Never Say You Can't Survive: How to Get Through Hard Times by Making Up Stories

by Charlie Jane Anders

anyone who imagines a different reality is helping everyone else to see our power to act, and to make changes. Imagination is always a form of resistance to domination and oppression, and we’ve all been saved by other people’s stories one time or another. There’s a reason why politicians and organizers try to tell stories, to put a human face on their policies, and worry about “controlling the narrative”—it’s because our world is built out of stories.

There’s a reason so much of the most powerful writing from survivors of horrifying events contains surreal or unreal elements. People who have been through unthinkable ordeals often instinctively take refuge in weird, reality-warping scenarios, and you can totally make this work for you. Normality is bullshit, and surrealist weirdness is a direct assault on the bullshit fortress.

Community is going to save us in real life—and in fiction, stories about communities joining together are going to be a lifeline.

You have the power to shape worlds, and the monsters are scared of you.

But getting immersed in my own writing project is the best way I’ve found to get out of my own reality.

The sooner I can see a character going through changes, the better—because often, your characters are only as compelling as the changes they go through.

Here’s a quick writing exercise: Write down just one paragraph about something intense that happened to you in the past. Pretend you’re telling a friend about a situation that tested you, and upset you, and maybe also brought out some valor in you. And then think about the fact that you’re no longer the person who went through that mess—you’re almost writing about a different person. And by retelling that story, you’re both reliving and recontextualizing those events. And maybe try to fictionalize some of the details and see how it becomes more and more about a different person.

And speaking of change and origin stories, there’s something incredibly compelling about a character who has major regrets. And when we watch someone do something unforgivable, we’re primed to root for them as they search desperately for an impossible forgiveness. I also live for a character who has unfinished business, something from their past that nags at them.

People who are in denial, or selectively oblivious. People who have been kept in the dark about some basic facts of their own lives. Especially when we can glimpse things out of the corner of our eyes that these characters fail to notice, it can create a kind of suspense—like in a horror movie, when you want to shout look behind you!—and fill you with a desperate urge to see this person wake up to reality.

My own personal inner reader is kind of a cranky obnoxious weirdo who asks too many inappropriate questions, but it’s nice to have someone to talk to while I write.

Whatever you feel able to write. Whatever will make you feel like you can keep living and fighting. Write the thing that you’re ready and excited to write—not the thing that you feel the moment calls for, or the story that you think will fix every broken thing in the world. Your job is to survive, and maybe to help others to survive. That’s it. That’s more than plenty.

But making up your own stories about the world is a form of self-care and self-care is an important part of resistance. Plus we’re going to need new writing, all kinds of new writing, and you never know which stories will end up being treasured, in ways that you could never predict.

I had to learn to stop thinking of an unfinished story as an admission of defeat. To give myself permission to move on.

And yet, when you recognize that ideas are endless and bountiful, you won’t just feel more relaxed about trying them out—you might also have an easier time coming up with new ones. Instead of being precious about any one idea, you can just keep brainstorming until you have a bunch that you like.

The only difference between love affairs and story writing? You probably can’t put a potential romance on ice for a year or twelve and be certain that your date will still be excited to see you whenever you’re ready to come back.

Just to be clear: when I talk about a “good” scene, I don’t mean a well-written one, or a polished one, or even one that you’re sure belongs in this story. In this context, “good” means “interesting.” A good scene leaves you wondering what’s going to happen next, or more absorbed in the characters and their issues. A good scene should probably feel as if things are cooking, and like the story

to them? If I know in advance that something needs to happen in a scene, then I try my best to make that action a surprise—or at least introduce some minor wrinkles.

1. Every writer is also an actor.

In other words, you almost have to hypnotize yourself into thinking that the events you’re writing about are real, and they actually took place.

We’re all at the mercy of Dornbusch’s law: A crisis always takes much longer to arrive than you think it will, and then it always happens much faster than you expected.

Oftentimes, character growth comes down to one of the following: A character couldn’t do a thing before, and now they can. Or they were not willing to do a thing before, but now they’re willing. They’ve been wrestling with a choice, or a difficult relationship, and now they have clarity. Also on the relationship tip, two characters work out (some of) their issues with each other. An identity crisis, or a crisis of faith or ideology, has reached some resolution.

when you’re writing during a time when history is getting all histrionic (which is what this book is about, after all), then you might need to take it a little easier on yourself.

But if you find it too upsetting to write atrocities, then … don’t.

And paradoxically, it’s often a bigger gut punch when people bring disaster on themselves instead of just getting sideswiped by some external force.

But this isn’t just about me narrowly avoiding a shitty trope. Bianca became more interesting to me, and her arc was clearer, when she was allowed to make mistakes without being pushed into them by outside forces.

We started to treat ugliness as a key signifier of quality, rather than just one valid creative choice among many.

7 OTHER THINGS ABOUT ENDINGS THAT I’VE LEARNED THE HARD WAY A good ending doesn’t have to be a surprise, or a twist. The most gut-punchy finales are often the ones that you can kind of see coming, which only lends them more power when they arrive. If you do use a twist ending, the reader should still feel as if they should have seen it coming, because the clues were there all along. You don’t have to answer every last question, as long as the characters find some resolution. We don’t care about the solution to every tiny mystery nearly as much as we do the emotional stakes that the characters have been chasing—and in real life, there are always a few things you’ll never fully understand. Likewise, you don’t have to tie off every conflict with a bow, especially if the reader can easily see how things will turn out. Sometimes leaving a little imaginative work for the reader to do can make them feel more invested, not less, in the story. A denouement gives you a chance to wrap up more of the emotional questions in the story, after the main conflict has been put to bed. You can also drop some hints about how the characters will go on after the last page—and the denouement can pack more surprises, if the big plot resolution was more or less what people had expected. An ending “pays off” if it addresses the things that you’ve told us, over the course of the story, that we should care about. If a character spent a hundred pages obsessing about learning the truth of her mother’s d...

