Until It’s Written

I killed a man a few months ago; however, lately I’ve been thinking of not killing him. He was fictional, and certainly a jerk who probably deserved it, but I didn’t want to. The story calls for it. At least, it did at the time. I toyed around with the possibility of keeping him alive for a couple of years. I tried to make it happen, maybe even turn him around and redeem himself with something heroic, but nothing worked. It took a long time for the fateful decision to play out, but somebody has to die. There’s just no getting around it.

I started thinking about him last spring when Infinity War was all over the place. I was anxious watching the trailer, specifically the scene showing Captain America trying to withstand the power of Thanos. “Oh no, you can’t kill Cap,” I thought, “but there’s no way Steve can withstand Thanos, so…” *lip quivers*

Great storytelling involves us becoming invested in characters we love. Even though we know they’re fictional, they matter. We want them to succeed, to win, but sometimes for the good of the story someone has to die.

It probably isn’t the case for most writers. My wife never kills anybody. But I write military fiction, and so it happens. I killed six guys just the other day in the span of about two hours (don’t worry, they were all bad). Sometimes you need to kill a hero, however, or take a character through a series of events you’d rather spare him from if you could.

My current book deals in part with issues of domestic violence. It’s hard to write. You want these people to succeed and forgive one another, but life is messy and it takes time to heal, even on paper. Would you like to know a secret? I have no idea how they’re going to get through it. I think things will work out, but I haven’t gotten them there, and until it’s written anything can happen, just like with the guy I killed. He could survive. I just don’t know until we get into it together.

Storytelling is a ride, and it matters. I don’t mean that works of fiction matter in the sense that we couldn’t live without them. We certainly could. In that regard, plumbers matter, firefighters and power plant operators matter, mothers and fathers teaching children right from wrong matter. I don’t mean to draw a moral equivalence with the work of artists and the work of everyday life. If a disaster struck tomorrow, nobody would be perusing Amazon to buy our books or heading to the movie theater. But when things settled down you can bet they would.  After 9/11 a lot of people turned on old episodes of I Love Lucy, and I pulled Debt of Honor off the bookshelf. Why? It’s because we were designed to laugh, to love, to cry and to mourn.

We turn to story for the same reason Christ did. He knew, the same way Stephen Spielberg does, that a story drives home truth in a manner that philosophy can’t. My older children can tell you what the Holocaust was, but they won’t really understand it until they see Schinder’s List because characters matter, because story matters, and you matter in a story someone else has been writing since the dawn of time.

 

I recently heard an interview with author Jan Karon speaking about her decision to kill a beloved character. When asked about her decision, she simply stated in her soft North Carolina accent, “It was his time.”

You tell ’em, Jan!

I’ve been spending a good amount of time lately digging into characters I’ve created, and bringing them through hard, sometimes unimaginable circumstances that would seem crazy if they weren’t based on true life accounts. There are a lot of stories being written out there, and not by fiction writers like me. Your story is unique. It’s a tale of struggle and perseverance. The characters around you sometimes make life harder. Sometimes they cause you pain, and sometimes they die, and there is nothing good about it. There’s also nothing you can do about it, except go on, and play your part, and maybe become the hero. Your powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

You never can tell until it’s written.