Thirty-Nine Pages

I’ve been trying to write a dystopian novel.

I say “trying” because right now I have thirty-eight pages, three characters who are basically the same person with different names, and a government agency whose job changes every time I open the document.

Yesterday I was working on it at Coffee & Teabag with Ryan. Or pretending to work on it, anyway. I’d been staring at the same paragraph for about fifteen minutes, so Ryan asked what the book was actually about.

I told him the government introduces a national identity system. At first it’s optional, but eventually you need it for taxes, banking, travel, jobs and most of the other things required to function as an adult.

Ryan nodded. “So it’s an app.”

“It’s not an app.”

“Is there an app?”

I thought about it. “Probably.”

“Then it’s an app.”

I told him that wasn’t the point.

The point was that over time, the system starts keeping track of more things. Your behavior affects what you can do. Maybe certain jobs become harder to get. Maybe you can’t travel somewhere. Nobody necessarily comes to arrest you. Life just gets more inconvenient if the system doesn’t like you.

Ryan took a drink of his coffee.

“Okay.”

I waited because I thought he was going to say something else.

He didn’t.

“That’s it?” he said.

I told him there were cameras too.

He looked up and pointed at the ceiling.

There was a camera directly above us.

Which wasn’t helpful.

Obviously, I know that having a security camera in a coffee shop doesn’t mean we live in a dictatorship. I’m not insane. I just mean it’s surprisingly hard to come up with dystopian ideas that don’t already exist in a much more boring form.

Phones know where we are. Companies know what we buy. Algorithms decide half the things we see online. People post pictures of their food, their children and sometimes basically their entire house for strangers to look at.

Nobody really cares most of the time.

Including me.

That’s the annoying part.

Every time I try to make the book more dramatic, it starts sounding stupid. If I put soldiers on every street, it feels like a bad movie. If the president cancels elections, then obviously everyone knows something has gone wrong. If there’s one giant evil organization controlling everything, I immediately picture a bald man sitting behind a desk in a building shaped like a triangle.

Ryan said I was probably overthinking it.

He says that about most things I do, so statistically he has to be right sometimes.

I tried explaining that I wanted there to be a moment in the story when people suddenly realize what has happened. They wake up one morning and think, oh. Right. We live in a dystopia now.

Ryan looked at me for a second.

“Why would there be a moment?”

I asked what he meant.

He shrugged. “Wouldn’t people just get used to stuff?”

I hate when Ryan accidentally says something useful because then he looks very pleased with himself for the next ten minutes.

But I think that might be the problem with my book.

I keep trying to invent some enormous turning point when maybe it would just be a lot of small things. A new rule that sounds reasonable. A database nobody thinks about. Something temporary that stays longer than expected. Something optional that eventually becomes annoying not to have.

Then one day somebody complains about it.

Somebody else tells them they’re being dramatic.

And everyone still has class at nine the next morning.

I wrote that down after Ryan left.

So now I have thirty-nine pages.

Progress.