Man, I was not expecting to get the blog going with a current event like Orlando hanging over everyone’s head. It always breaks my heart to hear about tragedies like this, and then having the media twist it around to a political problem. In a way, it is, but there seem to be a lot of reports being used to advance an agenda, and that is just sick.
It’s times like these that makes me wonder what I can do personally to help make the world a better place. As a writer, making a statement veiled in my work (Orwell is one of my favorite authors that achieved this) is what makes a tale timeless. And sometimes it’s like a secret code, encrypted with character and plot. The ones I want to hear me will see, the ones who resonate the strongest with the message will know. I’m not good at marching in protests, nor am I good at convincing politicians to fix a broken system. But I am good at writing, and what I can do is convey a message that I hope inspires people. What I really want someone to do after reading something of mine is to introspect. That was a complicated choice that character made, you think. Would I have done the same in his situation?
What guides our morals as humans is how we interact with each other. For better or worse, our interactions have consequences, and those consequences are either deemed good or bad by others, depending on how much of the situation they know. As more variables are presented, morality becomes grayer and grayer. Until at some point down the line, the action is justified by someone. My job as a writer is to weave a character’s personality so tight that I would know what any of them would do in any given situation, and when that gray area justifies something. Characters should never be purely black and white, just like people aren’t. Some people are sick, and the justification for something heinous comes early. Some people are greedy, which also brings the threshold forward. Any number of moral or immoral traits move that line around in the fog of justification.
The governments in almost all of my fantasy work are often corrupt on some level. The system works, but it is deeply flawed in some way. Writers often write what they know best, and this is what I have come to know about the Powers That Be in my country. I am more and more ashamed to be an American and becoming ashamed of being a human being lately. If an alien landed right in front of me and asked me to take him to my leader, the first words out of my mouth would be, “Oh, uh… I’m not with them.”
I love figuring people out. It makes creating tangible characters fun. When I see tragedies on the news like this, my first thought is, “What brought them to the point where they thought what they were doing was right?” When I ask those kind of questions about people, my characters become richer as a result. So though there is no doubt in my mind that the events over this weekend were wrong, terrible and a disgrace to my race and country, I can take away a sense of what true villainry is.
Maybe I could pass on a more positive way of dealing with that kind of villain.
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