INTRODUCTION
2020 was the worst year of my life, the same as for many other people. My father died of COVID-19, and this was part of a death toll that felt seismic, as if the landscape itself was being churned by overwhelming loss. I was coping with a cluster of family crises and struggling to finish a late book manuscript while trying to keep a dozen other commitments. And the world around me was nine kinds of messed up.
One thing got me through that hell-year: dreaming up imaginary worlds and larger-than-life people who never lived.
I was halfway through writing a young adult space fantasy trilogy, full of aliens and villains and starship battles and lots of kissing and people talking about their feelings—the first book, Victories Greater Than Death, is out now. Whenever I got overwhelmed with doomscrolling, I could escape by hanging out with Tina, Rachael, and Elza, and imagining how they overcame villainy and survived heinous dangers by being there for each other. At night, I crawled into bed with a blank journal and scribbled a fantasy novel for grown-ups until I fell asleep with my head full of spells.
Throughout that heinous year, I was also writing the essays in this book, which explain how you can use creative writing to survive the worst things history can throw at you.
Early in 2020, I had pitched the idea for a book about how to write your way out of hard times, which could be published in real-time installments at Tor.com. I could already tell that 2020 was going to be a uniquely heart-crushing time, and I hoped these essays would help a little.
Honestly? I had no earthly clue just how awful 2020 would turn out to be, and how much I would need a space to think about the ways fiction could help me shield myself from harm. With the essays in this book, I was reminding myself, as much as anyone else, that writing can be an act of self-preservation. That creativity gives us heart and purpose and clarity and the ability to keep going. You can heal yourself just by making up your own fables.
(These essays came out of a talk that I gave at the Willamette Writers Conference and elsewhere. And this book’s title, Never Say You Can’t Survive, is borrowed from the 1977 album of the same name by Curtis Mayfield, which is a piece of music that has brought me so much strength and inspiration over the years.)
Putting any kind of story together makes you a god in your own private universe and grants you control over a whole world inside your own mind, even when the outside world feels like a constant torrent of awfulness.
You can use stories to face up to your most debilitating fears, the way I did with “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue” (see sidebar). Or you can turn to escapism and distract yourself with swashbuckling tales of action and romance, the way I did with Victories Greater Than Death. You can also combine the two: wrapping escapist fun around a kernel of real-life politics.
People sometimes talk about escapist storytelling as a kind of dereliction of duty—as if we’re running away from the fight. That’s some garbage right there, because escapism is resistance. In her 1979 essay collection The Language of the Night, Ursula K. Le Guin paraphrases Tolkien: “If a soldier is captured by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape?… If we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape and to take as many people with us as we can.”
Visualizing a happier, more just world is a direct assault on the forces that are trying to break your heart. As Le Guin says elsewhere, the most powerful thing you can do is imagine how things could be different … What if?
It’s no accident that some of the most enduring and positive communities in the real world have come out of people sharing an escapist narrative. Star Trek, Doctor Who, Star Wars, Steven Universe, She-Ra, and countless other series have created wonderful real-life fellowships. Happier, kinder worlds in fiction naturally lead people to band together, to try and create pockets of that experience in our world. And there’s plenty of evidence that these fan communities feed directly into political organizing.
But that’s about how escapism can be helpful for readers. Let’s get back to how it can be good for you, the writer.
People will always try to control you by constraining your sense of what’s possible. They want to tell you that reality consists of only the things that they are willing to recognize, and anything else is foolishness.
But you can reject their false limitations in the act of conjuring your own world—and carve out a pocket of your mind that they cannot touch, in the act of world-building. The more details you add to your world, the realer it feels in your mind. And thus, the better refuge it can become during hard times.
I know a lot of people who haven’t been able to keep writing these past few years. It’s hard to know what the point is of making up random stories when everything is messed up. Families are still being destroyed every day by institutionalized racism, there’s an endless debate over whether trans people deserve to have any rights at all, and women’s healthcare is slipping backward. Many of us feel like our very personhood is up for grabs. During the bleakest moments of 2020, I found it impossible to motivate myself, and there were days when I didn’t write a single word.
And yet, the more I thought of storytelling as a safe place to work through my feelings, and a sanctuary for my mind, the easier it was to put the real world away and turn to the (way cooler) world inside my head.
