Hope Is Not a Speech

Hope Is Not a Speech

Hope is one of those words that becomes less useful the more desperately you need it.

When things are going well, “have hope” can sound encouraging. When you are exhausted, frightened, grieving or depressed, it can sound almost insulting.

Hope in what?

Based on what evidence?

And what exactly am I supposed to do with it?

That question ended up becoming much more important to A Funeral for the Living than I expected.

When I began writing The Box of Dead Heroes, I knew I wanted the story to contain hope. I did not want to write nihilism. I did not want darkness simply for the pleasure of making everything miserable.

But I also knew there was a kind of hope I could not write honestly.

The speech.

The moment where somebody stands up, says the right words, reminds everybody what they are fighting for, and suddenly the room believes again.

Fantasy is full of those moments. Some of them are wonderful.

But while I was writing these books, they were not the kind of hope I personally found convincing.

I was struggling too much with the question that comes after the speech.

All right. What now?

Hope has to survive breakfast

There is a difference between inspiring somebody for five minutes and giving them a reason to get up the next morning.

The latter interested me much more.

If a group of frightened people has nowhere safe to sleep, a speech does not give them beds.

If somebody is hungry, inspiration does not feed them.

If a person has been treated as disposable for years, telling them they matter does not automatically teach them how to believe it.

If people have spent their lives being separated, categorized, monitored and made afraid of one another, declaring them a community does not make a community exist.

Somebody has to do something.

Someone has to find the food.

Someone has to clear the room.

Someone has to move the furniture.

Someone has to remember who has not eaten yet.

Someone has to notice that one bed is still empty.

Someone has to know the safe route home.

Someone has to come back.

That became the version of hope I trusted.

Not hope as an emotion.

Hope as infrastructure.

The world does not change because somebody names the problem

Titan, the occupied city at the centre of the trilogy, is very good at turning horror into routine.

It has systems. Procedures. Records. Assignments. Rations. Places people are supposed to be and words for what happens when they are no longer useful.

The machine works.

That is part of what makes it frightening.

And one of the things I wanted to avoid was answering a world built from systems with a single heroic declaration.

A speech cannot defeat an infrastructure.

People have to build something else.

Not necessarily something grand.

Often something embarrassingly small.

A room.

A route.

A table.

A meal.

A place where people begin learning that they are allowed to remain.

The trilogy increasingly treats civilization in exactly those terms: not as something preserved because a king, bloodline or institution declares it legitimate, but because ordinary people keep carrying one another, keep working, keep remembering, and keep returning.

That is a much messier kind of hope.

It requires maintenance.

Sometimes hope looks like soup

I have become slightly obsessed with food while writing these books.

Not extravagant fantasy feasts.

Food that somebody actually needs.

Soup. Bread. Something warm. Something shared. Something packed for the road.

There is something fundamentally different about saying “you matter” and placing a bowl in front of somebody who expected to go hungry.

One is an idea.

The other is evidence.

That distinction became important to me outside the books too.

When I am struggling, I can hear reassurance and understand the words perfectly well.

People can remind me of things I have accomplished. They can tell me I am loved. They can point toward the future. I can recognise logically that they are probably right.

And sometimes none of it gets very far inside.

But the smaller things occasionally do.

A meal somebody thought about making.

A message that arrives without being requested.

Someone sitting down rather than trying to fix me.

A plan for tomorrow.

Something practical enough that I do not have to believe in the whole future. I only have to deal with the next hour.

That is not lesser hope.

I increasingly think it may be the more durable kind.

People need somewhere to put the hope

One of the things I discovered while writing the trilogy is that people cannot live indefinitely on emergency.

At first, survival is enough.

Get through the door.

Get away.

Find somewhere safe.

Eat.

Sleep.

But eventually survival has to become life again.

People need routines.

Work.

Jokes.

Arguments about stupid things.

Music.

Children being irritating.

Somewhere to leave a coat.

Somewhere to expect to find the same people tomorrow.

The trilogy's worldbuilding increasingly grew around that idea. Resistance does not become real because someone gives it a name. It becomes real because people have already begun feeding one another, making routes, preparing rooms and returning to the same places. The movement exists before anybody formally announces it.

That mattered because I did not want the resistance in these books to feel like a military organisation that happened to contain civilians.

I wanted it to feel like life becoming difficult to suppress.

The enemy has facilities.

The people have rooms.

The enemy has systems.

The people have meals.

That difference became increasingly important.

Hope does not require confidence

This is probably the part of the trilogy I understand most personally.

People often talk about hope as though it is confidence about the future.

I do not think it has to be.

You can take a step while expecting it might fail.

You can help somebody without knowing whether it will be enough.

You can build somewhere safe while knowing it might not remain safe.

You can start something without knowing how it ends.

That is still hope.

Perhaps more importantly, it is still action.

One of the ideas running through the trilogy is that participation matters more than certainty. People survive because they continue choosing to take part: carrying, feeding, remembering, arguing, travelling, rebuilding and returning.

That distinction has mattered to me enormously.

There are days when asking myself whether I feel hopeful is not a particularly useful exercise.

Quite often, the answer is no.

But I can ask a different question.

What would I do if I were hopeful?

Maybe I send the email.

Maybe I work on the website.

Maybe I finish the chapter.

Maybe I make plans for something several weeks away.

Maybe I agree to go somewhere.

Maybe I write another book.

None of those actions prove that everything will work out.

They create the possibility that something might.

The heroes are not the point

This is also one of the reasons The Box of Dead Heroes begins with heroes and gradually becomes interested in something else.

Legends are easy to build speeches around.

Ordinary people are harder.

They need breakfast.

They get tired.

They become frightened.

They misunderstand each other.

They argue over resources.

They make bad decisions.

They need somewhere to sleep.

They sometimes need to be reminded that the person standing beside them is not another problem to solve.

That is where I wanted the trilogy to live.

The heroic moments still matter.

But they matter because of what they protect.

A heroic last stand means very little to me if I do not know what somebody was hoping to go home to.

The sword matters less than the hand carrying the food beforehand.

The victory matters less than whether there is still somewhere to return to afterward.

People first.

Then movements.

Then, perhaps, history.

The opposite of death

While developing these books, I eventually found a sentence that explained more of the trilogy to me than almost anything else:

The opposite of death is not life. The opposite of death is participation.

That became one of the central ideas beneath the entire story.

Being alive is biological.

Participation is choosing to remain connected to something.

To another person.

To a community.

To work.

To memory.

To music.

To tomorrow.

It does not mean everything is good.

It does not even necessarily mean you are happy.

It means you are still taking part.

For someone who has spent a lot of time wrestling with depression, that idea feels considerably more useful to me than simply being told to have hope.

Sometimes I do not know whether I believe the future will be better.

But I can participate in it anyway.

So hope is not a speech

At least, not in these books.

A speech can matter.

Words can matter enormously.

But if the words are true, eventually somebody has to put them into the world.

Feed someone.

Build something.

Remember a name.

Make room.

Find the route.

Play the music.

Open the door.

Come back tomorrow.

That is the hope I ended up putting into A Funeral for the Living.

Not certainty.

Not optimism.

Not the promise that everything will work out.

Just people continuing to do the things that make another day possible.

And perhaps that is enough.

Because if hope is something we have to feel before we can act, some of us may spend a very long time waiting.

If hope can also be something we do, then we can begin before we are ready.