Skip to main content

Planting Ideas...

So the characters in my book get up to some pretty harmful shit, self harm and vandalism and worse.  The other night, I had a chilling thought: what if I give someone ideas? 

What if there's a kid out there that just needs the seed, the impulse, the implicit permission and then takes the ideas from the page and applies them to the real world?

There's evidence for this idea already.  About ten years ago I was invited to a fight club.  A real one.  Literally a group of dudes that met up in a basement, put on some thrash metal and just straight up fought each other.  I didn't go, don't honestly know if the guy that invited me was serious. Truthfully the guy could have been just winding me up, or trying to lure me into something unspeakable in his basement.  He seemed sincere, though, like it wasn't something crazy he and his friends were getting up to, like it was simply a good way to pass a Saturday evening.  When he wrote Fight Club, Chuck Palahniuk touched on an idea that had lain dormant in the hearts of a generation of young men, and they acted on that idea, they took his fiction and made it real. 

What a result.  I can't say for sure because I have never had the chance to ask, but I sincerely doubt that that was the plan, that it was Palahniuk's intention to spark this action, this blurring of the lines between reality and fiction.  Maybe it doesn't matter; there were fight clubs all over the place whether he wanted it or not.   

As a writer, you want to move people, to convey your ideas in a way that speaks to people, that impacts them somehow.  As a human being, I'd be horrified if some kid took the ideas in my book as a good way to pass a Saturday evening. 

Maybe Mr. Palahniuk is responsible for a few knocked out teeth, a few stitches and black eyes.  Maybe someday when my book is in print, some kid will read it and think its a great idea to destroy beautiful things, to intentionally hurt himself.

And maybe that will be my fault.    

Comments

  1. UnknownSeptember 19, 2014 at 11:34 PM

    If someone takes fantasy and makes it reality, I believe somethng is already wrong in a broken mind. I wonder if Stephen King ever wondered or worried about it. Doubt it.

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

We Would Be a Song

I seem to define my life with soundtracks, playlists that encompass epochs or periods of change or development.  My earliest music was my mother's: Van Halen and Judas Priest, Def Leppard and AC/DC.  I remember a friend of hers explaining to second grade Ralph that the big balls that Angus was singing about were parties, but even then I didn't buy it.  My teen years were heavy on grunge, Nirvana and Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, and that was the first time that music ever felt like it was mine , that I discovered by myself or through the radio, or like minded friends, that was the first time that I took it and owned it and loved it, and even now I'll hear Black Hole Sun or Rooster or Smells Like Teen Spirit on the radio and back I go. In the fifth grade, I moved to Kelso, Washington. I want to say that it was hard, but what I remember mostly from childhood is just this sense of taking every day as it arrived.  What else do we have except our own experiences to measure th
4 comments
Read more

The Terrible Darkness

Out there in the darkness, something is circling us. something cold, something terrible.  It circles us, and sometimes, it takes one of us. Punks tend to have a short lifespan. We die early, through overdose or violence, through neglect or disease.  And we die of suicide. It happens. Way too often, it happens. It is patient, this terrible thing, it waits.  We huddle together around the light we created for one another. The thing hates the light, but there is just too much darkness, and the terrible thing whispers, and sometimes, one of us, we listen. We come to punk in self defense; in many ways it is a reaction, a response to a hostile and uncaring world.  Hardly anybody comes to punk as an adult. You don't come to punk because you are well adjusted . You come to punk because you're fucked up. You're fucked up and angry and young, and then you hear a song, and the sound sounds like you feel, and the words speak like you feel, and you realize that someone out t
2 comments
Read more

Fighting for Clarity

There's this to be said about fighting: while you're doing it, you don't have room in your head for anything else, not your busted ass car or your worries about your family, not the leak under your bathroom sink, or how you're going to pay your bills.  There's only breathe one two, step out of range, shift off the center line, move breathe one three two slip the jab level change three to the body check the low kick counter one two...  it is a better escape than most, and I've tried most of them, believe me. I don't know what the fuck I'm doing here. I get humbled and beat up at every session, I don't understand why I even go. I'm feeling defeated; everything is so fucking hard for me, and I don't know why I'm doing it. I should just quit, right? Fuck you.  I'll show you motherfuckers what I am capable of. I'll show you-  And then I go and I try and my knees give and I get pummeled and twisted and what the fuck man how humble do I
5 comments
Read more