It’s a Brave New World at the day job today. Yesterday’s events 100% supported my decision to base story squad dynamics on my former team. You write your catharsis. (I do, anyway). I’ve always been better at processing emotion through storytelling than, say, therapy. It IS my therapy.
While it’s true that you can’t make inferences about an author’s private life based on what or who they write about, I’ll say we all DO have core emotional or trope-specific themes that one can probably make SOME inferences about if artist gets enough time to explore it across many works.
I keep coming back to abusive relationships in my work, and that is 100% because I have found myself processing those dynamics from childhood and teen experiences: how you can be both a hero, a victim AND a villain at various times. How seemingly “strong” people can get caught up in a bad situation.
The body horror all started with my first IUD and then descent into dying of type 1 diabetes (I was dying for a year! A year!) The journey from healthy 20 something to disintegrating corpse and then chronically ill is wild to experience, let me tell you (Why yes, I DID love watching The Substance!).
The war obsession is easy: I spent the first 12 years of my life mostly with my grandparents during day: they met in Nazi occupied France, lived in Europe for seven years after the war. One of his many jobs in the aftermath was driving truck loads of dead bodies out of the camps. Those stories stick.
And of course my childhood was one of ingesting psychedelic, drug-fueled 80s cartoons and horrifying yet delightful Jim Henson productions. Let’s not forget the impression that Goblin King David Bowie had on me as an 11 year old (“gosh, what is THIS feeling I am feeling watching this person rn??” ?).
We are all collections of our emotions and experiences and especially our early influences. And for me, the writing is very much key to me in processing and understanding my world. It’s how I construct my story, find meaning, and figure out what I think and feel.
Error many make when looking critically at art is assuming we’re writing biographies when instead what many artists are doing is processing EMOTION. So the EVENTS are less meaningful than the EMOTIONS being explored. And if writer doesn’t express that well or critic doesn’t see it, it’s invisible.
When that’s invisible, all you’re looking at is events and trying to figure out who the Mary Sue is. In fact, they are ALL Mary Sues (I’m using this term more broadly to mean “author insert” tho we know that key aspect of OG Mary Sue idea was making a character who is perfect and good at everything).
These are the people that get made to process the emotion of the story. And for many of us, that means pulling and remixing from other media, people we know, our traumas/interests, and other influences. What great artists do in end is create something completely new and original from all of that.
So while in the end, this squad tl will 100% be about me processing the EMOTION of getting close to a team you don’t want to get close to, trauma bonding during a time of great upheaval, and then having it break apart, the how and why and who is “inspired by” as opposed to autobiography.
Because lordy, let’s be real: most autobiography is BORING. It’s why I write SCIENCE FICTION. But I have a core EMOTION to drive that part of the work now and the decisions I make on the who and how and events will be based on what I find is best at exploring that EMOTION in a cool setting.
I remember talking to someone about Twilight. I just could not understand why it took off. And colleague said, “You know what she captures really well? The experience of falling in love.” It clicked for me that it was THAT emotion that many folks were connecting with (I did not share that XP lol).
When people burst into tears when they meet me at an event, it’s not because I write about giant bugs and exploding heads. Those things are cool, yes! But they react that way because they connected EMOTIONALLY with something I wrote. It’s that feeling like “OMG I’m not alone. I feel that TOO!!”
Art is, at its best, a way for humans to connect. We’re holding out a hand saying “I felt this way. Have you ever felt this way too?” And no, not everyone has, and thus those are not people who are going to be yours fans. But many HAVE. And if you’ve done it right, you connect with that person across time and space – and for one glorious moment, we feel less alone.
THAT is great fucking art. THAT is magic. It’s a magic every great storyteller has; heroes and villains alike. Perhaps that’s why we hate it so much when we’ve connected with art made by people who have done monstrous things. It makes us ask if we, too, are monsters.
I know the answer to that.
I connect emotionally with fictional monsters (and the work of people who’ve done monstrous things) all the time. We all do. We are human. We share the multitude of all human emotions and possible actions with the best and worst people in the world. That’s terrifying.
This is why the STORIES we tell ourselves are so important. I changed a lot of who I was by asking myself how the person I wanted to be would act in any given situation. FEELING a monstrous impulse isn’t what makes us monsters. It’s taking the ACTIONS of a monster. It’s being aware enough to choose.
That’s core emotional component of my fiction too, of course: do you want to be the hero, or the monster? We make those choices constantly, with every action. The two wolves anecdote has endured for a reason: Which one do we choose to feed?
It’s OK to acknowledge that every day, we are making a choice to feed one or the other.
And we are all processing that terrifying idea together, every day.
