Escapism is a hot genre right now given, well, everything… What do we mean, I wonder, when we say “escapism?” Do we mean a neat romance? A quiet story set inside a cozy magical tearoom or bookshop? A dungeon crawling adventure where the monsters aren’t too terrifying and there’s never a doubt our hero will reach the treasure at the end? Sure, of course.
But I would argue all story is fundamentally escapism. Even the stories unspooling inside our heads as we go about our day-to-day lives.
On some level, any constructed narrative has to make sense.
Real life? Not so much.
Experienced storytellers know how much goes into creating a cohesive, powerful narrative. A large part of crafting a story is knowing what to take out, about identifying the why behind every element you leave in.
That character? That setting? That scene? That simile? All there to serve a purpose, ideally multiple purposes. Everything on the page should build, we are told as writers, toward your (ideally) surprising yet inevitable climax. The whole story exists as a crucible for your poor protagonist, forcing them to grow and change.
Even a many-layered narrative does not approach the complexity and randomness of real life. And the thing is, in order to keep pushing through that complexity, we have to keep telling ourselves stories: “This is happening because of XYZ,” or “I must do A so that someday I can have B,” etc etc. We have to believe in reason. We have to believe in silver linings, even if they are of our own making. We have to ascribe meaning and value to an indifferent universe.
And when we open a book, cue up a movie, sit down in a theater, we are comforted that for the next hours what we will read or see or hear will happen for a reason. We will get to escape into a different reality. Perhaps in that reality the good guys always win, or the oblivious love interest will always realize who’s standing right in front of them. Maybe it’s a reality where the worst of the worst does happen—but it’s building to something, there’s a reason for that horrible loss, that devastation.
“Make it make sense,” as they say. Isn’t that why we want to escape into a good story?
Recent reads: The House Saphir by Marissa Meyer; The Trouble with Heroes by Kate Messner; The Last Cuentista by Donna Barba Higuera
Listening to: Today it’s been the Avatar: TLA and Skyrim soundtracks
Watching: Lots of Game Changer on Dropout.tv; Frieren
Elizabeth Gootzeit 
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