It is objectively difficult to create when it feels like the world, including the networks and structures we take for granted, is crumbling around us—even more so when it actually is. But art in all forms is a critical kind of resistance and reconstruction, and it's one way we can actually help.
But what the heck do you write about when everything is terrible?
Thankfully, we're not the first to experience this. Writers have been writing in dark times for as long as there have been times. Stories didn't stop being told just because there were world wars, global depressions, or raging pandemics. In fact, many of our best stories were created from those times.
With that in mind, here are some of the reasons I and others continue to write.
To Give People Hope
A story can give people hope that the darkness can be beaten, that even the smallest person and the smallest act can matter. For example, J.R.R. Tolkien drew on (among other things) his experiences in World War I to write The Lord of the Rings, even as he lived through the build-up toward World War II.
Stories can give people hope for a better future, like Susan Kaye Quinn's Nothing Is Promised hopepunk series, written amidst the ever-present doom of our climate crisis yet presenting a vision of what humanity is capable of.
To Give People Inspiration
The darkness can be beaten, but how do we beat it? Your story might address this more directly, presenting a dystopian world and the hard-pressed, reluctant heroes who tear it down—for example, Suzanne Collins' Catching Fire, Lois Lowry's The Giver, or Alan Moore's V for Vendetta. It's fiction, yes, and not an instruction manual, but stories like these can be the seeds for real-world ideas (or in some cases, real-world warnings).
To Shine a Light on the Truth
Many stories, especially those by authors from underrepresented or oppressed groups, reveal truths that majority culture is often blind to. These are the kinds of stories that can change someone's entire worldview, and humanity needs as many as we can get.
R.F. Kuang's Babel takes a scathing look at the former British Empire and the cultures that were crushed to create it. It raises critical questions of whether an invincible power can be fought at all and, if so, how—all while telling a gripping historical fantasy tale.
Celeste Ng's Our Missing Hearts paints a vision of a terrifying America-that-could-be (one that feels increasingly real in today's political climate) and asks the reader to consider how such a thing could have happened and what they might do within it.
To Increase Empathy
Not all stories need to touch on dystopia to make a difference. Every story is an exercise in empathy, especially the most personal ones, and empathy is critical to pull us out of the darkness.
In Little Fires Everywhere, Celeste Ng writes about a town that believes itself to be uplifted yet struggles when faced with its own underlying biases. There is no great villain nor power to be toppled in this story, but it nonetheless forces us to empathize and wrestle with multiple perspectives on difficult moral questions.
(Honestly, all of Celeste Ng's work is amazing. I can't recommend her enough.)
To Provide an Escape
Not all stories need to inspire or teach or represent. A story that is merely an escape is every bit as vital during dark times. When every headline feels worse than the one before, despair comes all too easily. But despair is how the darkness wins. In a fight like that, joy and escape become lifelines and weapons.
My examples, of course, are from my own interests—what I have read and remember (hence all the sci-fi and fantasy). But there are so many good examples I am omitting here. Please, recommend your own stories-from-dark-times in the comments. We want to read them!
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