Consider all the ordinary people out there.*

People like you and me, going about their everyday lives. Getting up, eating breakfast, going to work. Husbands, wives, sons and daughters all passing from moment to moment with minimal excitement, maximum predictability. Living for the momentary free times, earning enough money to buy a house that they won't own for twenty-five years, putting a little by each month for two weeks in the sun. Lusting after the latest car in the showroom, or the neighbour's wife. Picking those six numbers every week in the vain hope of being excused from the race. Settling down each evening to watch the telly.

Dull, isn't it.

It doesn't really make for good fiction, real life. No matter how you try to present it, if it's going to be interesting it'll have to be different. Even the purveyors of Soap Operas know this. You might like to think that Albert Square is a little slice of London, but real life is nothing like Eastenders.** Real life doesn't come in half-hour long packets, it runs in real time.

And so we spice things up in fiction. We make life more interesting, and we gloss over the dull bits - fast-forward to the next car chase, violent murder or gratuitous sex scene. As writers, we strive to come up with more and more exciting, interesting and thought-provoking things to write about. At times, and in certain genres, it seems like we are locked in an arms race, each book trying to out-gross the last. It's the same in the film business, with slasher movies getting ever gorier, finding new and unpleasant ways to kill people; and with blockbusters getting ever bigger, more effects-driven. In the first Lethal Weapon movie it was enough for Mel Gibson to jump off a building; in the last one, he had to blow it up.

What, you may ask, is the problem with that? Well, as far as I'm concerned, there isn't one. Ram badgers up people's arses, bury them in deep graves with added compost-accelerator, stalk them by murdering everyone else in their high school yearbook and posting them essential bits of anatomy, one a month, until there's none left. I can tell that this is fiction. I know that it's make-believe designed to take my mind off the dull drudgery of everyday existence.

But one of the key features of a good book is suspension of disbelief. To transport a reader into the world you've created, you need to absorb them completely, with no jarring reminders that they are actually sitting in bed, propped up against the pillows and their better half snoring gently beside them. Immersion must be complete, or as complete as possible, and this begs the question that this rambling monologue is trying to reach.

What if you can't recognise what's real and what's fiction anymore? What if you think the world is full of child-murderers and vengeful half-brothers? What if you think it's all right to murder your noisy neighbour and feed his body to the pigs at the nearby farm? Or to take an assault rifle to school and blow away anyone who's unlucky enough to be in your line of sight?

Or more insidiously, what if you think it's fine to down a dozen pints of lager and get into a fight with the bloke from the other end of the street who you reckon's been shagging your sister?

I think as writers, we can rest easy. We can't be held accountable for the actions of our readers, however many ways we come up with for dismembering a corpse. We didn't force them to pick up the book and read it. But television is another matter altogether. It's message is shorter, punchier. It reaches into our homes and grabs us by the throat. We are hooked on its drug early in life and cling to the relief it gives us from our daily worries. And in the effort to ground excitement in something recognisable as reality, it teaches us a false sense of what is normal.

I'm not for a moment saying that television should be censored any more than it is at the moment. There's an argument I favour that says it should be censored much less, if at all. It should be the responsibility of parents to make sure that their children aren't exposed to things they don't want them to watch. It would be nice to be able to shock telly watchers*** so much they stopped for a moment and thought about what they were doing in front of the flickering tube.

Sadly, parents are too busy to spend that much time with their children nowadays. Instead they are out pursuing the grinding lifestyles that require full-body immersion in TV-land to make bearable. Responsibility is handed over to government and we wonder why everything goes to hell in a handbasket (and complain loudly when it does).

And slowly, bit by bit, the behaviour of the fictional world becomes acceptable in the real one.

So should we consider this when we write? Should we try to distance our fictional worlds from reality? Or introduce decent characters who are morally upstanding (but probably very dull)? Or should we not give a toss either way, and let the proles screw themselves if they want to?

*These thoughts, probably in a more ordered manner, went through my head this afternoon as I was walking the dogs. I've no idea what set them off, and I was supposed to be thinking about the world of Sir Benfro. Which just goes to show something. What, I'm not sure.


**I should add at this point that I've never watched an episode of Eastenders from start to finish - my instant reaction to finding it on is to switch over or off. But I've seen enough of it and other UK soaps to know that they present a very distorted view of reality, whilst dangerously pretending that it is reality.

***And I count myself among their number, though I'm struggling to escape.

Comments

Sandra Ruttan said…
I do think there has to be a degree of realism in your writing. I mean, if every single person is super-fucked up it just gets old after a while. Introduce new character, introduce major hang-up, blah blah. I mean, people are complex, but there's nothing wrong with a character that has a pretty decent life as long as you present the person in a compelling way.

I liked the beginning of the Alan Banks series because he was married, he resisted temptation. In short, he wasn't a drinking, womanizing cop like every other cop out there.

Of course, that changed and he became that, which is sad. I found it so refreshing.
I don't think there is any significant risk of people confusing fiction with reality - most people will stick to the mundane whatever they see on TV. Loons will still go off the rails, but they always have.

More dangerous, to my mind, is the perception that the world matches this scary, sensationalised reality; the thought that I've got a dull job and a drab house, but to get from one to the other I need to run the gauntlet of hoodie-wearing psycho-teens, gun-toting drug-dealers, terrorist immigrants and sweaty-palmed paedophiles.

This isn't reality.

On the other hand, there was a Channel 4 documentary on the week presented by Martin Bell that discussed how sanitised the news coverage of war was. Sure, we get pictures of the missiles being fired and hear the sound of gunfire behind a journalist's report, but as Jon Snow pointed out, the problem broadcasters face in showing footage of a car bomb blast is making sure they don't offend the viewers and the regulators by letting any severed limbs creep into shot.

So TV on the one hand over-emphasises the grotesqueries of reality, but on the other hand censors how bad real life can be.

On the flip side though, the escape can often be as mundane as the life being escaped from. I sketched a cartoon a while back that flipped between a guy sitting dumbly in front of a computer in an office and a fantasy warrior hacking and slashing monsters...

...Guy staring at computer...

...Warrior hacking monsters...

...Guy staring at computer...

...Warrior hacking monsters...

...with the final panel showing a wizard asking the warrior why he spent all his time on this virtual office simulator. "It provides an escape from my monotonously mundane existence," he replied.

This came after several months of World and Warcraft and the realisation that while the context of the game is exciting, the reality is a player facing a whole menagerie of beasts and then performing the same series of mouse clicks over and over and over and over...

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