Words of Power

Stepping into the maelstrom of stories.

I've been working on getting this right for some weeks now.

Part of the struggle has been trying to unlearn some bad writing habits I've picked up over the years. I have a stubborn case of Essay Voice—a highbrow, ex cathedra way of writing that probably comes from spending too much time in journalism school. Works well enough for professional jobs, but it's not the tone I'm trying to strike here. 

Apart from the stylistic hang-ups—this is something I'm trying to thrash out for myself, as well as something to share with an audience, and it keeps slipping out of my grasp.

Here's what it is: I think we need better stories.

It feels almost heretical to say. We’re supposed to be living in the Golden Age of stories, of television, movies, podcasts, eBooks, and all the rest. Never before in human history has there been such wide access to stories of this depth and breadth, a vast library of stories, from every culture across time and space and into a future that is vibrantly, dizzyingly imagined.

Hard enough to navigate that as a new writer: it’s almost impossible to look at that enormous, buzzing hive of content creation and imagine a way to carve out a niche for yourself.

To complicate things further, there’s an ongoing, furious war of words over the whole idea of “better stories”—about who has the right to wield the awesome cultural power that digital media enables, and how it should be used. “Better stories” has been a call to arms in the Culture Wars for at least the last decade, if not longer. To suggest that all those struggles have only marginally improved the quality of stories (if at all) is asking for a fight from somebody.

I should clarify here that—when I say “better stories”—I don’t mean “better entertainment.” There are plenty of people digging in those mines already. Instead, I’m interested in the deeper function of stories as the building blocks of reality. Stories don’t just distract us from reality: they shape the world in ways that we’re in danger of losing. Myths are cultural-spiritual ballast in hard times; fiction, specifically, can be an imaginative laboratory where we test-drive the different ways that reality could be constituted.

We need these things now more than ever.

Fortunately, I’m not alone in this. Writers and thinkers like Bayo Akomalafe, Charles Eisenstein, Dougald Hine, Paul Kingsnorth, Ursula Le Guin, Tyson Yunkaporta—and many, many others, all much more capable than myself—have been sounding the alarm for some time now. We need better stories in order to imagine what comes next, in a world that’s increasingly out of our control.

Because the future is coming for us. And it looks pissed.

Recently, the quote that resonated most deeply for me was from this essay by Paul Kingsnorth:

The work of the age of inversion and anticulture is not to fight puny online battles, or to look for victory in some imagined political settlement or brilliant new ideology. Our wounds are much deeper than that. Our stories are cracked at their foundations, and as a consequence we are afloat in a fantastical world of our own making: grasping at freedom, entirely enslaved.

The antidote to this is to dig down to those foundations and begin the work of repair. We are going to have to learn to be adults again; to get our feet back on the ground, to rebuild families and communities, to learn again the meaning of worship and commitment, of limits and longing. We are, in short, going to have to grow up. This is long, hard work: intergenerational work. It is myth work. We don’t really want to begin, and we don’t really know how to. Does any child want to grow up? But there is nothing else for it; no other path is going to get us home.

That myth work is what I’m interested in. It’s a job for professionals, which I’m definitely not. Still—hard labor at this depth calls for many hands and strong backs. I’m hoping to lend what I can.

I’m still trying to understand what the work is, and what’s needed for it. What follows is my own attempt to get the lay of the land—where storytelling is at right now—before I find a place to dig in.

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I said in my first post that I wouldn’t talk about politics on here. That was mostly true: I am, to my great shame, a grizzled veteran of the ignominious Social Media Wars of 2016. I’m never going back to the front again. (We lost a lot of good men out there, psychologically speaking.) I have no interest in arguing about partisan politics online, or with strangers, or really anywhere else but the safety of my local bar with a few friends I trust.

Still, though—we can’t talk about storytelling without taking stock of where we are currently, and in order to do that, we need to talk about power in stories, which inevitably veers very close to politics. Not partisan politics, but the precursor to politics: how power is shaped and defined in the narratives we use to understand the world.

Every story is about power, because every story worth the name contains some element of conflict. Conflicts are intrinsically about power. If we define politics broadly as the means by which power is constituted within a system—who has it, who deserves it, who’s trying to get it and who’s trying to hold onto it—every story has an inherent politics or a political valence.

All stories are about power, and all stories are political, in the sense that they describe how power works. 

We all know this. 

