So I sit here, relaxing since there is no homework to be done and no imminent test to study for. I sit here and work on writing my book about a universe that had been cooking in my head for eight years now. As I am writing through scenes, characters, and emotions, I realized something. Writing out a book, a story, about many different people, personalities, actions, places, and emotions forces you, momentarily, into split personalities. You aren't just documenting a story about imaginary people in your mind, they are telling you about all the little things you never consciously think about. They are actually showing you the door to yourself that sits in that dark little corner of your mind. The one that you don't think about opening as yourself, well actually, you can't open it yourself. That's why it sits there in a dark little corner. It is a door that you can only open with the help of, in my case, an entire fictional species.
So I bring you back to me sitting here. That door has been nudged open a crack and it is fascinating and a little bit scary. I only realized this when I try to write out the scene where one of the characters experiences an instantaneous inescapable desire to kill someone on sight. Now it's one thing to write out, "He had an instantaneous urge to kill", but that isn't enough. That doesn't have enough emotion, feeling, or passion behind the words to make the reader feel it, to get a taste of what he could possibly be feeling. This feeling does not get to be bland and not passionate just because it is something that I can't possibly begin to imaging how it truly feels. Other scenes, other emotions can be so easily written with enough passion to make the reader cry or rejoice. What makes this one so different?
I guess it just scares me to wedge open that door and search for a way to describe how that must feel, even though I don't have the capacity to actually feel it or understand it. The feeling itself is scary to think about to the point where you don't even want to know how it would feel hypothetically. But then that makes me think. Maybe that's why that door in the dark little corner exists. To take the scary things and put them somewhere where you have to want to look for them in order to face them.
So I still sit here, staring at that door. I slowly take a step forward and by slowly I mean it takes a good day or two to take one step because as writers, we sometimes find ourselves facing things that were never meant for us just for the sake of our story. It just won't feel right if we didn't. The goal of any writer is to make the reader, at the very least, understand what the character is going through even if there is no way they can relate.
And this isn't to say that I want people to understand the urge to kill, or to understand why he wants to kill. I want them to understand him. In my story, he represents the struggle of someone who is inherently evil, someone so dark and twisted that a simple smile is a challenge to him. He is a warped and damaged soul that is believed by the vast majority to be nothing more than pure evil. This scene, and the few following it, are to prove something, to show you the inside of someone. A person who, for all their life, has been told by both the little voice at the back of your mind and society that all they are is evil and all they will accomplish and be is evil. This is the start of his breaking point. It shows how far someone will push themselves to fight and then how hard they fight when their will to fight almost disappears. He is meant to show how someone lives their life when they are handed a bomb at birth and society is just waiting for it to explode and all he wants to do is defuse it but he can't on his own but there is no one there to help him and the one person who can is the one person who could trigger the bomb. All he wants to do is be happy.
It's hard to look at that door and know that I can tell his story, but but knowing that I am too scared to find the words to tell it. So I sit here and wait until I can.