TURN YOUR FEARS INTO STORIES
Back in January 2017, I was scared out of my wits. I was having trouble sleeping and suffering panic attacks about the impending inauguration of Donald Trump, and the ways he would try to deny safety and equality to trans people. I couldn’t concentrate on finishing The City in the Middle of the Night, until I finally decided to channel all of my anxiety into a story about my fears as a trans woman.
The result, “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” is a dystopian nightmare about a trans woman who gets captured by an evil NGO and forced to undergo a surreal, exaggerated “cure” for her transness. It’s horrifying and intense—and I’ve only read it aloud once, because I find the words too painful to speak. A number of other trans people have told me that they needed to lie down after reading it.
But putting my fears into a story really helped me to deal with them, and I’ve heard from some cis people that this story helped them understand what trans people are facing.
When I wrote “Don’t Press Charges and I Won’t Sue,” I was going to the darkest possible place, and putting my protagonist through the most dehumanizing treatment I could imagine. I needed to face up to the absolute worst that could happen, so I felt like I understood it a little better. I also needed to imagine someone surviving the most nightmarish scenario and breaking free, even though it’s a dark ending.
This wasn’t the first time I used fiction to cope with political anxieties—after the 2004 election, I guest-edited a special issue of a queer erotica journal, full of stories about LGBTQIA+ people joining together to process their feelings about a second term for George W. Bush. And I wrote a handful of dystopian stories in the mid-2000s, about my fears that hyper-capitalism and income inequality could end up harming trans and queer people in ways that most bigots could only dream of.
Writing a horrifying story on your own terms means that you can show how someone can endure, or even triumph. And meanwhile, you can cast a light on the injustice of oppressive systems. You get to choose the frame and eliminate some of the ambiguity, to make things starker and more clear, or to make juxtapositions that illuminate how the problem started, and how it’ll be in the future.
When you’re telling the story, you get to draw all the lines.
How getting better at writing can help you survive the worst
You never stop learning how to do better at writing—even if you’ve published a bunch of books and “arrived” as an author, you’re still on a steep learning curve, for as long as you’re stringing words together. This is excellent, because it means there will always be new discoveries and insights. Put another way, if writing was a house, you would never run out of rooms to explore.
The essays in this book are a mixture of encouragement, ideas for how to use writing to feel okay in a world that is not okay, and actual technical advice on stuff like characters, plotting, and world-building.
In the first section, “Getting Started,” I talk right away about creating characters—because your protagonist(s) can provide you with a whole alternate consciousness. When you create a fictional person, you’re making a whole other persona, or even an alternate self. Instead of living your own life, you can be immersed in someone else’s.
And the rest of the early essays are about giving yourself permission to write—and that, in turn, means rejecting imposter syndrome and accepting that you’re going to make mistakes. Mistakes are awesome, especially if they lead you in a surprising direction.
For me, a good writing day is often one where something happens in my story that I never saw coming and didn’t plan on. When my characters take on a life of their own, or when I find pockets of my world that I never knew were there, it’s magical. Even as I’m learning new things about how to tell a story, I love to feel like I’m also learning more about my characters and world as I go. (And speaking of which, research can also be an underrated fun part of writing, because you learn the weirdest facts—that you can then inflict on all your loved ones.)
Then there’s the second section, “What’s a Story and How Do You Find One?” Identifying the story that you want to tell can be ridiculously fun, when it’s not making you want to tear your hair out. The moment when you get excited about a premise, and then start building out the world and the characters, is bloody magic.
The third section is all about harnessing the awesome power of your own emotions—and not letting anyone tell you that your feelings aren’t valid. Or that you’re dealing with them the wrong way.
If you’re depressed, don’t try to force yourself out of it—and don’t try to make yourself write something that you’re not feeling up to. Whether you feel like writing light and fluffy escapist stories, or dark and intense tales of suffering and angst, it’s all good. Whatever you are able to write in this tough time is self-evidently the right project for you.
If you’re angry, stay angry. Anger is the best fuel for writing, emotion, plot, comedy, and everything else. Channel that energy into stories. Use your anger to create something so beautiful, people will cry all over the page.
And if you feel like writing erotica, write erotica. Make it dirty and obnoxious and queer and sweet and righteous, and build a fortress of horniness to protect you from this cold, ugly world.
Dive into endless world-building, and create more and more elaborate systems and histories, if that makes you feel excited.
