🤔 Inneresting #167 - Why do bad things happen?
Making meaning out of suffering.
Just like non-fictional people, characters grapple with the reasons why bad things happen to them. What they understand, or how they process their pain, leads to how they act in return.
For example, Lex Luthor sees Superman’s existence as the source of all his problems. It’s that narcissistic view that if Superman stands in his way, it means Superman stands in the way of human potential. YouTube channel ArticulateT breaks down one essential scene between Luthor and Superman to examine how Luthor’s sense of grievance was the largest impediment preventing him from becoming humanity’s savior (if that was what he even wanted).
Luthor probably could’ve benefited from understanding Hanlon’s Razor. Farnham Street offers a primer on this thought model that helps people to question if you’re actually in a situation where someone is out to get you, or if the problems you’re experiencing can better be explained by institutional incompetence or neglect. This also ties into a conversation on the podcast Trust Me about why some people are prone to believe in conspiracy theories to provide the security of an explanation, even if it’s impossible or demonstrably false:
Christopher Lieberman looks at Thank You For Smoking through the lens of its morally flexible characters, and the concept that bad things are allowed to happen because even the people who want to do good are hamstrung by ego and self-interest. It’s a film showing a system that’s not built around what is right, but what is convincing, and the lack of accountability to the truth leads to pain, suffering, and death. Covering similar ground, Ann Friedman talks with the real Erin Brockovich about the broken regulatory system and conflicting economic interests that endanger America’s drinking water (with some time spent discussing her depiction in the film that bears her name).
This kind of indifference of larger systems is an underlying theme of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, such as in this scene when an alien fleet announces that if the citizens of Earth didn’t want their planet blown up as part of a construction project, they should have filed an official objection:
Looking for the reason why bad things happen to them suggests a character with a worldview that suffering shouldn’t be the norm, and that bad things happening is a sign of a world out of balance. Cristina Moon draws on the Four Noble Truths of the Buddha to suggest inverting that model:
In a Judeo-Christian worldview, suffering is seen in more moral terms. Essentially, suffering is what happens when we do bad things and/or lack faith in God. But in Buddhism, suffering is agnostic. And it's so common that, if human existence were an app, we'd say that suffering is a feature, not a bug. The presence of suffering really is not a sign that you're malfunctioning or doing anything wrong. It's actually a hallmark of our human experience.
Whether a character can point to a specific reason why bad things happened to them—direct evil, they’re collateral damage in someone else’s conflict, an indifferent force just happened to mark them—it’s how a character understands their suffering that pushes them to act.
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The WGA and SAG-AFTRA are still waiting for the AMPTP to come back to the table and commit to a fair contract.
If you are interested and able, join a picket line! The Writers Guild also has a list of other ways to help.
⏱️ Time to Write Sprint!
Each week we post a comment thread for writers to meet up, cheer each other on, and put some words on the page with a Write Sprint.
What’s a Write Sprint?
John wrote up an explanation, but here’s the short version: Set a timer for 60 minutes, close down all distractions, and do nothing but write until that timer goes off.
A sprint like that is a great opportunity to try new things, even if you delete them later! Give yourself the space to see what happens on the page right now instead of worrying about what it needs to look like when it’s finally polished.
Shout out to last week’s Sprinters Anish, Elyse Moretti Forbes, Mark Leiren-Young, and Aimee Link!
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Previously on Inneresting…
In case you missed it, in last issue’s most clicked link John Siracusa introduces “The Plumber Problem,” where your expertise on a subject forces you to notice an error in what you’re watching, and it breaks the movie or TV show for you.
What else is inneresting?
Rebecca Jennings suggests that social media hype ruins vacations, and that people need to stop turning travel into completing someone else’s “best of” checklist.
Ben Everard used a Raspberry Pi and some 3D printing to make an e-ink typewriter that saves his writing to the cloud.
And that’s what’s inneresting this week!
Inneresting is edited by Chris Csont, with contributions from readers like you and the entire Quote-Unquote team.
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