Life, Death, and Fire Alarms

Ideas do not come only from beautiful places, or quiet walks, or poetic moments where the light falls nicely and everything behaves itself. Sometimes they come from life being inconveniently life-like.

They come from death. From humour. From the strange things people say when they are tired, frightened, grieving, or trying very hard not to be any of those things. They come from family stories, old memories, half-heard conversations, news headlines, hospital corridors, kitchen tables, and the sort of laughter that turns up at completely inappropriate moments and saves everyone from falling apart.

I have found that almost everything becomes material eventually.

That sounds slightly ruthless, but writers are magpies with notebooks. We collect shiny things, broken things, odd things, painful things, and things nobody else thought were worth keeping. Then one day, years later, something we barely noticed at the time becomes the hinge of a story.

Even my husband’s work in the fire industry has found its way into my imagination.

How could it not?

Fire is such a powerful thing to write with. It is danger, warmth, destruction, cleansing, comfort, warning, panic, and survival all at once. It can cook your dinner or take your house. It can gather people around it or scatter them into the night. It has rules, and if you ignore them, it becomes very rude indeed.

Through hearing about that world — the precautions, the risks, the systems designed to protect people, the human mistakes that make those systems necessary — I have found endless story sparks. Fire doors. Alarms. Smoke. Evacuation plans. Buildings that behave until they don’t. The terrible speed at which ordinary can become emergency.

Science fiction loves big disasters, of course. Exploding stars. Cracked planets. Ships in distress. Colonies under threat. All very dramatic. But the truth is, disaster often begins with something small. A failed sensor. A missed warning. A door left open. A person assuming someone else has checked.

There is a story in that.

Several, actually. Because what fascinates me is not only the danger itself, but how people respond to it. Who freezes? Who acts? Who lies? Who helps? Who saves the cat first and then remembers the oxygen system? Who makes the hard call when there is no clean answer?

That is where character steps forward.

 

Life has given me plenty to draw from. So has death. Not in a grand, gloomy, cloak-swirling sort of way, but in the ordinary way death enters human lives and rearranges the furniture. Grief changes the shape of people. Sometimes quietly. Sometimes with the subtlety of a dropped piano. And yet humour still turns up.

That still amazes me.

People laugh at funerals. They make dreadful jokes in frightening moments. They say ridiculous things when they are exhausted. They cling to humour when everything else has gone sideways. I think that is one of the most human things we do. We light a tiny candle in the dark and then, because we are impossible creatures, we make a joke about the candle.

That mixture matters to me as a writer.

I do not want stories that are only grim. Life is not only grim, even when it is dreadful. Nor do I want stories that skip lightly over pain as if a witty line can fix everything. It cannot. But humour can help us breathe while the hard thing is happening.

Some of my own stories have surprised me after I have written them.

That is one of the strangest parts of writing. You think you know what you are doing. You sit down with a proverb, an idea, perhaps a spaceship with a worrying noise in the left engine, and you begin. You think you are in charge.

Adorable.

Then the story grows teeth. Or wings. Or a conscience. It turns around halfway through and reveals what it was really about.

There are stories I have written, then read again and again, and still found myself crying. Not because I set out to write something sad, but because somewhere in the writing, a truth slipped through. A grief. A kindness. A small brave thing. A character saying goodbye when I did not quite expect them to.

Others have made me laugh every time.

Those are a different kind of gift. A line of dialogue. A stubborn character. A ridiculous situation that somehow becomes more ridiculous on rereading. There is a particular joy in discovering that something you wrote still catches you out. Like finding a biscuit you hid from yourself and then forgot about. Excellent planning by past-you.

And then there are the stories that open my eyes. Those are the unsettling ones.

Sometimes I write something and only later realise it is not as far from the real world as I thought. War. Global warming. Pandemics. Displacement. Fear. The way ordinary people are asked to carry the consequences of decisions made far above their heads. The way communities fracture under pressure, or come together, or do both at once because humans are gloriously inconsistent.

Science fiction gives us distance, but not escape. That is why I love it.

You can write about a colony beneath a dying sun and suddenly you are writing about climate change. You can write about a ship under quarantine and realise the shadow of pandemics has crept in. You can write about rival moons firing on each other and hear the echo of wars happening now. You can write about people arguing over water, land, safety, borders, memory, ancestry, survival — and there we are, right back on Earth, pretending it is all safely fictional.

It never is. Not entirely.

The stars are a mirror with better lighting.

That is what keeps me writing. The chance to take everything life throws into the pot — love, loss, fire, fear, laughter, old jobs, family memories, bad decisions, global disasters, cups of coffee, stubborn hope — and stir until a story begins to rise.

Writing, for me, is not about inventing from nothing.

It is about noticing.

Noticing what frightens me. What makes me angry. What makes me laugh. What breaks my heart. What people are doing to each other. What they are doing to the planet. What they still manage to do right, even when the odds are behaving like they were designed by a committee with a grudge.

The world is full of warnings. It is also full of ridiculous, tender, brave little lights.

Both belong in stories.

Life and death. Fear and humour. Fire and renewal. Disaster and the person who still stops to help. The alarm sounding, the smoke rising, the door closing, the hand reaching back.

That is where the stories come from too. Not just from imagination.

From living long enough to know that the universe is dangerous, beautiful, absurd, and very badly supervised.

 -         Rebecca

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