What's My Motivation?
Yesterday, a segment of the blogging community decided to blog as though writing under zombie attack. It’s an interesting exercise. I didn’t participate, largely because I didn’t find out about it until after I’d written my own, less inspired entry for the day. But it sounded like fun, and I considered doing a second entry that day, just a quickie. But I had another commitment last evening, and by the time it was over, I went right to sleep.
Nothing truly lost, though, right? Nobody is depending on my timely expression of the zombie experience, so I began this entry as a day-late report of the zombies outside our own window.
I never got past the first paragraph. Why not? I couldn’t envision a scenario that made any sense. No, not the question of what animates the zombies—the nonsensicality of brain-devouring walking dead is a given. I’m talking about the nonsensicality of stopping to chronicle it from the figurative front lines.
Picture this scene: Something has gone terribly wrong in the cemetery up on Mt. Hebron Road. The streets are littered with shambling corpses breaking into my neighbors’ houses and devouring their vital organs. Sometimes, an alert resident, with a proper education in B-movie natural law, takes out a few zombies with a bullet or blow to the head, but most people panic, the zombies are tireless, and every loser joins the other side, so Upper Montclair is slowly being overwhelmed. Somehow, I’ve become aware of this. Honestly, I’d more likely be one of the first victims. My first awareness of zombie attack would come with my front door breaking in, at which point, it would be too late even to grab a suitable weapon, and my participation in the zombie attack would consist of at expletive followed by munching noises. But, for the sake of argument, imagine this is one of the few nights I spend some time looking out the window. I haven’t watched a lot of B movies, but I know the basic rules of zombie engagement, and I realize what’s up. Zombie attacks can sweep the world, in which case we’re all doomed, or they can be local outbreaks that can be contained by swift military action, in which case the only hope is a level-headed escape to armed authorities, and the only way to find out which kind of outbreak we’ve got is to get moving. I need to grab Eileene and anyone else still among the living, collect as many weapons as we can capable of causing massive head trauma, locate the nearest National Guard base, commandeer sufficient large vehicles to carry us all and plow through zombies on the roads, and go.
Nowhere on that list of things to do is the statement, “Wait. All that’s important, but first I need to put up a blog entry about this.” No, not even the situation is clearly hopeless; that would mean nobody is going to be left to read the damn thing. I’d rather spend my last few minutes on earth trying to phone loved ones, then polishing off the ice cream in the freezer. If I’ve somehow become aware that this is a purely local outbreak, but decide that I’m doomed anyway, I might experience a certain sense of civic duty, and I’d spend my last minutes trying to work out how to die in such a way that my head is already staved in, so I can’t become a zombie threat to anyone else. Capturing the experience in text would be a rather arduous and entirely pointless way to go.
Knowing this makes writing as though I were in a zombie attack impossible. “What’s my motivation?” is so clichéd that it’s the punchline to innumerable actors’ jokes, but it got clichéd because it’s important. Believable characters must have believable motives. The rule applies to good fiction, too. (And, incidentally, to good role-playing, which is how I came by it.) After three abortive attempts this afternoon, I still don’t know what my imaginary report on the zombie attack would have to say. But do I know that, whatever it is, it would sound stupid, because I would never, ever say it in an actual zombie attack.