Today, author Christopher Clancy visits The Storytelling Blog. Chris recently published We Take Care of Our Own, a look at a dystopian future, which focuses on the rise of privatized military endeavors. You can read more about the book and his research at Chris’s website, here.
Chris recently shared a few thoughts via email on what inspires dystopian fiction as well as his own writing process. We Take Care of Our Own is available on Amazon.com , Powell’s, and locally via IndieBound or Bookshop.org. Follow Chris, here.
Disclosure: I have a business relationship with Chris Clancy’s publisher, Montag Press, which will publish my Sean Joye Investigations novel in the future.
Kathy: Let’s talk about dystopian fiction. My first (and primary) thought is Mad Max movies. That’s undoubtedly a gross simplification. How would you describe the genre? What distinguishes this genre from other types of fiction, i.e., what is the audience’s expectation? Tell us about the challenges and rewards.
Chris: I don’t think the Mad Max movies are a bad reference point at all. Sure, it feels like a gross simplification when you’re watching all these leatherbound motorbike dudes chase each other across the desert, but the world of that movie—the reason for all those motorcycle chases—comes down to people turning savage in the face of diminishing resources and a loss of hope for the future. And that’s never far off. It’s important to remember that historians typically mark the end of the Enlightenment with Marie Antoinette getting her head lopped off by French peasants who had no bread.
Dystopian Injustice
One of the things I always think of when I hear the term “dystopian fiction” is a quote that goes something like, “If you want to write a dystopian story, think of an injustice being done to some group of people somewhere in the world. Then imagine that happening to everyone.” (I want to say Margaret Atwood said this but I’m not sure.) Dystopian fiction isn’t just fiction that imagines a miserable society. It’s fiction in which the misery of that society can be traced to the present. At its best, dystopian fiction is a warning: “Guys, we need to get on the right side of this particular issue, because if we don’t, it’s going to mean big trouble, and the trouble might look like this.”
Kathy: Tell us about We Take Care of Our Own. The story incorporates a number of modern social issues. Was there a more specific inspiration? Do you have hopes or goals for what the novel can accomplish in the world?
Chris: What’s funny about We Take Care Of Our Own was that I had no intention of writing a dystopian story. My initial idea was this: One guy talks another guy into murdering someone. That was it. Then I started to think, What sort of relationship would there have to be where one person could suggest murder and the other person would actually listen? Well, it could be a sibling relationship, or two lovers, or a parent-child relationship. Or it could be a psychologist-patient relationship. So, then I invited a psychologist friend of mine to lunch and asked him about that possibility. He kind of shrugged and said, “Well, it’s a stretch, and of course no psychologist would ever do that, but. . .” Good enough for me!
Dystopian Inspiration From Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder
Then I realized that a soldier, being able-bodied and trained to handle weapons, would make an ideal patient in such a scenario. But what soldier would have to see a psychologist? One with post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD), of course.
This is where the dystopia stuff started to come into play, because the more I researched war-related PTSD and the mental conditioning of soldiers, the more disgusted I became [regarding] the War on Terror. It seemed to me that the war was being handled too much by large private military contractors (Raytheon, Halliburton, DynCorp, Blackwater), and a big reason why the war is such a quagmire was because these companies want a quagmire.
War on Terror
That got me imagining a world where private military contractors had merged to take total control of how the War on Terror is managed, developing a propaganda arm to ensure the public would go along with each new declaration of war, each new entry into a “developing war market.” It was that kind of world that I thought might give rise to a government-sponsored program to radicalize veterans with PTSD into becoming mass shooters.
As for hopes and goals for We Take Care Of Our Own, yeah, I want the book to find some readers and I want those readers to like the story. Then I want those readers to think about whether the government’s turning to private contractors, who care less about the public good than they do about profit, is such a good idea when it comes to matters of life and death.
Kathy: What’s your next project?
Chris: I hope to write a few short stories based on childhood memories. Right now, I’m trying to finish one about the time I was fifteen and got a cavity filled by a dentist who, I am about 95 percent certain, was high on cocaine. Meanwhile I’m nearly halfway through the first draft of a novel about the ongoing privatization of space. That one is shaping up to be more hard science fiction than dystopian.
Kathy: What is your writing process? Does it differ for short stories versus novels? How did your academic study of writing impact your process?
Chris: The only writing rule I’ve ever managed to stick to is this: 400 words per day, every day, no exceptions. I also keep a writing journal around, and it’s there I try to work out any structural problems I’m having with this or that story. My writing process doesn’t really differ between novels and short stories. Maybe it should.
Getting my Master of Fine Art (MFA) in Creative Writing was great, and I would recommend it to anyone who can comfortably afford it, but it’s not necessary to writing well. The best way to learn anything is by doing, and writing is no different. The best thing my MFA did for me was it turned me on to authors I might otherwise have never read. It wasn’t until the last semester of my graduate studies that I had ever picked up a book by a Latin American author, but the writers I read for that particular class—Mario Vargas Llosa, Clarice Lispector, Julio Cortázar, and Manuel Puig, whose Kiss of the Spider Woman was a huge influence on We Take Care Of Our Own—opened another world to me, got me thinking about the novel as a means of questioning society’s most basic assumptions.
Kathy: What does storytelling mean to you?
Chris: What a question! I don’t know how to answer that, but I’ll tell you about a guy I used to work with who quite smugly told me he does not read fiction because fiction is “useless.” Only content that contains usable information, whether that’s the seven secrets of effective leadership or directions to the grocery store, is worth his time. I was too unnerved to think of a good comeback, but if I could relive that moment, I would like to tell him that his statement is as perverse as saying all music is useless, since the sounds music makes do not convey information about possible food sources or predators in the listener’s immediate area.
Let me try this: Storytelling is narrative that is not transactional, yet every society in human history either prizes or condemns its storytellers. Either way, there’s magic there, so to either bear witness to that magic (via reading) or try one’s hand at wielding that magic (via writing) is an excellent way to spend an afternoon.
If you enjoyed meeting Chris in this interview, you might enjoy my best reads of 2020. You can purchase We Take Care of Our Own locally via IndieBound or Bookshop.org, Powell’s, and Amazon.
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