It’s not just because I can’t not write. No, every now and again, something like this comes along to smack me between the eyes with the unpalatable truth: I write because I’d make a godawful Dictator of the World.
Seriously.
It’s a disease we oddlings are prone to. When you see patterns most people miss, and connections most people miss (usually they’re thinking “what is this mad person talking about?”), you tend to overdo it and start getting all utopian about how the world would be much better if only… And forget that many, many people have thought the same thing before us, some of them pretty damn smart, and many many people have tried to make things better – some outright bastards, but again, some of them pretty damn smart – and not one has manged to impose a better world from On High. Why would I be any different, hm?
Which of course is where writing comes in, and letting people I trust read it. If the world I’ve built is horribly off-kilter in a way I’m peculiarly blind to, they’ll smack me, and deservedly so. I freely acknowledge I can be ridiculously dumb for a smart person – even for a dumb person sometimes. Which is why I have no intention of mocking Ms Moon for her proposal. I’d bet she’s only seeing the potential benefits, not the potential problems. Besides, I’ve thought worse. (Yes, I did change my mind. I just don’t know what other flavors of ‘worse’ are still hanging around in there).
Being a bit on the odd side is one of those two-edged sword situations. On the one hand I’ve ended up standing outside a lot of human interaction, which allows me to observe from a more or less neutral perspective. On the other claw, because I’ve ended up standing outside a lot of human interaction, I’ve got bugger all idea what it feels like from the inside. So my observations could well be flawed. Think of an alien watching NYC traffic from above. Without the knowledge that the vehicles contain individual thinking beings, each of which has a destination and some degree of urgency about when they get there, our hypothetical alien is likely to reach entirely the wrong conclusion about what it’s seeing. I’m not quite that far off, since I belong more or less to the same species and have at least some experiences in common.
I suspect this is common to everyone, but it’s a bit more pronounced in the oddlings who end up being writers (also many of the other oddlings out there). Yes, I do wonder if things would be better if some rule was imposed from above. Then I start working through that notion in a storyline, and usually discover that no, things would probably end up getting worse because people are always going to be people and everyone will do what seems to them to be the best thing they can do right now – and no-one ever has all the information, much less the ability to sift through it all.
Which is a pretty roundabout way to get to the idea that the worst evil comes from utopian visions. You want to write a nightmare world? Write a utopia from the perspective of the poor bastard in the middle of it.
Why is this so?
Take someone with a utopian vision – say, eliminating poverty. It’s a worthwhile cause, at least on the face of it, so someone who comes up with a more or less feasible-looking plan to do it is likely to get support. And because it’s a worthwhile cause, anyone who has objections has to be bad in some way, even if it doesn’t look like it on the surface. Who wouldn’t want to see the end of poverty, after all? (By this point, if the lightbulbs aren’t all on and the little buzzer isn’t busily going DINGDINGDINGDINGDING because damn it you know where this is going, you might need caffeination). So now, our utopian has effectively demoted a bunch of people from “disagree with me” to “bad”. They’re on the road to people as things, a road that leads to the massacres that have followed damn near every idealistic totalitarian. At least if I write it, I’m not trying to make it happen, and not adding my name to the long, long list of political mass murderers.
All things considered, it’s better for everyone that the concentration camps and the fields of blood stay in my books, and never get to visit reality. Besides, when I write it, I might figure out that it’s a bloody stupid thing to try, and not worth my while attempting. Besides, I’d never get elected. I can’t lie to save my life, unless it’s a story.
Mad Genius Club 
22 responses to “The real reason I write”
This is why I don’t follow Elizabeth Moon on the internet. I really like her books but, everytime I read something she writes or says out of her books; it leaves me scratching my head and going, “What is she thinking?”
Oh, and I would make a terrible World Dictator also, but if I held power for a decent length of time, we wouldn’t have to worry about Earth becoming overpopulated any time soon. 😉
It’s too early for a “rant” about idiots so all I’ll say is that Ms Moon’s idea is one she’d likely hate if a “right winger” pushed it.
Or, as you reported downthread, she was being silly and tossing out ideas for the heck of it. I used her comments as a starting point to go someplace a tad… darker.
Of course, I can go dark places without any difficulty.