For me, I get the most joy from writing about relationships. The tiniest moments of personal connection can feel huge as you’re writing them. I try to remember to luxuriate in the little moments, like when two characters haven’t seen each other in ages and they’re together again, and I have a chance to write a quiet emotional scene between them.
And the fourth section, “What We Write About When We Write About Spaceships,” delves more into how to use your fiction to process the trauma of living through a moment when the whole world turns into flaming walls of shit.
Don’t be afraid to be political in your writing, but don’t feel any obligation to champion any particular ideal or point of view. Politics is bound to show up, one way or another, and it’s important to be mindful about the politics of your story—but you don’t have to be political in the way that anyone else expects.
You don’t have to think of yourself as an activist—but anyone who imagines a different reality is helping everyone else to see our power to act, and to make changes. Imagination is always a form of resistance to domination and oppression, and we’ve all been saved by other people’s stories one time or another. There’s a reason why politicians and organizers try to tell stories, to put a human face on their policies, and worry about “controlling the narrative”—it’s because our world is built out of stories.
And then there’s the power of telling stories about people who haven’t gotten to be the heroes of our stories in the past. If you’re a member of a marginalized or oppressed group, putting someone like yourself into a story can be incredibly powerful, as I found when I started writing stories about trans and queer characters. In one chapter, I talk about the importance of representation without appropriation—or how we can reflect the diversity of the real world in our stories without telling stories that aren’t ours to tell. The past few years have shown us how powerful representation is, in the midst of a tidal wave of hatred and bigotry.
The issue of representation in fiction is not just some academic question of fairness, it’s a matter of survival. When the full diversity of people is represented in stories, it expands people’s sense of possibility. It’s incredible how direct a line there is from representation in fiction to empowerment in the real world. And celebrating cultures that have been historically suppressed or downgraded is a powerful act.
The final section is called “How to Use Writerly Tricks to Gain Unstoppable Powers,” and it’s the most nuts-and-bolts part of the book.
A lot of fancy writing techniques are basically ways for you to gain more control over this imaginary realm you’ve created with your mind. You get to choose who’s telling the story, how close we are to your characters’ points of view, whether the story is past tense or present tense, and what details the reader pays attention to.
Playing with the passage of time, speeding it up and slowing it down, can be a way to show the arc of history and demonstrate that things that appear permanent really aren’t. Or to reveal the wealth of experience and sustenance that can exist within a single profound moment. All of these things make you more powerful as a storyteller, and in turn make the act of storytelling more restorative.
Because you can shape every aspect of a story, you can use perspective and irony to expose the true awfulness of a situation—or to provide hope for another way. You can pull back and show the big picture, the long view, through narrative choices that reveal all the stuff that the main character isn’t seeing. You can provide context through expansive narration.
And irony is amazingly powerful, because it works against groupthink and paranoia. Fear is about tunnel vision—and you don’t have to limit your perspective that way when you’re the one controlling the focus.
That voice inside you that stands back and analyzes everything from a distance? It’s so often key to surviving in the midst of scary and depressing moments. You can give that voice its own place at the center of the narrative. I love a chatty, sarcastic first-person narrator—or, for that matter, a chatty, sarcastic third-person narrator.
There’s a reason so much of the most powerful writing from survivors of horrifying events contains surreal or unreal elements. People who have been through unthinkable ordeals often instinctively take refuge in weird, reality-warping scenarios, and you can totally make this work for you. Normality is bullshit, and surrealist weirdness is a direct assault on the bullshit fortress.
We’re all made of stories
Writing is a solitary act—but it’s also a way to feel connected to the world, in a different way than spending ten hours a day on social media. When you write, you always have an imaginary reader in your head, but you also get to be part of a community of writers, each reading each other’s work and building on each other’s ideas, and supporting each other through all the frustrations and setbacks.
And your stories, too, can be full of communities coming together and supporting each other (and occasionally being obnoxious as hell). Lately, whenever I talk about world-building, I always focus on how a good fictional world has strong communities—and I’m honestly tired of stories where there’s the protagonist and then there’s just a painted backdrop behind them, that’s only there for them to react against. We are shaped by our communities, for good and bad, and our communities define the worlds we belong to.
Community is going to save us in real life—and in fiction, stories about communities joining together are going to be a lifeline.
Copyright © 2021 by Charlie Jane Anders
