I write fiction. “I thrive on rejection” is an example.
This month on YAOTL we’re blogging on the blurred line
between reality and invention.
I borrow heavily from the real world in writing my novels.
The emotional energy and themes come from what I struggle with in life. And I
take the basic facts too. I plucked medical details for my first novel, about
a girl who donates her bone marrow to her younger brother, from my wife’s world. (She used to be a pediatric
ICU nurse and now works at the George Mark House, a children’s hospice.) And
whole scenes were taken from my real life. (One, almost verbatim, except for
the Green Day songs.)
Unfortunately, as I sat down this week to write about this,
I was again derailed by the news, this time about three separate acts of
domestic terrorism in the U.S.: A white supremacist in Louisville failed to
break into a black church and then shot two black strangers at a Kroger
supermarket. A Trump supporter was arrested for attempting to assassinate 11 prominent Democrats with 13 pipe bombs. And an anti-Semite murdered
eleven people at a bris celebration in a Pittsburg synagogue.
So instead of talking about how we use reality in our
fiction, I’d like to talk about how fiction changes our reality.
The first point is modest: As we writers know, words matter.
Whether we tell lies matters. How we talk about other human
beings matters. And if we promote hatred and fear, pushing dehumanizing
narratives of fear of the other (Soros-funded caravan of [insert shorthand here
for scary brown people]!) to a country with easy access to weapons, it matters.
Fatally, it turns out.
But there’s an even broader point about how stories change
us.
I survived my sometimes disaster of an adolescence by
floating on a raft of books. I read thousands of stories, about people who took
action to change their world and changed themselves in the process.
The protagonists in those stories solved incredibly
difficult problems and learned things about themselves and their world.
They didn’t wait for a hero to appear to save everyone. They
became that hero.
Here’s the bad news: No hero is going to save us if we don’t
do it ourselves.
Susan Collins isn’t going to save us.
Unless mere hand-wringing is required, Jeff Flake isn’t either.
And Robert Mueller won’t save us. Even if Mueller isn’t
fired first, and his report isn’t immediately hidden from the public (like the FBI’s
supplemental investigation of Brett Kavanaugh), that report won’t do anything by
itself—any more than the New York Times’ lengthy exposé showing that Donald Trump and his family had committed half a billion dollars
of tax fraud to avoid taxes on his father’s estate.
What will save us?
You. And your work over a long time ahead.
But only if you choose to be a protagonist.
Protagonists persevere. Protagonists change what they do,
because they have to.
And protagonists put in the work. They slog through the story’s
discouraging middle, despite setback after setback as stakes grow and the
situation grows dire.
Protagonists don’t quit.
Be a protagonist.
Historically in the U.S., most old people vote, but most
young people don’t. In fact, most Americans don’t vote. That has to change. We
have to change it: By voting, by registering young people to vote, by making
individual donations to campaigns, and by working to get out the vote. Every YA
literary festival for teens should include a voter registration table. Every
school visit to high school seniors should come with information on how to
register to vote, tailored to that state. We have years--maybe decades--of work ahead of us, to assure fair, representative elections free of vote suppression and national leadership of compassion and empathy instead of hate- and fear-mongering. It will be good, healing work. But a lot of work.
Changing the world is in our hands.
It is a gift, of sorts, to live in pivotal, dangerous times,
because it gives us the real answer to the question who we are and who we
choose to become.
You don’t have to ask yourself anymore what you would have
done if you’d lived in a place like Hitler’s Germany in the 1930s.
Because you’re doing it.
So do good and don’t give up.
And while you’re at it, when you have a chance, tell the stories
of hope and empathy, not just of despair.
According to his social media post just hours before
yesterday’s murders, the shooter targeted Pittsburg’s The Tree of Life synagogue
because of its participation in the HIAS National Refugee Shabbat program helping
refugees who have fled from persecution and violence. (You can read more about
that program at
https://www.hias.org/national-refugee-shabbat
)
In the first day since the shooting, two Muslim-American organizations,
Celebrate Mercy and MPower Change, have raised over $55,000 through
crowdfunding for the Jewish victims of the shooting, to cover medical and
funeral expenses.
That’s the world I want to live in, where Jews work to help
Muslim refugees, and Muslims raise money for Jewish victims of anti-Semitic
hate crimes.
It is, actually, the world we live in, and we shouldn’t
forget to tell that part of the story.
Do good. Be well. And don’t forget to vote on Tuesday,
November 6.
Dean
Gloster has an MFA in writing for children and young adults from Vermont
College of Fine Arts. He is a former stand-up comedian and a former law clerk
at the U.S. Supreme Court. His debut YA novel DESSERT FIRST is out from Merit Press/Simon Pulse. School Library Journal called it “a sweet, sorrowful, and simply divine
debut novel that teens will be
sinking their teeth into. This wonderful story…will be a hit with fans
of John Green's The Fault in Our Stars
and Jesse Andrews's Me and Earl and the
Dying Girl.” Dean’s hobbies are downhill ski racing and Aikido. He’s
currently writing a novel about a 16-year-old boy who gets a sketchy summer
internship and finds out it’s with Death herself.
Dean is on Twitter: @deangloster
