Ordinary Men.

Last week, rather than write a blog post describing the continuing general lack of progress, I transcribed my rough notes from Ordinary Men in the form of comments and quotes, looking at the subject from the viewpoint of pulling together the story for Lock Out Tag Out.

This week I’ve been getting a start on outlining and also considering issues that I have with Dystopias in general, what my criticisms of the genre are – at least so far as the stories I’m familiar with – and how I think Lock Out Tag Out will be different.

What’s Wrong With Dystopias?

Don’t get me wrong, I have no complaints about the writing style or the craft of any of the Dystopias I’ve come across. I’ll deal with just two to highlight my central issues, and from the outset I reiterate that I found them both engaging stories that were well written. The two I’ve chosen are targeted at two starkly different audiences and written in starkly different styles, but they both suffer from the first of my complaints. The second complaint is easier to unpack from The Hunger Games, so I’ll start there.

Hope in Fictional Dystopia.

There’s my complaint. There shouldn’t be any.

There may some people out there will argue that Katniss wasn’t out to fix anything or save the world, she was just dealing with what was in front of her at the time, and in the end the world wasn’t really made any better, so my accusation that there was any hope is baseless.

Of course, I’d disagree with that.

In the first novel, there was hope: hope that Katniss would make it out alive and, in the end, hope that she and Peeta could force the hand of the authorities and both come out alive.

In the second, there was hope that she could sell their romance and later on, hope within the arena since it was clear that something was going on – why else would Peeta’s life be saved in a fight to the death?

I’ll leave the third book alone, I think my point is made.

No Hope in a Dystopian Reality.

How I personally see a Dystopia is within the walls of the Warsaw ghetto, which is why that was my first stop on the journey to feel out miserable human conditions.

Within the ghetto, there were a few distinct classes of people. The authorities, being the Judenrat and the Jewish Police existed alongside the affluent and the gangsters – these were the elite within the walls. Below them were the ordinary people eking out their existence with what meager dwindling resources they had. Below these ordinary folk were effectively the dregs of that society: the indigent who had expended their resources and could now only starve slowly to death, and the new refugees who either arrived with nothing and joined the indigent, or arrived with what they could carry, which meant a holding off the inevitable for a little while.

Whoever you were, starving indigent, dwindling resource dependent, a worker for a German firm that gave you an ‘exemption,’ or a power broker within the walls, the obvious reality, hidden behind Nazi lies and deceptions that were both hollow and transparent, was almost everybody was bound for death. Those that survived beyond the ghetto liquidation were a rarity and most of those went on to die elsewhere soon after for the simple sin of being Jewish.

There was never any hope of changing the rules of the game, let alone winning.

A tale of ordinary folk swept up into a Dystopian nightmare isn’t one with a way out. Even when the Jewish Fighting Organization started up, the majority of the population opposed the idea of resistance because it always made things worse.

Tiny Worlds.

The worlds shown in Dystopias are too small.

In The Hunger Games, we’re presented with an America in the guise of Panem which is made up of a small number of Districts with, for the authorities at least, quick, easy and direct communications via that fancy monorail.

In my other example, 1984, we have a world of three major superpowers constantly at war. Only three major superpowers on this huge planet.

It’s all too small.

I get it, to make the full philosophical point, the world needs to undergo a certain reductionist simplification, otherwise it won’t fit neatly into a book, at least not one people are going to want to read.

Full Scale.

The world I’m working in is a multi-faceted world that is significantly more complicated. It’s as if I’m deliberately designing it to completely dwarf the individuals in the story.

Partly because I am, but also because that’s how the world is.

Spoiler alert. I’m not going to write a story where the action of a single individual could save the world. Destroy it perhaps, but not save it. This is because this seems to be the world I live in.

The three stories I’m planning on publishing in what might have been a series through the imagination of another author. Each takes place in the same world but separated either by geography or by time, and so are vastly different, even taking the main characters’ out of the equation. They each have something different to say about the world as I apprehend it, but it’s the same world.

Up Next…

I have one invitation through CritiqueMatch accepted, and one other person possibly interested in Beta Reading. I won’t be moving forward until I can be confident of having at least four Beta Readers, so I’m going to be continuing with ground work for Lock Out Tag Out.

This upcoming week I’m also going to be conducting an experiment to see where all my time goes. Each day for at least the next week, I’ll be making a note of what I’m doing and when I start it, so at the end of the data collection, I’ll either have a better idea of where I can find time, or a better idea of where all my time actually goes. As you might have guessed, my ability to manage my time and workload has not gotten any better.

I also plan on sending out some more CritiqueMatch invitations and keeping an eye out all those hours that I hope to wring and force out of my upcoming weeks, and see if I can Beta Read for someone else. If nothing else, I’ll get an idea of how others operate the process and a better impression of the standard of my own writing.

So, if you’re looking for a Beta Reader, you can get in touch or comment below.

Have a happy and safe week, everyone!

Categories: Critiquematch, Dystopia

Tags: 1984, Dystopia, Hunger Games