But it’s one of those fundamental truths that bears repeating, because we forget: stories are never “just” stories, and if we’re insisting that some narratives are just entertainment or just fantasy, we’re probably in trouble.

I can hear everybody nodding along, yes, yes, of course, this is all Internet Psychology 101 stuff. But listen. All stories have power. Even the ones that you enjoy as easy-breezy popcorn fare and would rather not think too hard about. Especially those.

We’re living in an unparalleled age of entertainment—a global glut of stories. Digital technology has blown the gates off of commercial media production, as well as the services that bring narrative products to consumers. Yesterday’s penny-press pulp fictions are today’s billion-dollar industrial juggernauts. Everybody’s getting rich from stories, so many stories everywhere; the streets are paved with gold, and if you’re not starting your own podcast or Twitch stream or fanfic or screenplay, you might as well be living in a cave. (Welcome to my SubStack! I’m obviously staking a claim in this, just like everybody else.)

Alongside this embarrassment of riches, we have the growing insistence that this is all just entertainment: ideologically neutral; harmless fun; universally appealing, like candy for kids.

And I think this makes people feel crazy.

The fatal flaw in our culture right now is the idea that any narrative is ideologically neutral, let alone the ones that are creating these swirling vortices of wealth and endlessly kaleidoscopic content. Nobody sane can look at these fractalizing layers of recursive narration—the New Big Movie, and the reaction videos pointing at it, and the reactions to the reactions, and all of it representing more money than the GDP of most countries—and say, straight-faced, that these are just stories.

And yet we try.

Just about everything that goes under the clashing banners of “the culture war” is, fundamentally, a battle over ideological neutrality; lately, that goes double for cultural products like books, movies, TV shows, video games, etc. 

Here’s how it usually plays out: 

Group A says that something (pick your toxin) is ideologically neutral—“just” a story, universal in its appeal, completely anodyne, unobjectionable to anyone whose motives are pure. Group B comes along and says (correctly, kind of) that this is horseshit. Group B is only partially correct because all narratives make a normative claim about power—except they’re usually not making a meta-critique of how narratives function. That would be too generous. Instead, Group B focuses on the (real or imagined) bad actors in Group A, and their nefarious plots to corrupt our precious bodily fluids. The conflict devolves into a pitched battle, usually about the presence or absence of some -ism; the fight rages on, until everybody gets tired and goes home to salve their wounds. Nothing much is gained except a few yards of muddied digital ground. And then the two sides switch. Now it’s Group B’s turn to raise the flag for some cultural artifact that they believe should be entirely above reproach, purest innocence, completely palatable for anyone who’s not a monster. Calumny! screams Group A. This thing is obviously just a Trojan Horse for [X]ism, and remember what they did to us the last time! The whistles blow, the commissars shout, and we all go scrambling over the top once more, bayonets fixed, charging as we scream into volleys of absolute stupidity.

We all think that this is getting us somewhere. Of course all stories have power, we say, and that’s why we have to keep our stories out of the hands of those grubby, skulking Other People. That’s why we have to fight so hard. So we can have better stories.

I think what most people are really fighting against is the cognitive dissonance between the idea that these stories are “just” entertainment, and the obvious, relentless power for stories to remake the physical and imaginal worlds that we live in. 

And as is so often the case, while we fight to the death down here in the virtual mud—waging endless skirmishes over one little patch of imaginal dirt—we’re giving up huge cultural territories that used to belong to us, surrendering control to larger forces working over our heads.

What have we gained from this, really?

I’ll probably catch heat from both sides by saying that we’re not getting better stories. I won’t give any examples, for fear of being accused of bias or favoritism by one side or the other. Just think of any huge dust-up about media or culture in the past, lord, twenty years at least, and you’ll know what I’m talking about.

What’s changed?

Even the “new” stories struggle to escape the crushing gravity of the same old stories, which are really just different facets of one Big Story. And while we try to strangle each other over the supposed worth of these cheap tinkertoys, the Big Story trundles along, uncontested, remaking the world in its image.

What does this mean for a new writer like me?

It means there’s an enormous amount of social and political (and financial) pressure to go along with the Big Story. The benefits to writing anything controversial in this supersaturated, highly-politicized environment are practically nonexistent. Much easier to find a niche within the Big Story—to take shelter within the status quo and hope the worst of this blows over.

But then—what are we left with, when the Big Story breaks down entirely?

More on that next time.