Newsrooms are strange places at night. Silent, mossy hollows of noise. Muted and soft and then, deeper in, a knockout punch of sound. A cacophony of all the bad, everywhere in the world.

Beneath the spaceship-white lights, you are alone. Or nearly alone. Most of the local reporters have long since gone home. Those abroad are just waking up. No one is filing new stories. The photog offices are dark and quiet. Far across the room, you see the metro editor, awaiting updates on a murder. Nearby, the news editor watches for last-minute changes so he can lock the pages and send the news to print.

And you, at your desk, watch the wires. Wires full of misery, usually. You keep a running list in your head. Where is hell on earth, right now? Nine times out of ten, it is a country where the kids have names like yours. Sometimes you even see your own name, attached to the dead, the bombed, the broken.

It is upsetting.

In this strange tumult, you have a job. Keep an eye out for any new, shiny misery that would shove aside the misery that has already clinched a spot in the paper. Something powerful, potent. A single, knockout punch that would send that old misery to the floor, unable to put up a fight. Bombings, usually. Earthquakes. Once, a tsunami.

You must also update the stories you do have. Death counts. Injuries. Copycat attacks. Aftershocks. After that, you must reread the stories, the ones that have risen to the top of the misery charts, and you must find any mistakes. You must correct them.

And so you read about children being torn apart by bombs, or women afraid to get water because the hyena of a soldier circling their refugee camp might rape and murder them. You separate the forever scream in your chest from your job, which is to look for errant commas, repetitive phrases, factual inconsistencies, misspelled names. You divide your mind, because there is a deadline to meet, and you cannot weep about a four-year-old shredded to bits by an American bomb an ocean away while you are in the middle of a newsroom with that news editor waiting to lock those pages.

Besides, you are in the middle of a warm, safe newsroom. You didn’t even report the damn stories. The reporters are allowed to be sad. You’re a copyeditor. You’re fine. Do your job, so that people in their homes can pick up the paper, or open their app, and read about the aforementioned four-year-old and hopefully feel…something.

This goes on for a while. A few years. The scream in your chest bites at its cage. It escapes every now and then, and you begin to write your own stories. Therapy, really. You try to write about things that have nothing to do with the reality punching you in the guts every night. Really, you do. But you can’t. You hate the phrase “give voice to the voiceless.” The voiceless ­actually have voices, you think. None of you are listening.

You decide to take reality and put it in fantasy. You will make your reader know the four-year-old. Love the four-year-old. Then you will take him away. You will make them root for the romance. Then you will crush it. You are a monster. You make the world. You are its destroyer.

But as you write, you remember other things from those loud newsroom nights. You remember the hope: that bookseller who survived a dictator; the church that stood through the disaster, that sheltered all regardless of religion. The brown hands digging, digging, digging and the cries of “God is Great” as a tiny baby is brought back to life out of rubble, gasping and ash-faced and beautifully alive.

Hope is reality too. Hope is also worth writing about. So you make the shift. The noise of the world, which has stuck with you, which will never leave you, becomes music. Sometimes terrible. Sometimes beautiful. And never more than a step from the imagined worlds of your books. There, just under the surface. The scaffolding. The skeleton. The everything of the fantasy worlds you write.

From the May/June 2025 special issue of The Horn Book Magazine: Perception and Reality. Find more in the "Reality Reimagined" series here.

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