When I was writing my thesis play for a class, or my thesis novel at Denison, or my thesis musical at NYU, I didn’t pretend to want to write anything other than speculative fiction. Dystopian sci-fi appeals to the exact spot where my right brain and left brain meet, both sides always vying for attention. Fictional characters and scenarios? Meet the cutting edge of science and technology.
Then 2020 happened. And back in March, before millions of people were dead and millions more were irreparably affected by COVID-19, before “two months in lockdown” became “indefinite", before we found new boiling points to reach every month, I started noticing something that seemed, at that ignorant time, almost comical. See, when you write speculative fiction, you want the scenarios to feel real enough to create a dialogue about the potential fate of our future, but fictional enough for people to actually enjoy this kind of thought experiment. But the stuff I predicted as nothing more than a “thought experiment” was starting to…well…happen. And I knew it wasn’t just me who saw these parallels. More than one friend would quip, “Hey, this reminds me of that thing you wrote.”
Cool. Cool cool cool.
Here’s an example.
One of my favorite plays I’ve written, “The Dark on Fire,” is about a family who has to stay inside due to the toxic environment, and their isolation slowly drives them insane. Their visitors come in masks, they have to disinfect everything frequently, they even kit a meal kit delivered! I wrote this around 2011. It was loosely inspired by the situation over in Cheshire, Ohio. But nowadays, Cheshire, Ohio would not be the first thing to come to mind.
Then there’s my thesis musical, which deals with censorship in books and how sometimes, some works should be censored when you’re talking about things written for children.
Or my novel, which is mostly about music in the future, but sits on a premise of renewable-energy-gone-wrong and using the destruction of art as a bargaining chip amongst nations. It seemed pretty safe from 2020… But whoops! What about that line about how wall street fell to hackers?
During the summer of 2020, there was a lot of talk about how media was going to handle the pandemic. Not just in terms of rules and regulations, but as subject matter. Nowadays, everyone feels desperate to get to a place where we can ignore it. We’ve lived it for a whole year. How long before we want to relive it at all?
The thing is, “COVID as drama” is not what people need right now, and it’s not what people will need a year, or two, or three years out from the pandemic. And even though I never sought to include current events from this time in my work, it just happened. It’s bound to if you’re keen on writing a realistic near-future. That’s the risk I took, and it’s the risk I’ll keep taking with this genre.
So what do I do now? Well, there’s one thing I’ve desperately needed in the media I consume: stories of hope. Not necessarily sports movie-levels of “the little guy winning,” but hope in humanity. Art that is reckless but not cynical. Creations that are reflective but not suffocating. Characters who show me how to overcome enormous disasters.
So maybe I shelve “The Dark on Fire” for a bit. That’s okay. I’ve refocused my lens onto another project of mine, “Captain Moriah’s Map of the World,” a steampunk kids show about three friends who make the most of their new and glorious world. It has its dark moments, sure, but they’re there to enhance the light. And I’ve found a community in Midnight Oil Collective, a group of individuals who are so different from me in so many ways but also desperate to create these stories that SHOUT hope, and who want to see little 2D Captain Moriah succeed as badly as I do.
And maybe the events of “Captain Moriah’s Map of the World” will happen next year and I’ll have to shelve that project, too. That’s okay. If my work isn’t bringing positivity to people, then I don’t want to share it. But I’m going to focus on hope, laughter, and imperfect people you still want to be around.
It’s my job to adapt. It’s my job to evolve.