Whenever I listen to a podcast about a cult leader, influencer, celebrity pundit, or similar, I take a beat & imagine what it would be like to be in their shoes, with everyone hanging on my every word, and I just... can't. Sure, I'll monologue on a BookTube if I'm solo, but just... *how* do these people keep on talking and talking in group settings when they could be cultivating space for collaborative chats and building a richer dialogue among all present instead?
(Am I the only one who thinks it's freaking weird to be around other people and just lecturing at them?!)
@MLClark Some people like the dopamine rush of validation so much it becomes a feedback loop. At least when they believe their own nonsense. Don't know what motivates the people who know they're lying to their audience, though. Very difficult to empathize with that kind of raw hunger for power over others.
The best depiction I've ever seen of the mentality was Tom Cruise in Magnolia. And he did a phenomenal job performing the breakdown that came after it - despite buying into a cult himself.
P.T. Anderson's The Master also offers an excellent portrait of that way of being. But still, there's something about hearing examples "in the wild", average people just going on and on with everyone hanging on to their every word, that feels more fictional than fiction at times. We're an odd bunch.
@MLClark I was rage writing about my parents' evangelical church while I was living with them, but it was all stranger than fiction, or too on the nose. Nothing compared to seeing a crowd tearing up at their pastor and his wife accepting the "gift" of a tithe money vacation while they wept and acted surprised... and then seeing the same exact performance a year later with the same crowd. I realized that the performance was the point because it reinforced the idea of gift giving over grifting.
@MLClark They also almost let a reticulated python loose among a group of small children because the animal rescue they associated with liked to poach inexperienced volunteers from the church.
My point being... how the heck do we write this stuff believably???
YES. That's it exactly!
Thanks for such a perfect example.
There is a grinding stupidity to so much of what goes on in the real world. Even when highlighting the inanity of it all in fiction, there's still this mitigating effect we pull off, of gentling or aggrandizing the sheer mediocrity of so much that humans actually get up to.
*That's* the schism catching me up when I listen to these real-world examples: the sheer competence gap between our stories and ourselves. 🙃
@MLClark Writing is always the act of contextualizing something, isn't it? So we can't escape our own EMPHASIS.
Like, I could have shared the irony of the reticulated python being part of a talk on creationism, during which the presenter made a show of forgetting his notes with all the stats that would surely disprove evolution, but gosh darn it he left them at home.
But that feels like a completely separate story to me. We make that call with even the tiniest word choices. 🤯
This is one reason I don't much care for biographies, unless I'm fully aware of and interested in the biographer - because what we're necessarily reading is *their* view of an historical figure. Everything is mediated. What was catching me when listening to those excerpts of a cult-y figure the other day was a confrontation with the unmediated. But here we are even now, mediating it. 😉
Hope your own storytelling's faring well this week! Just about to dive into another window myself.
@MLClark Oh yeah, biographies are weird for me, too. Don't even get me started on biopics!
Happy writing! 😊