Dystopian Hunger

The other day, my writing partner and I decided that we should get around to writing this story we've been saying we'll get around to writing for about a month now. Having decided we'll actually write it, I went over to her house after work and let myself in, walking up to her room, where we started planning it.

One of the first things Amber and I noticed was that while I had the skeleton of a plot and characters, we didn't really have a setting. We started thinking a little bit, and I remembered something I had thought of a day or so earlier.

I wanted this to be set in a dystopia.

A dystopia, for those of you who don't know it, is... not a utopia.

Dictionary.com defines it as "a society characterized by human misery, as squalor, oppression, disease, and overcrowding."

In fiction, most often dystopias find themselves as seriously flawed utopias. The most recent literary example of a dystopia is The Hunger Games. Also good examples are 1984 and The Giver. Often literary dystopias attempt to present themselves as utopias, but underneath the veneer of perfection, you will find serious and deadly flaws.

So, we both decided this story would best be set in a dystopia. We began world-building. This was actually my first time really world-building. Usually I just set my characters in the place that's near this place, and they do things in places. It's all very vague. So I was very excited to start world-building.

We got a giant map and drew all over it, deciding what countries would take over the world, who was in charge, and where the new borders were. It was a lot of fun.

During this planning session, Amber's mom was downstairs cooking dinner. And it smelled really good. When she was done, she came upstairs to find us still plotting. She told us to come down for dinner.

We ignored her. We were thick in the middle of plotting, and didn't really want to stop. She came back, and invited me to stay as well. So I stayed for dinner.

It was a good dinner. I rather enjoyed it. I stayed after dinner a little longer, then went home. I got home and found myself in a rather strange position. I was very, very hungry. And I had only eaten dinner a few hours ago.

It was strange. My mind was still working, thinking, trying to churn out new ideas for my dystopia, and I was hungry.

So I ate.

Then I awoke the next morning, chock-full of brand new ideas... and I was still hungry. I was hungry all day. I went to Writer's Club, bringing candy (because I was hungry) and I found Amber making cookies. She had also been experiencing odd hunger pains. We hadn't really gotten hungry until we had created our dystopia. It was strange. It still is strange.

Maybe creating dystopias makes everyone hungry. That would explain Suzanne Collins' titling of her book The Hunger Games.

It's been a few days since we created it, and I'm not as hungry anymore. But it was really really really odd.