In an article in the Boston Globe, Dale Dauten tells about overhearing a conversation between a father and son about what might be the next generation of the Wii video game system (the one where you move a small controller around in the air to make things happen on screen). The son suggested that it might be gloves, with the movement of each finger creating a different response. The Dad replied, “Yeah, but what about somebody who’d lost a finger?”
What’s amusing in this instance is the far-fetched nature of the objection. Would missing-finger people put a dent into the sales of the glove? Would they organize a protest at being excluded on the basis of their other-digitedness? But it also illustrates one of our basic impulses: to jump immediately to what could go wrong.
What strikes me as interesting is that as writers, we are probably well-served by being able to imagine what could go wrong. At least in fiction, we’re in the business of making stuff go wrong for our characters. The more the better.
The problem may be turning off this side of our imagination when we go about the business of being writers. When we think about sending our work out to agents and publishers we’re equally quick to imagine what could go wrong, and sometimes that inhibits what we do.
Maybe it’s useful to remember which times it pays to be the aware of what could go wrong, and which times to focus on what could go right.
