How to stand against a world that hates you
... and why knowing that also makes you a good storyteller
The opening line of The Grandmaster of Demonic Cultivation (aka The Untamed on Netflix) is “Rejoice! Wei Wuxian is dead!” I could write a dozen posts on what makes Mo Xiang Tong Xiu (MXTX) such an incredible and subversive storyteller, but in this first line she follows the textbook rule: have a first line that hooks.
Before you ask yourself, “Who is Wei Wuxian? Why is it so great that he’s dead?” she follows up with the second punch . The news of Wei Wuxian’s death has spread far and wide, and faster than the flames of war.
War? Gossip? I’m in.
I read fantasy. A lot of fantasy. And I read quickly, which you kind of have to if you expect to make it through the sheer volume that fantasy occupies in a bookshelf. Almost all fantasy novels share a common trope—the true villain isn’t a person. It’s the world itself. A society that hates the very existence of the protagonist. Which tells you the second most compelling thing about storytelling: we all want to side with the underdog. How much more disadvantaged can you get than when the entire world wants you dead?
We immediately want to know: How do you survive a world like that? How do you change it for the better? Does the protagonist settle for being tolerated, or can they find acceptance, belonging and love?
Because we all have our own “stand against the world” moments. When we’ve screwed up and pissed off those we love, or when we make a stand and fight for something that makes the powers that be (at work, or on social media) hiss and spit. And every author has the pile of rejections that scream, “You’re not interesting or important. You’re not one of us.”
How, in the face of that, do we keep going? Every author wants to share their thoughts. MXTX’s answer (in several hundred thousand words or 50 hours of television) is: A clean conscience. And one true friend.
Last week, a friend wrote back to me after reading one of my as-yet-unpublished novels, “Now I'm trying to remember if your other book* made me cry. This one surely did.” It was just one line, and it made all the difference, arriving on the same day as yet another publisher’s rejection and other disappointments. It made me realize I’d told the story I meant to tell, and made absolutely no compromises. I had a clean conscience.
*My other book in case you haven’t read it.
My friend was willing to give this next story a chance. The world isn’t yet ready to. That’s okay. I have what I need to keep going. After all, I had this view today when I turned my head—it will become a fragment of the modern dystopian fantasy world I’m currently writing.
Thank you for reading!