INSIDE TWICE - The Plunge

SUBSCRIBER NOTES FOR EPISODE SIXTY THREE:

Hello subscribers! I hope you’ve made it safe and healthy through another week of this remarkable ‘season of discontent’ we’re passing through! Shannon and I haven’t been outside the house for over a week because of smoke, but we’ve still got it easier here than so many friends and family further south—so 🙏!

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This week’s episode lends itself to discussion of one important distinction—in my mind, at least—between ‘literary fiction’ and ‘fantasy literature’ as TWICE is defined within the often rather forced and arbitrary system of ‘genre categories’ that book sellers and publishers invented a century or two ago to help them sell more books. :]

The distinction I refer to came to my attention as I worked on this scene in which young Matt finally begins to interact with the community of homeless and vagrant youth who call ‘the Avenue’ home.

Before going farther here, I should say that I’ve had a fair amount of engagement over the years with ‘at risk’ youth like those on ‘the Avenue’ in TWICE. Decades ago, I did several years of volunteer work with incarcerated teens in the SF Bay Area’s juvenile justice system. As a result of that work, I was later employed three days a week as the sole “relief staff member” overseeing a group home for “abused delinquent boys” in Livermore, California, while the foster parents running that home took a few days of much needed leave each week. That experience was a profoundly educational life-changer for me, and though I left the position after a year because—even as a young man—it just plain wore me out, physically and emotionally, I remember each of those boys with gratitude and respect to this day. I have done a large variety of other volunteer ‘youth work’ and held several other professional positions working with teens through the years, including having been a board member of Big Brothers/Big Sisters in Mendocino County. And, finally, as an artist, writer and low or unpaid youth worker, I have lived in MANY ‘rental room’ boarding houses like Lita’s, and even a slum tenement or two over the years, all situated on or near urban venues very like ‘the Avenue’ in Twice—where I’ve had both the challenge and the gift of knowing and sometimes befriending a fair number of homeless or near-homeless adults and teens over several decades.

All of which is to say that, having actually known and interacted with a lot of marginalized and at-risk youth, homeless, criminalized, and otherwise, I was very aware as I sat down to craft these accounts of Matt’s first acquaintance with such people in TWICE, that little of what I depict in these scenes would EVER have happened as I depict it here—or at all—in the ‘real world.’ Which brings me—finally—to the distinction between literary and fantasy fiction I’d like to talk about here. It seems to me that ‘literary’ fiction strives to observe, explore and interpret human experience and the world ‘as it exists’ in the world we already know—or could know somewhere on this planet, at least. I have read a fair share of literary fiction over the course of my life, and found much of it moving, thought provoking, sometimes even life changing. But, in the end, I’ve chosen to read and write primarily fantasy fiction, which, in my opinion anyway, strives to imagine, explore and interpret and human experience and the world, not as they are, but as they might be. That is very much what I am trying to do here: not describe the real world in some meaningful or revealing way, but to re-imagine it.

I have more than a few close friends and relations who have struggled—some over their whole lifetimes—with serious drug addiction and its worst consequences—including prison, poverty and death. Most are people I care about, and respect today—all the more because of the scope and complexity of their struggles and the life stories behind them. But in some important ways, ‘Dusty’ is not a credible ‘real world’ drug addict, any more than a clueless ‘fourteen-year-old suburban’ boy’ is going to be welcomed and chatted up by a bunch of street kids, and be ‘introduced’ to dozens more of them during his first afternoon—or dozens of afternoons, for that matter—wandering out onto their streets. Almost none of the major characters in this story—including Anna, Colleen, Lita, Amber or others you have yet to meet—are truly credible facsimiles of their ‘real-world’ inspirations—just as the core premises of this story—fifty-year-old man is transformed into fourteen-year-old boy by ‘fairies’ living hidden in plain sight by the hundreds if not thousands in a large modern city—are remotely possible in the real world. Though it is my job to make as much of this FEEL ‘real’—or at least plausibly acceptable while you’re reading it—as possible, you could find little if anything in this story replicated as described in these pages out in the real world.

So why am I expending the time and energy to write all this? What is the value of depicting characters and a world nowhere to be found in our reality? Why even read such tales? Can any of the intentionally distorted and inaccurate ‘inventions’ here be applicable to our real lives or our understanding of the world we actually inhabit?

As you may not be surprised to hear, I have HOURS of answer to these questions. But, to be considerate, I will confine myself to sharing just a couple prominent highlights of that screed here. :]

First, even in the ‘real world,’ some truths or legitimate phenomena are only clearly observable—or detectable at all—when viewed in distorted, artificial environments. This is ‘laboratory science’ in a nutshell. We didn’t learn much of what we know today about microbiology, quantum physics, or astronomy, for instance, just by making objective observations of the natural world as it actually appears to us. How were we to observe the behavior of atomic particles, or even the inner workings of viruses and organic cells, much less analyze the light spectrum data of visually undetectable stars just by observing and describing the world we experience everyday? Intensely ‘unnatural’ and ‘distorted’ lab environments are required to let us see and analyze things which are simply impossible to find or parse in the impenetrable complexity and white-noise clutter of the ‘real world.’ It takes entirely ‘unnatural’ devices designed to isolate and abstract normally undetectable or indecipherable aspects of the normal world in order to make sense of them and understand not just what’s happening, but what those discoveries imply. Which is what I believe imaginative, speculative fiction can do as well.

