Writing Through Violence: Catharsis

Why do people write? 

A question that surely has multiple answers, even if you ask the same person. To explore fantastic places, to create exotic things. To press the limits of imagination. To entertain, to frighten, the enthrall. For me, it has always been to settle myself; to organize my thoughts, to face my fears, to face my anger and my sadness. 

For me, writing gives me catharsis, relief from feelings I might not be able to face any other way.

Each one of my books is actually a thought which became an emotional wall. And, in a time that now seems more violent that ever before, in the wake a tragically violent event, I draw on my writing. 

My latest series is about violence.

My generation grew up steeped in violence. Global violence came through a speeding plane shattering a national icon when I was ten years old. It came through two young men on security cameras gunning down their peers when I was eight. It came through the next two decades of battles and shootings and gunmen and planes and memorials and bombs and sobbing witnesses and broken families and grieving nations. Looking at the world today, it's sometimes hard not to see the viciousness of war, a plague of hate, and, lately, a darkness that compels people to do terrible things to each other. 

I see these things and I think, “People are terrible creatures.” 

I see these things and I think, “The world is senseless madness.” 

And I wonder, what's the point of preserving a world like that?

Like everyone else, I look for a reason for it all. But there isn't one. And there never will be.

Catharsis is learning to accept that. And accept that it's okay to be angry. It's okay to be sad. 

 And that terrible things don't mean the world is shit and people are shit and everything's pointless. 

Writing takes us out of that negative spiral, puts visceral feelings into words, lets us feel these emotions through the shield of our characters, and allows us to create people that are stronger than ourselves.

 One of the first scenes I wrote was Aborgine, an abandoned ruin of a city stained in soot and blood, and the military experiments that an evil empire burned alive. And the three young scouts that stumble into a pit of human ash. The young woman and two young men don't cry or shiver—they bear their haunting thoughts with stern faces and continue to fight against tyranny.

The next scene became the first scene in the series; a decorated officer, a powerful warrior, loses his friends and bannermen in an assault on an enemy capital. Trudging through mud and bodies and rubble, he kills every man he sees and butchers the city leaders in a vengeful frenzy. He endures punishment for his savagery, carries his guilt wordlessly, and slowly realizes he can become a better man.

Writing can press the limits of imagination. It can take us somewhere else.  It can take our hate and our fear and our hopelessness and give us strength. 

Writing can take us to a war-torn plane cracked by hate and tyranny—and then rebuild it.