The World Turned Upside Down

I had thoughts, I really did. A useful laundry list of wonderful tips for making your prose shine and your plots glitter.

But – maybe another time.

I can’t help noticing that it is not merely Good Friday, but Good Friday in the Age of Plague. A lot of people are feeling isolated or scared. The wheels of history are grinding and they don’t care too much who they overrun.

I’m not fearful for myself or my family. We’re comfortably isolated in the country. The weather is wonderful. We have a big garden and our village community is actually more active and friendly than it ever has been before. Likewise my brother and sister, my mother, their families, my in-laws – they’re all fine. They’re OK.

But one of the things that fiction achieves is to take us to the edge of strange inversions and new recognitions. Fiction takes you to a place where you realise something unexpected – or actively impossible – is also true. In Pride and Prejudice, we know for sure that Lizzie doesn’t love Darcy. She makes it clear. She turns down his proposal with force and asperity.

Lizzie does not love Darcy. FACT.

But – boom – fiction does its thing, it turns its wheels, and we realise she loves him with all her heart, and all her soul, and all her mind. The Lizzie/Darcy love is as complete and perfect as any we could imagine. FACT.

Fiction isn’t as crass as to say the first view of things was false. More like, it was incomplete. The old binary view of truth buckles a bit at the hands of good writing. Those inversions and completions are an essential part of fiction.

But reality is pulling the same trick right now. We’re a celebrity obsessed culture, right? Any teenage YouTube vlogger can sell some weirdly huge mountain of books just because they know about (I don’t know) eyebrow threading or vegan yogurt.

FACT.

But cometh the plague, cometh the inversion. It turns out we have no interest in these posing celebrities. (Billionaire David Geffen putting pics of his yacht on Instagram as he outlines his isolation strategy. The moron.)

We have an interest and respect for the people who work in healthcare, without acclaim and often enough without much cash either. We turn out in our city streets to clap and cheer and bang saucepans and say, these are our heroes. Not just today, but forever. We have loved you always and have only known to say it now.

FACT.

And we here at Jericho Writers are the same. We’ve had some emails from healthcare workers who have told us that they’d love to become JW members but can’t afford the fee.

In more normal times, we’d act like commercially responsible businesspeople. Ones with budgets and targets and marketing plans.

But you know what? Stuff that. Our budgets are have been completely shredded and our marketing plans are in the bin.

So here goes:

If you are a healthcare worker,
then tell us – and we’ll give you 75% off your JW membership.

We don’t care if you’re a trainee nurse, a top consultant, or a citizen volunteer. If you’re supporting the health service at this time of crisis, just tell us. All we need is a picture of some form of ID that shows you are what you say you are, and we’ll tell you how to get your 75% discount.

This isn’t a clever marketing strategy, so there are no strings attached. No ulterior purpose. Just – the world doesn’t really need more writing mentors at the moment, but it sure as hell needs more nurses. This is our version of standing outside our homes and clapping.

(I should probably also say that we won’t see your email before Tuesday at the earliest and we’ll have a huge backlog of emails to get through at that point. So if you do want to take us up on this offer, please bear with us. We’ll be with you as fast as we can.)

That’s it from me – or almost.

When I write these emails, I often discover something I hadn’t realised at the start. And that thing about fiction inverting an apparent reality to reveal a true one underneath – the Lizzie/Darcy love story, for example – I wonder if that is true of all great fiction? Or all fiction? I wonder if it’s true of mine.

Just now, I don’t know, but it’s a damn interesting thought.

Stay safe. Keep writing. Keep clapping.

And tell me about your fiction. Does it achieve that inversion? I think mine probably does – or aims for it anyway. But I want to hear from you. Tell me about how your fiction upends expectations and makes the impossible true. Or do you disagree completely ? Either way, let’s all have a Heated Debate.