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.