Of course, there were a few hours between my posts. [Smile]
As for you going “dark places easily”, I try to watch that tendency in myself.
Since I’ve thought similar things (and then thought better of them) I’m not dinging Elizabeth Moon over this. And yes, with me as World Dictator, overpopulation would be the least of anyone’s worries.
In a way, writing is dictatorship without the responsibilities and headaches.
Oh, yes. At least until your characters start giving you headaches.
I suspect there are a lot of people (and pieces of equipment!) that are alive or just uninjured because of an Odd decided to write it out rather than “reaching out to touch someone,” as the old commercial put it.
I have a whole slew of horror stories written in the final years of my marriage–I can’t stand to look at them now, but back then, they were . . . helpful.
I have a few, some of which I’m rewriting before putting up. NOT divorce, but Dan was working out of town and I had to deal with TWO young kids. Alone. And I hate driving, and am night-blind, so life was limited…
I just seem to have this permanent attachment to Dark Places. I’ve never written horror, but apparently what I do write has a pretty wide streak of horror anyway.
I like stories that veer into dark places, but don’t generally care for horror. Most of what is classified as horror I tend to find extremely boring, and not at all horrifying, as well as being generally completely unrealistic. If I do find it horrifying, that is what I generally find it; horrifying not interesting.
There are certian things (movies or books) classified as horror that I do like, but none that I would personally call horror. For example I liked the movie Scream, and the Jaws movies, but didn’t find them horrifying just good movies that I would have called thrillers (or possibly mystery, for Scream).
Yes… In my case the horrors leak into other places. Even when I”m writing silly fluffy comedy.
Oh, absolutely. I could name names…
Ryk Spoor reported that Moon thought it an absurd idea and she was just as surprised as everyone else when the BBC took it and ran.
Here’s (apparently) her LJ entry about it: http://e-moon60.livejournal.com/442811.html
I think the BBC marketing people were responding to various pro and con stuff going on over there with some kind of national ID scheme. (I vaguely recall them having some kind of national ID scheme going-to-be-implemented for at least fifteen years, but it never happens.) So it was red meat for them, no doubt, whereas I’m fairly sure Moon was floating around in Anglophile land, where nobody in the UK would ever do anything bad or uncharming, just tossing out funny ideas as ordered.. Sigh.
Some days, you just shouldn’t get up in the morning. Buzzsaws await.
I think so. And of course, the Beeb’s marketing gits don’t get the difference between playing with ideas and believing them. They probably think Ms Moon harbors intentions of becoming the Empress of the Universe.
I’d make an excellent tyrant. Not a good leader. A good _Tyrant_. Not that I want the job. I understand the paperwork’s so bad you don’t hardly have time for a decent massacre every weekend.
As I understand it, well-done tyranny does not allow for much delegation, so yes, there is a lot more paperwork required of a tyrant than, or say, of a dictator or a nice, benevolent oligarchy of authors.
Well, yes. Executing anyone who gets a bit above themselves has this unfortunate tendency to leave the tyrant without anyone who can be trusted with the paperwork.
It makes it so much more difficult to enjoy a good massacre when you know you’re going home to a huge pile of things to be signed – and you’ve got to read them all CAREFULLY in case some sorry SOB tries to slip something past you.
I dunno. Like Bearcat, I really admire Moon as a writer. The Deed of Paksinarrion is a classic and well deserves all the praise heaped on it. But…
Even as a throwaway that was a galactically dumb thing to say, and any defense of it has to be seen as lame backpedalling.
In the same situation, I’d be FAR more inclined to argue the absolutist-on-privacy position, that the government has no legitimate reason to even know who you are, and that requirements for identification — as opposed to credentials — are a fundamental affront to liberty.
Now, if they want to require everybody to carry anonymized credentials that assert the trustworthiness to be permitted to go about a given activity (drive a car, board a commerical airliner, perform brain surgery, carry a firearm) … well, they STILL should be forced to defend their contentions against the basic, absolute civil right to privacy.
And to shoot down police spy drones. But that’s another argument. 🙂
M
Writers play with ideas – for a writer to say something like that to other writers, it’s idea play. The media doesn’t get this. Heck, I suspect most of humanity doesn’t get that it’s possible to write about someone who deeply believes something without believing that yourself.