A couple of days ago, Chuck Wendig posted a piece on his blog about being a writer and coping with all the terrible things going on around us. I posted a comment over there, but I want to repeat it here. (Especially since Chuck’s website appears to have eaten my comment. It’s not displaying.) It was this part of his piece that I was reacting to:

Fourth: Words Are A Door

Just the same: embrace the power of escapism.

We all need to escape, man. Every day I’m looking for a portal out of this donkey show and into something more fun, something so distant that I can’t hear the chaos through the walls. Nothing wrong with writing that escape, or seeking it. Use your own stories to provide an out for yourself and your readers; and read books, too, that give you that escape. No shame. Words can be self-care. They can be a doorway out, for a time. A portal to a Narnia where it’s not a circus orgy of sick chimps running around, on fire, throwing flaming shit at one another.

Nothing wrong with that escape. Absolutely. I am currently writing a young adult science fiction novel set 150 years in our future. The world my protagonist inhabits is not perfect by any means, but it is a much happier and safer world than this one. Visiting his world gives me peace.

The recently departed Ursula LeGuin wrote:

Fantasy is escapist, and that is its glory. If a soldier is imprisoned by the enemy, don’t we consider it his duty to escape? The moneylenders, the knownothings, the authoritarians have us all in prison; if we value the freedom of the mind and soul, if we’re partisans of liberty, then it’s our plain duty to escape, and to take as many people with us as we can.

And J.R.R. Tolkien wrote:

I have claimed that Escape is one of the main functions of fairy-stories, and since I do not disapprove of them, it is plain that I do not accept the tone of scorn or pity with which “Escape” is now so often used: a tone for which the uses of the word outside literary criticism give no warrant at all. In what the misusers are fond of calling Real Life, Escape is evidently as a rule very practical, and may even be heroic. In real life it is difficult to blame it, unless it fails; in criticism it would seem to be the worse the better it succeeds. Evidently we are faced by a misuse of words, and also by a confusion of thought. Why should a man be scorned if, finding himself in prison, he tries to get out and go home? Or if, when he cannot do so, he thinks and talks about other topics than jailers and prison-walls? The world outside has not become less real because the prisoner cannot see it. In using escape in this way the critics have chosen the wrong word, and, what is more, they are confusing, not always by sincere error, the Escape of the Prisoner with the Flight of the Deserter.

I wholeheartedly endorse escapism. It can be the only thing that keeps the prisoner sane, and who could object to that? Besides the jailer or the tormentor, of course. So read stories. Especially read science fiction and fantasy. Write them too, if you can.

I am currently reading They Both Die at the End, and find I am liking it quite a lot. I will post a review here when I finish it, but if you’re looking for something to start with, you could do worse. Don’t be put off by the grim title (even though it is accurate).