Writing is pointless: N M Browne

 Sometimes writing fiction feels pointless. Sometimes what is going on in real life eclipses fiction, so that making things up can feel like the most cowardly kind of escapism, a failure to engage with reality. 

In Covid lockdown, writing poetry about the pandemic made sense because, Downing St apart, we were all in it together. 

Not all of us suffered, but we all feared suffering and for a time, when it seemed that the virus was as likely to affect all of us equally, that seemed to legitimise writing about it. It was everyone's story even for those of us not on the front line or in hospital. I felt entitled, obliged even to write about it. 

   The war in Ukraine feels different. I don't know where the line lies between imaginative empathy and exploitation.  This is not my suffering and dipping my metaphorical pen in someone else's blood feels inappropriate. Let those who are living it, write it, record it, rework it into art or poetry or propaganda as they see fit. Who else has the right? And yet when the horrors have invaded our homes through our screens and twitter feeds, what else is a subject for our stories? In the face of this story all others shrink and pale.

 What is striking, however, is the way the devastating events of the last few weeks have proved, should proof be needed, the life and death power of story. The Ukraine war exemplifies the urgent need to create  narrative,  to give shape to the chaos, to make madness make sense and to make the world care. Putin is busily selling the notion of an invasion as a liberation, casting the lead actors from an old familiar script, good guys v Nazis. The Ukrainian president retells his nation's story with reminders of other nations' crises, his requests for help couched in language that reminds us of our own past: the attack of 9/11, Churchill's promise to fight our enemies on the beaches. And it is Zelensky's own story of the comic turned war leader, the hero turning down lifts for weapons that is already taking on a mythic quality: Ukraine, the bully's victim re enacting David v Goliath for the modern day. A story told in film clips and vlogs, in pithy phrases and passionate advocacy that has changed the way the world sees Ukraine. 

It is not our story but the images and messages that have made it through to us have melded Ukraine's story with our own past, echoed our present, and frightened us with the prospect of a future like theirs so that this struggle has become part of our own story as other recent and ongoing terrible conflicts have not. 

Sometimes writing feels pointless. I struggle to reconnect with my WIP and yet I cannot but acknowledge that nothing is more important: story telling, literally, shapes our world.