One of my favourite jokes goes like this: There's an optimist and a pessimist. The pessimist puts his head in his hands and says, “Oh no, things can't get any worse!” And the optimist replies, “Oh yes they can!”
When I write fiction, I find it useful to apply the structure of this joke to plots. I think of it as the Rule of Cruel Optimism, and its mechanism is simple: You put your central character in a situation where they think their life can't get any worse, and then you make it do just that.
If you follow the Rule of Cruel Optimism, you'll all get the conflict, extremity and white-knuckle excitement of any good thriller – whether or not you're writing one. Get your characters into a mess and then get them out again, changed: That's storytelling in a nutshell.
Extremes mirror the zig-zag nature of life's path – what we all refer to as “the ups and downs” – and in doing so, they snare our psyche, trigger the what-if-it-were-me reveries that we succumb to so readily. As consumers of stories, both real and invented, we humans are extremity addicts: bliss-seekers, worst-case-scenario junkies, happy-ever-afterists, catastrophists. I'm no exception. From the comfort and safety of my writing desk, I want to explore what it's like to be in a dire, unusual, freakish, impossible-looking situation. I devour Worst Disasters, Deadliest Home Accidents, Hottest Hunks, Most Dramatic Escapes, Cutest Sick Animals.
The Rapture, by Liz Jensen, Doubleday Canada, 304 pages, $29.95
If you, like me, watched a TV program called The World's Fattest Man, you'll remember that the man in question kept his belly – and the giant benign tumour it played host to – on a special trolley. That his mother cooked him elephant-sized meals. That his normal-sized girlfriend's previous boyfriend – who'd been a friend of The World's Fattest Man (bear with me) – had died of complications arising from obesity. (Did she and The World's Fattest Man have sex? The program drew a coy veil over this). There was Extreme Action, too. You saw the operation to remove his tumour. It weighed as much as a teenager.
Am I a better person for having watched The World's Fattest Man? Morally speaking, probably not, because the famous “there but for the grace of God go I” sentiment feels too close to schadenfreude for comfort. But I was a more stimulated person, a more knowledgeable one, and perhaps one more inclined to order a simple green salad. Because in sampling the life of The World's Fattest Man, I briefly crept inside his skin, discovered what his life involved (eating superhuman amounts of pizza, basically), glimpsed how he'd arrived there, and – crucially – imagined how, if it were me, I might escape.
What-if is the red pill that opens the door to another world
Long ago I used to work in TV news, but I wasn't cut out for it. Reporting requires a certain ruthlessness (“Tell me, how long did you cry after your baby was killed by the nail-bomb?”) and I became grumpily disillusioned with the news process. Not just by the way the presence or absence of footage skewed the editorial decision-making , but on an existential level. What was the point? It all began to seem, in the end, like just a global horror-story exchange, a giant freak show parading misery, conflict, perversions of justice, disasters; events that defied the norm and generated large-scale pain and suffering.
And then, to add insult to injury, the format required the conjuring of a “human interest” story – often animal-related – to cheer the viewers up at the end: a bonbon at the end of meal of carnage to keep morbid thoughts at bay. We used to call it “the skateboarding duck.” Because there probably was once, on TV, a duck that skateboarded for pleasure. You can picture it. Great image, 30 seconds of giddy-up, smile, the duck's skating and Afghanistan's behind us.
Yet perversely enough, now that I write fiction for a living, variations from the norm are what I seek out most, because they trigger that what-if process that's so vital to us all as consumers – not just as consumers of stories, but consumers of life. What if I went into the basement of my house and discovered a time-machine that could catapult me back five centuries? What if your phone rang right now, and someone told you you'd get a million dollars if you spent a year in solitary confinement? What if a methane catastrophe that happened 55 million years ago were to reproduce itself today and wipe out most species of life?
What-if is the red pill that opens the door to another world: a world of dizzying, endless variety; of danger and ecstasy, unexpected emotions, corners of weird calm; of philosophy even. What-if offers you the chance to become someone other than yourself without bearing the cost. And if empathy is what holds us together as humans, then its practice is an increasingly vital mental exercise in a world where so many different people rub shoulders.
What a comfort, then, that whatever person's head you want to enter, there's a story to get you there.
No, it's more than a comfort. It's a goddamn miracle.
Liz Jensen's psychological eco-thriller, The Rapture, is published by Doubleday Canada.
