I gots problems. You gots problems. We all gots problems.
They’re usually terrifying mundane. Not enough money. Not enough love. Not enough time.
Sometimes, don’t you just want a bigger problem? Not more, just more… epic?
I know I do. I know that I want a problem that means something. They (the faceless, nameless ‘they’ responsible for so-called conventional wisdom) always say, more money just means a different kind of problem.
I could come to appreciate different kinds of problems.
Sometimes, it feels good to write just to explore a life where the problems are bigger, more important. The universe is at stake! The lives of every first born child are on the line if the magic whutsit does not return to its rightful owner! You know the drill.
But even those can seem terribly dull after a while. It’s hard to relate to those kinds of problems. Hard to wrap your own heart around them and really feel them, you dig?
So we (as writer, as readers) return to the problems to which we can relate: not enough money, not enough love, not enough time. We circle back again and again.
The interpersonal, the personal, the extrapersonal. The cycle of problems we seek, we desire.
All good fiction educates. Stories, are, at their core a lesson in survival. Ug went left instead of right and the sabertooth ate him.
So the problem is crucial. The problem makes us forget our own for a while. Or understand our own better. Or teaches us a response to a problem we may yet have.
I gots problems. Real and imagined. I bet you do too.