NOTES ON A STORY
The Hopeful Apocalyptic Stories That Inspired Me To Write My Own
Or, what inspired Sing The End.
My short story, ‘Sing The End’, has been published in Cossmass Infinities Issue 9. It’s a story I’m incredibly proud of: I wrote it during the summer of 2020 as a lifeline, and at the time, it was my favorite story I had ever written. Two years and thirteen rejections later, it landed a home in Cossmass Infinities. But that’s the ending of ‘Sing the End’s story. The beginning of it starts in June 2020, with an untitled note and a history of inspiration:
I knew from the start that I wanted the story to be apocalyptic in nature. I also knew I didn’t want it to be too depressing. I was writing about guilt, but I was incredibly isolated mid-pandemic, and writing something bleak would have depressed me further.
The genre, theme, and emotional space I ended up writing from was somewhere in the middle of the following four pieces.
Key Inspirations in the Genre of Hopeful Apocalypses
Neptune’s Children by Bonnie Dobkin
This is a YA apocalypse novel about a virus that kills off only the adults, leaving the children to fend for themselves. There are a few other books with a similar premise, namely the Gone series by Micheal Grant, but this is the first one I read (and was traumatized by). It spawned an elementary school obsession with envisioning the places I inhabited as shelters for hoards of frightened children. In my mind, every apocalypse is full of petty middle schoolers, and I’m pretty sure it’s this book’s fault.
When I was designing the Deaths for Sing the End, I figured that one or two of the earlier ones must have targeted older people. Why else would the world crumble so quickly into chaos? I also used this device because I thought it would be interesting to have a character who has younger personality traits (angsty, full of it) grow up quickly and become an authority figure. It also makes more sense that they don’t have things like farms: they don’t have the knowledge or consistency or maturity to make it.
I Know The End by Phoebe Bridgers
This is a song, but it tells the story of an apocalypse washing over the world. It also fits thematically in with Sing The End in that it is a soft song for the most part, but there is a section with some incredibly emo and angsty yelling. Just, flat out screaming over a guitar and trumpet riff. It’s a song I know my protagonist would have loved at the beginning of the story and hated at the ending, but it’s a song I still love and has actually inspired several other pieces of mine, including a play and some poems.
A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers
I didn’t read this novella until November 2021, a year after I wrote Sing the End, and a month before the story sold. But when I read it, I realized that this was the energy I was trying to channel for the ending. It’s a utopian story, but the utopia isn’t saccharine. It feels like everyone has to work for their own happiness, and acknowledges that people can still be depressed even when everything is apparently perfect. But the story is overwhelmingly and utterly hopeful. That is the energy that I want to bring into my writing, from here and into the future, which is why I count this book as one of my inspirations.
Station Eleven by Emily St John Mandel
This is the most obvious and most direct inspiration. According to my Goodreads, I had read Station Eleven that summer, and it was (other than current events), my closest link to the end-times. But what I was most inspired by in Station Eleven was the sense of community and hope.
In Station Eleven, the post-apocalypse centers around a roving troupe of Shakespearian actors. The group in my story travels too, but they are more isolated than Mandel’s. And they eventually perform, but before they do that they have to find a sense of stability and hope. This is different than Station Eleven in that they find hope through the performance, rather than perform because they have found hope. But the theme was still a huge influence on me, subconsciously or not, and I don’t think I would have written the exact story I did if not for this influence.
I’m sharing the stories that inspired me to write in this genre because I think it’s a really important genre. Often, the world feels like it’s headed towards an apocalypse we cannot recover from—the End of Humanity, of Life on Earth, of Everything. Hopeful apocalyptic stories show shows that even if something comes that we think might be The End, it’ll only really be An End, and that humanity will carry on. These stories center community, art, and sustainability, all things that we value now and will continue to value even if our societies crumble around us. And that’s very comforting to me.
Have you read any Hopeful Apocalyptic stories? If so, please let me know! I’d love to read more of them!
Thanks for reading, and have a nice day!