Kinetic Kamala
The Story Energies Election Special
If you’re new here, read this quick primer on the Story Energies, a new way to talk about storytelling.
Dear Storytellers,
We’re coming up on three weeks into our Story Energies Substack escapade, and I’ll begin here with a couple updates:
Last week, I reached out to some of my former GrubStreet students to let them know that this exists, and the response has been fantastic—hi students! Our classes are strange because, for their duration of six or ten weeks (or even a seminar’s three hours), they’re really intense, and then it’s over, and we mostly go our separate ways. I really enjoyed looking back through the rosters and connecting memories of names to faces to stories shared in classes going all the way back to 2019. And it was lovely to get so many replies to my emails, with reports of an essay that was published, or an exercise that’s proved enduringly useful. And it was very heartening for me that so many signed up here—particularly encouraging was the response rate from students who have already listened to me go on about the Story Energies in a class, and still want to hear more.
I also put out a call here for writers who publish their fiction on Substack to let me know where I can find them, and again the response was energising—hi Substack fiction writers! A huge thank you to those who posted links, recommended others, and subscribed or followed here. This will hopefully be the beginning of lots of beautiful friendships.
In the next week or two, I hope to publish my first post featuring some of that Substacked fiction. And I want to move toward posting more concrete advice on how to harness the Story Energies in your own storytelling. And I’m going to start phasing in paywalled content, so that I can look my young children in the eye while I keep spending my weeks writing posts and developing more content (and so that those who have already become paid subscribers [thank you for the support, it means a lot!] feel like they’re getting their money’s worth.)
But it’s election week in the United States. And it’s close. It’s pretty compelling Story, so let’s interrupt our regular programming to look at the Energies running through it…
A presidential election campaign is a story. You’ve got a protagonist, an antagonist, a supporting cast. You’ve got many many subplots, all of which work in service to the momentous A-plot—who will be the next ‘leader of the free world’.
For the Democrats, this campaign didn’t exactly explode into life. Deflated by inflation, haunted by the horror in Gaza, and with their leader looking every day more inert and confused, they found themselves floundering to keep up with the same villain who, despite everything that happened in the first instalment, has returned in this sequel, more baleful and seemingly-indestructible than ever.
But then: a twist! Biden’s faltering debate performance, a few days of head-shaking and hand-wringing, and Kamala Harris strode forward to take her place as the party’s heroine in shining pant suits.
And the campaign, suddenly, was charged with all sorts of Energy. But will it be enough to carry her to a sublime victory? Let’s look closer…
She is too poised to sprint onto stages, but with her assured stride, beaming smile, and coherent sentences, Kamala reanimated the party with a surge of Kinetic Energy. Like the terminally ill dad in His Three Daughters standing out of his chair and ripping away the tubes, the campaign’s recovery felt miraculous, and that movement helped in turn to generate various other forms of Energy.
A wave of enthusiasm and hope swept through the nation, from social media and opinion columns through living rooms and college campuses to voter drives and campaign rallies. The atmosphere was charged with a new sense of possibility and opportunity, and her supporters were suddenly overcome with an emotion that so recently seemed impossible to even imagine: Joy!
Many of us didn’t realise it before, but Kamala Harris is a charming and charismatic leader. I already mentioned her assured stride, beaming smile and coherent sentences, and that all contributes to a current of (relatively) youthful vigour, a warm breeze of the oxygenated air we were gasping for. And maybe we’re projecting our desires onto her handsome features and shining couture, and maybe it’s largely repulsion generated by her rival that’s propelling us into her comforting glow, but now she’s looking every perfect-postured inch the saviour we need.
All that new energy generated some serious heat, and combined to transform a sinking solid into effervescent bubbles of optimism. But the uplift provided by that Thermal Energy wasn’t enough to carry her clear of her rival, perhaps because of problems with…
Kamala ran for president before, of course, but her primary campaign never sparked into life. And after four years of being vice-president to an unpopular boss, where she made about as much impact as vice-presidents usually make, she remains mostly the same candidate, with the same qualities and history, who failed to energise enough of her own party members to come out and vote for her in 2016.
Today, it seems easy to argue that this daughter-of-immigrants, prosecutor-of-corporations, long-time champion of women’s and LGBTQ+ rights who propelled herself to the offices of Attorney General of California and United States Senator had the potential to be a great president all along. But it’s also maybe difficult, at least for some people, to connect with the ‘real’ Kamala, when she has only spent a few weeks under the glare of this bright a spotlight, and when her convictions seem adaptive to the demands of the particular moment.
That backdrop of war and economic hardship that Biden struggled to spring from still maintains its pull on Harris’s campaign, and with so many potential voters getting their news and information from right-wing sources, and living and working in overwhelmingly Republican communities, changing minds takes a lot of work. To get her message across, she needs to overcome the clamour of anti-immigrant, anti-‘woke’ scaremongering, and the understandable disillusionment of millions of people who’ve found themselves on the wrong side of a widening wealth gap.
These grim realities against which this election is set also elevate its stakes. They enhance the jeopardy. Right-ring, radical agendas are waiting to be enacted, already-inadequate attempts to avert climate change could be dismantled, and the systems that protect the vulnerable, and that protect democracy itself, face an existential threat…
While there’s an age-old truism that politicians are all the same (the self-serving egos, the corruption, etc.), the two candidates for this election are clearly very different. I’ve already written here about how stark differences between characters can help drive compelling Story, and so can difficult choices. And for some reason, or for a lot of complicated reasons, America is finding this choice between these contrasting alternatives very difficult to make.
Kamala’s initial surge took her from way behind to out in front, and as it’s waned, this race has become incredibly close, nationally and in each of a handful of states that could end up swinging the election. If you like your stories to build towards a resonating climax, then oh my goodness gracious me you’ve got to appreciate this one…
So what can we learn from this election campaign? What advice can we take forward into our own storytelling?
Movement helps. We can energise even a dialogue scene by just having our characters get up and walk around, or, as I heard Quentin Tarantino say years ago, putting them on speakerphone while they’re driving too fast. But more than that, if we make our protagonists more active, that helps bring the world around them to life, and that movement can soon be converted into other forms of Story Energy.
Also: Story has power. It can be hard to trace coherent chains of cause and effect through our everyday lives, when so much seems chaotic and, as Tim Walz likes to say, weird. But, as I’ve written here before, we can’t help piecing events together into strands of narrative, to make sense of our lives. And the stories we engage with, in turn, help shape us—our values, our beliefs, our priorities, our voting habits.
Millions of people have been energised by Kamala Harris’s campaign, and while most of them were already Democrats, a huge number—still in the millions—will vote for her when they wouldn’t have voted for Joe Biden. Even though their platforms, and the choices they might make in power, are not very different.
And by Tuesday night, whatever happens, about eighty million people, probably including some of you readers, will vote for Donald Trump. That’s not the choice I would make. But I hope we can all understand and remember that our vote shouldn’t be interpreted as a final verdict on our moral character. We just tune in to different stories, and these stories have helped shape our values, our priorities, our senses of humour, and ultimately the stories that we will tell ourselves about this election.
Once we arrive at Election Day, campaigns come to an abrupt halt.
The Potential Energy of the election itself resides in its voters.
If you have a vote in this election, you should put it to work.
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