So these days, I aim for the most intense, memorable, thought-provoking, ambitious ending I can cook up.

But you absolutely can arrive at an ending that tells the story you set out to tell, and then go back and rework everything that leads up to it so that it all holds together.

the thing they have in common is that they feel right for the characters we’ve spent so much time with, and something happens that feels both stark and irrevocable. Someone dies, or something changes forever.

Unexpected but inevitable: that’s the balance that most endings need to strike.

Neil Gaiman often tells the story of a giant clusterfuck that infuriated Terry Pratchett when he and Terry were touring to promote their novel Good Omens. When everything was finally resolved, Gaiman tried to suggest to Pratchett that he could stop being angry now, and Pratchett responded, “Do not underestimate this anger. This anger was the engine that powered Good Omens.” Because humor comes from anger, and so does satire and an obnoxiously surreal sense of weirdness. Humor is a defense mechanism that allows us to lose our shit without losing our shit, and we’ve all been in situations where we can choose either to laugh or to scream.

Anger easily leads to remorse, too. And introspection and self-examination, as anyone who’s ever gone off half-cocked and left a trail of destruction will testify. Master Yoda was right about one thing: anger has a direct link to fear, and every rage-out has a kernel of fear at its center.

For a lot of us, especially people who aren’t cishet white men, anger is a huge taboo. We’ve been taught over and over that we should swallow our outrage. Marginalized people, in particular, are often told to censor our anger, or to act “reasonable” in the face of endless fuckery. When in fact the reverse is true: it’s on privileged people to be empathetic, to listen, and to pay attention to people who are coping with structural oppression.

It’s the intimacy of being right there in the middle of a bad situation.

There’s a word for anger turned to constructive ends, and that word is “justice.”

Channeling your anger can also be a way to cope with trauma, that doesn’t have to involve re-traumatizing yourself. During

I don’t write characters. I write relationships.

I try to pick the smallest possible number of relationships to weave a story around, and then I keep nurturing them until they take on a life of their own. Relationships are like any other element: the more of them you have in a story, the harder it is to give each one the space it deserves.

Also, the best relationship to focus on is usually the one that brings out something unexpected in one or both characters. If you find yourself writing a moment where you see a side to a character you’ve never seen before, or you say to yourself, “Wow, I didn’t know they felt that way,” then that’s a good sign that these two fictional creations need to spend a lot more time together.

Conflict and affection: the magnetic forces that push characters apart and then drag them together again.

You can write about people who want things.

When the world turns into an actual trash fondue, I find myself getting scared to wish for anything. As if I could be tempting fate if I harbored any ambitions. Or maybe it just feels selfish to want more, when so many people are suffering. Plus, people from marginalized groups have been told over and over that our desires are not valid and our dreams are unreasonable—that’s part of the stigma of marginalization.

I’ve been working on another fantasy novel for grown-ups lately, and I’m excited to explore the notion that doing magic requires you to focus your intent. You only have power if you can figure out what you want, and can express your wishes clearly. This, in turn, requires people to admit what they actually want, and to believe that they deserve to have it.

As with most other aspects of writing, I have a tendency to get this wrong, at least at first. I’ll assign goals to my characters that don’t actually hold up over the course of a story. I’m brilliant at trying to force my protagonists to want what I think they should want, rather than what they actually do want. Often, my characters are more selfish than I think they ought to be, and I have to stop being so judgmental.

Your characters shouldn’t just have hopes and wishes—they should also have strong feelings about their situation. So here are four questions I keep asking about my characters: How do they feel about their situation? What do they do about that feeling? What result does their action have? How do they feel about this new situation? I try to play as many rounds of this game as I can, with a character, to get in an action-oriented mindset. When I have a story that feels dead on the page, I’ve found this diagnostic surprisingly effective—because often the problem is that I haven’t nailed down how a character really feels about their situation, and what that feeling might spur them to do. Your characters’ attempts to change their circumstances might fail, or backfire—and it’s often more interesting if that’s the case—but we still need to understand their viewpoint, and witness the actions it spurs them to.

Gut checking your big emotional moments can be an essential part of getting lost in your own story. Which is important, if you’re writing stories as a way of holding yourself together in the eye of a landfill tornado.

Even when I’ve outlined meticulously before I started writing, I might not know for sure what the most heart-exploding moments are on the first go-round. Nor do I know the exact order things need to happen in, because little things always shift around. All too often, that little scene that I thought was just filler turns out to be the last time that two characters get a chance to talk to each other before something huge and terrible (or awesome) happens. Even more frequently, I realize there’s a scene missing, and two people need to talk before they’re thrown into the deep end.

Another way of looking at it: these emotional beats are the heart of the story, and everything else is the vascular system that makes them work.

The bigger the emotion you’re trying to evoke, the more attention you need to pay to the smallest things. This