Long before Facebook and Twitter, long before a cat could “has cheezburger”, back when my Internet connection was dependent on squeaks and squeals and beeps and boops, I had an idea, but I thought it absurd. I had been taking writing courses—progressed through 101 and 102, found myself in 201, and was faced with coming up with an idea for a new manuscript—something interesting, something amusing, something a little strange—something in particular, but grounded in a sense of reality, no matter how bizarre or out there.
I had run through books for inspiration and moved on to considering movies. Alien and Aliens were out there—oddly plausible, albeit a stretch—but I wasn’t feeling up to writing science fiction. There was Air Force One and Speed, but aviation, guns, explosions, and the physics behind…well…anything, wasn’t doing it for me at the time either. Now, it may have been Bono, it may have been The Edge, of course it also may have been the fact that I was running out of time and needed to get my ass in gear, but after popping Zooropa into my CD changer and listening to “Numb” on repeat for about two hours straight, all I could hear was Dustin Hoffman’s voice saying, “This is nothing.”
A movie critic I am not. And if I tell you that I actually enjoyed Spice World, I may lose all credibility whatsoever. (Sshh, I enjoyed Spice World). Again, a movie critic I am not, but I liked Wag the Dog—I found my muse—now I just needed to find my idea: non-derivative, new, novel, something out there, absurd, but plausible just the same. I eventually settled on a hint of science fiction, let’s call it a skosh, and politics, but I was happy nonetheless. Then I started writing it…
I couldn’t have been more than a quarter of the way into the thing when I had to stop. There is no way that anyone is going to buy this, I thought. A Jedi and a Death Star? Plausible. A shark that eats men named Quint and genetically engineered dinosaurs? Plausible. Flying monkeys and houses that drop on witches? Totally plausible. Hell, marching brooms and dancing hippos were more plausible than this.
What could possibly have been inspired by Wag the Dog via Zooropa’s “Numb”, but still more absurd than the Death Star and Fantasia? What stopped me? What made me question that the more realistic my manuscript, the more probable, the more plausible—the more farfetched and unbelievable it would be?
It’s because at the time I never imagined social media. Never imagined the news without Bernard Shaw. Never imagined a poll expert eating a bug. Never imagined that same poll expert, for all intents and purposes, having to state to a news anchor that eating a bug is not news. Never in my wildest dreams thought that a news organization would disagree. Never, even after all that’s been said and done, could imagine said news organization not heed such advice and post it as news anyway—make it a damn headline. And, oh the irony, I never envisioned an interrupting canine control soft-spoken royalty. Come on, your majesty, I want to hear what you have to say, it can bark when you’re finished.
And after 1984 and Fahrenheit 451, I thought those were the dystopias that would catch on. The ones that took a lot of work. That’s not to say that I didn’t buy into the phrase, “Never underestimate the…” (finish the line, I don’t have the heart), but for as self-aggrandizing as people can be, I always figured the “self-educated” were far fewer in numbers, and were an even smaller population when it came to understanding, and God help me, “believe” what they taught themselves. Ahh, but alas, here we are—you don’t need to convince people to believe you, you simply need to let them convince themselves. Far easier. Far cheaper. And certainly much quicker.
And that’s why I stopped. I didn’t see it. I couldn’t envision something on that grand of a scale to be at all believable to an audience. I figured the dystopian works before me with their governments and their infinite resources to be the limitations of suspended disbelief and plausibility. And I guess it’s true. Or was true…’cause, hey, truth is stranger than fiction, right? Life has just demonstrated proof of concept.
Hmm…Now where did I put that notebook…?
MINUS THE LIKE 