The Weight of Their Own Fictions
by S.G. Redling
It’s possible I am the curator of the least noir soundtrack
ever compiled. My favorite story songs include The Wreck of the Edmund
Fitzgerald, 500 Miles, and that Jim Croce classic, Roller Derby Queen. Not
exactly gritty gumshoe stuff.
But when it comes to songs that move me to create story, the
selection gets a little less corny. One of my favorites right now is Waitress
Song by First Aid Kit. It starts off with a classic escape fantasy –
I could move to a small town and become a waitress.
Say my name was Stacy and I was figuring things out.
They sing of the childish fantasy of running away to the
circus. They talk about sleepless nights in Chicago over a loud bar that are
still the result of a fiction.
Girls, they just want to have fun. And the rest of us
hardly know we are.
As a writer, what I love about this song is that she isn’t
telling a story, she’s singing about the stories we tell ourselves, the
narratives we dream about escaping to. The song returns over and over to the
hard lamentation.
It’s a dark, twisted road we are on, and we all have to
walk it alone.
But then ends on a soft, wistful hope of walking along the
ocean, being awed by its power and realizing how small our lives are. The song
closes with this revelation:
And we’ll never feel lost anymore.
The gorgeous vocals on this track cast this line in the same
tone as the stories of the waitress and the circus, bringing up the fear that
this philosophical realization is just another fantasy we hide behind.
For me, songs like this throw light into the corners of what
makes stories work. It’s more than selling a believable lie. Dark fiction that
satisfies readers requires characters who stare down, not only the Villain, but
also the weight of their own fictions.
S.G. Redling is a fifteen-year veteran of morning radio, an
avid traveler, and a so-so gardener. S.G. Redling currently lives in West
Virginia. Her last book, Baggage, can be purchased at Amazon.
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