Surging about in the back of my mind like flotsam and always just out of reach is My Big Idea. An idea for a novel. It tantalizes and teases, but never delivers.
That’s the one indispensable thing about writing: the idea. It’s not enough to throw words at a page. It has to be about something. It has to be a story. What do you want to say? Need to say? And why should anyone be bothered?
It starts with the idea. The thought. The few wisps of a scene. A character. Something that happens. Something that will happen. You grab Gentle Reader by the throat and choke him with your brilliance. You make him see. You tell him what’s going on. You convince him that he needs – no, he must! -- keep reading, because if he doesn’t …
It’s the idea.
And this idea, this little torturer of an idea:
First person. Present day. Man wakes up and … everyone is dead. Everyone. Everywhere. Spouse. Kids. Neighbors. The mayor. The homeless lady who spends her day sitting on the sidewalk near the filling station. The young lady across the street who always walks her perfectly-manicured poodle in the mornings before she goes to work.
They’ve all gone to glory.
I’ve tried to write it but it comes out flat. Uninspired. I can’t find the right words. Man walks around the city. Dead bus driver at the corner, still wearing his Metro hat. Dead police officers at the Police Station. Everyone dead. Man walks around in disbelief. It can’t be happening. It can’t be real. But … it is real. A day goes by. Another day. The smell … oh goodness, the smell. Thousands of bodies left to rot. The purplish faces. The bloating. The indignity of it all. The incomprehensibility. The sheer impossibility.
Why? Man screams at sky. Sky has no answer. Apocalypse? Virus? Bird flu? Mother Nature has a bee in her bonnet? What answer could there possibly be? Does an answer matter? Would comprehension numb the horror? Would a complete and full understanding make the situation bearable?
And …
Now that everyone is dead, what is like to be alive? In a world of corpses and rotting flesh, in a graveyard of ghosts and yesterdays and what used to be, in a world irretrievably lost, what does it mean to be, to exist, to have breath? What does it feel like? What do you do? What can you do? How long before you tire of walking around in a daze? How long before it becomes normal? How soon before you get back to the business of living? What do you tell yourself about what happened and what it means and why you were spared? What is your purpose in life? Does your life even matter if no one else is there to witness it? Who do you talk to? Where do you find meaning? How does it change you? Will you go mad? How soon before the electricity dies? How long will water flow through the taps? What happens if you get sick? And how do you pray? And what do you say to the God who let this indescribable madness happen? Do you comfort yourself with the idea that this happened before during the Great Flood when the entire world save Noah and his family were drowned? How do you square this thought with the Biblical injunction that God is love?
I want to put this idea down on the page. I want to see it come to life. I want to know how the story ends. But I get stuck. Each time I try to write it, I whip out a few pages, I’m off and running, the muse is dancing, the words are coming, and … I get stuck.
Words fail me.
I’m reminded of some of the characters in my novels. I think I know who they are and what they want to say. I put words into their mouths. But they insist on speaking for themselves. They make it clear I was wrong about them. They come alive. They say what they want to say. They don’t care about my ideas. They don’t give a toss about my plot plans. They know who they are and aren’t happy until I go back and rewrite their scenes and get it right. They have their own thoughts and motivations, their own ways of speaking and being in the world, and they will settle for no less.
Each time I try to wrestle My Big Idea to the page, the characters sit there. They don’t like the words I’ve put into their mouths. They are silent. Like they don’t want their story told. Like I’m not the one who should tell it. Like they’re waiting for someone better, someone with the right words, the right touch.
And what’s with this apocalyptic, let-it-burn fiction filling our book shelves and movie screens: The Walking Dead, The Stand, Left Behind, The Hunger Games, Resident Evil? What is this fascination with the end of the world, the collapse of civilization? Do we sense something in the wind? Is it some deep, primal intuition? Are we trying to prepare ourselves for our own demise? Is it the outpouring of a generation raised during the Cold War when the possibility of nuclear bombs raining down from the sky was very real? Are we trying to say something about the ravaging of the natural world, the rape of the earth? Have we spent too much time pondering the Book of Revelations?
What is this darkness?
What sort of writer feels frustrated and tortured because he can’t find the words to write a novel about every single human being on the face of the earth giving up the ghost?
Maybe it’s a story that can’t be told. Ought not to be. Maybe something inside me rebels at such a bleak depiction of human life.
Is it dark? Indeed it is. And maybe it says things about me that make me uncomfortable. But what is the job of the writer if not to march into the darkness and tell the truth about what’s there?
Maybe the only way to truly celebrate life is to consider its complete opposite. Maybe light has no meaning without darkness.
But in the end, perhaps trying to imagine life without other human beings is impossible.
It lingers there. In the back of my mind.
Let it burn!
Yes, but … how?