By placing aspects of the real human condition into an artificially and unnaturally edited and/or altered story format, in which ‘real things’ about us are subjected to conditions or influences that would never occur in the ‘natural world,’ we can isolate, explore and/or experiment with aspects of the human condition in all sorts of ways that simply aren’t possible to do in the ‘real world.’ An author friend who teaches literature courses at the University of Kansas likes to describe speculative fiction as ‘thought experiments.’ I believe that, not only can a great deal be learned about both the natural world and ‘real’ human experience by placing them into unnatural environments and observing them through unnatural lenses, but that some of those real and relevant insights can really ONLY be acquired this way.

The rest of my answer begins with my use above of the phrase, ‘what those discoveries imply.’ Because that, as much as anything, is what we ‘speculative fiction’ writers are really addressing in our work: not the question, ‘What is?’ but the question, ‘What else can be imagined?’ Why does that question matter? …Because without it, much of human history would never have happened, and much of the real, tangible human world in which our daily lives occur would never have been created. I won’t pretend that every—or even most—sci-fi/fantasy paperbacks out there secretly contain earth-shattering insights about the real world, or important predictions about what’s coming—any more than most literary novels or short stories do. But allow me to make a few observations about the ‘generative’ capacity of imaginative fiction.

First, once one starts looking for it, one quickly discovers that a GREAT DEAL of the material world around us—from automatic sliding doors to smartphones, public transportation to wi-fi, appeared first in someone’s STORY—often long before they existed anywhere in the real world. A great deal of ‘science’ itself sprouted first in someone’s imagination—then was sought, found and verified in the lab. If there’s one thing safe to say about human beings these days—for better and for worse—it’s that what we can imagine, we can create, sooner or later. So the ability to imagine both people and the world not as they are, but as they can be imagined, seems a crucial part of the human journey forward. No Neanderthal projected forward from his time into ours now would recognize—or likely believe—a thing he saw. Yet HE was US, and we ARE him. “Where are we?” is an essential question—on an ongoing basis—and always will be. But, for human beings, at least, so are the questions, “Where might we go? Who might we be?” and “How might we get there?” And, even if there don’t seem to be any viable answers to some or all of those questions at the present time, the question, “Nonetheless, what might that look like if it were possible?” still seems worth continuing to ask. Or so any serious look backward suggests to me.

So, yes. Real world lives are far more complex than the lives in TWICE. The character, motives and behaviors of any real world individual are far more varied, self-contradictory and ambiguous than those of my characters. Real world processes and developments are nowhere near as swift, condensed, or slanted as they are within this narrative. And yet, as I said higher up the page, it is still my responsibility to make all this SEEM as real and credible as I can—which I strive to do in many ways, two of which I will try to illuminate below:

First, the fact that I have given myself permission to write the world and those in it as they are NOT in ‘real life’ does NOT mean that I can just write any old dang thing that comes to mind as seems convenient or entertaining from one sentence to the next. Though TWICE does not conform to the real world’s rules, it does have its own (or my own, more accurately) clear and complex set of rules which are just as immutable. EVERYTHING that happens within my story must be consistent with the rest according to this system of ‘internal truths’ governing everything from the mechanics, costs and limitations of ‘fairy ability’ to the inner consistency and credibly organic evolution of each character, to the basic mechanics of time and space in which the story occurs. If I fail to create and honor such rules, the story I’m telling won’t even SEEM credible, and will thus mean far less, if anything at all, to its audience—all of whom know, consciously or unconsciously, that anything ‘real’ is governed by consistent truths—whether or not they are consciously and articulately recognized. We know that something is off, even when we can’t say why. A writer of even the most speculative fiction cannot afford to ignore or forget that.

Second, in this quest for internal consistency and seeming credibility, my characters still draw on and depict many qualities and motives consistent with those of their real-world counterparts. While real-world addicts and street kids would behave in far more complex and reserved or inscrutable ways than the ones in TWICE often do, and there would be far less if any clear division between between the ‘good and safe’ people and the ‘wicked and dangerous’ ones than my social order on TWICE’s ‘Avenue’ suggests, I’m not just making my characters up wholesale without regard to their real-world models. Virtually none of the at risk, and/or incarcerated kids or adults that I’ve known during my life were simply—or even primarily—‘bad people,’ though they are too often seen that simplistically. To one degree or another, virtually all of them possessed all the same values, morals, and codes of behavior I attribute to my versions in TWICE. Their values and codes of right and wrong were as appropriate to their circumstances as ours are to our own, and I have seen as much or more capacity for honor, compassion, generosity and care, moral outrage and self-sacrifice in damaged and/or marginalized people—especially young ones—as I see these days in most ‘normal, respectable adults.’ If my addicts and vagrants seem more undefended, caring, virtuous, cogent and/or approachable than many of their real-world inspirations, that doesn’t mean I’ve just ‘replaced’ reality with something else entirely. It means that I am using my ‘literary lab environment’ to isolate, observe and clarify very real aspects of such real-world people that are easily overlooked or disguised by ‘the rest’ of what clutters up the mix out here. I don’t want my readers just to see ‘how things really look out here.’ They can all see ‘how things look’ for themselves. I want them to see things they may have missed through the snowstorm of ‘other data’ that is always swirling between us and whatever we encounter in this infinitely more complicated life.

So, now you know. I am not attempting to write much of anything here ‘as it really is’ in this world. I am trying to imagine what things might be seen from another vantage point entirely. …As always, it’s for you to judge how well or poorly I am realizing that ambition. :]

Thanks again for coming along! I’ll hope to see you all, safe and sound, next week! :] Be kind to yourselves, and to those around you.