my imaginary friends. I can have entire conversations with these imaginary friends and then I envision how to make their lives suck a little more.
And, yeah, that all might sound a little twisted. But there’s a rather simple explanation: I’m a writer.
Over the last several weeks, you’ve heard many accounts of how books and stories have affected HPA members’ lives. The books that we loved as children taught us to imagine better, taught us important values and lessons, and kept us entertained. The time I don’t spend writing or working my day job, I spend reading. If you think about it, that means I spend most of my time, well, not in the real world. I perpetually live in stories.
When you read a book, you can simply imagine the happy ending. You follow the characters along and learn from them. You cheer them on. In the case of imagining better, though, it’s a little different for writers. As a writer creating the story from scratch, there’s a second step in the process.
For writers, we have the difficult task of imagining worse before we can imagine better.
Today, for example, I decided to turn my characters’ world upside down. Explosions were involved. There’s a lot of yelling going on right now as they try to figure out what to do, and a few of them won’t live to see the last few chapters (shhh, don’t tell them. They’ll never leave me alone). But it’s all worth it, because when I imagine worse, my characters have to imagine better. They get to do what we here at HPA do every day and try to fix the terrible things in their world.
All the books we love came first from someone imagining worse. The world I’ve created for my current novel-in-progress isn’t a happy one, but it has to be that way for my characters to see that things can change. When he was writing Wicked: The Life and Times of the Wicked Witch of the West, one of my favorite books, Gregory Maguire had to put Elphaba in the most painful and troublesome circumstances that would push her to want to stand up for what she believes in and eventually call herself the famed Wicked Witch of the West. Lois Lowry, who wrote Number the Stars (which I wrote about last month), put an innocent Jewish girl on the run during the Holocaust, so her best friend could gain the courage to do something to help. And don’t try to tell me our own J.K. Rowling didn’t have to imagine worse to create Voldemort and the Death Eaters, just so we all could imagine better.
It’s stories like these that we donate during Accio Books! It’s stories like these that we pass on to the people who need them most. All it takes is one person imagining worse that everyone else can gain the conviction to imagine better. The books that have been donated to Bedford-Stuyvesant will help those kids imagine better. The books we read ourselves, the books we hold so near and dear to our hearts that we want to pass them along, they help us all imagine better and live those values through groups such as HPA.
Trying to think of the worst possible situation has pretty much led me to have an overactive imagination. Creaky floorboard at two in the morning? Serial killer. Sudden loud noise from the sky? It couldn’t possibly be a plane taking off; it has to be the Apocalypse. But on the other hand, I also can imagine all the things that could change, because when I write I have to believe there might be a happy ending. Genocides can come to an end. Political leaders can get along. Polar bears can be saved from extinction.
An army of fans from all walks of life can move mountains. Get huge corporations to use Fair Trade chocolate. Inspire people to take care of themselves. Fight depression. Stop inequality and bullying. Build a library for a school full of kids in Brooklyn. And it all started because one person had the idea to write about a boy wizard who was a match for the darkest evil imaginable.
In my case, imagining worse can put me in a dark place. But it’s all so my characters and I, and hopefully future readers, can imagine better. If one person who reads the stories I weave can walk away and believe that they can change the world for the better too, if I can finish writing a novel and see that terrible circumstances can be fixed, then my overactive imagination has done it’s job.
It’s worth it all.
