Christy English

Fighting Demons: Conflict on the Page

Monday, January 14th, 2013 | The Writing Life

 

The crazy thing about writing fiction is that when you see your friends, your characters, careening towards their doom, you can’t call out to them to stop. You have to push them forward, toward it, and then watch as their world unravels beneath them. You can’t even help them pick up the pieces, not really, not until close to the end of the book. You have to watch them struggle, and falter, and fall, all in the name of conflict and plot.

This is hard for me.  It is hard to watch the characters I love suffer, and not intervene. But I have to make them suffer more, I have to discover who they truly are as their character is revealed in the heat of the crucible. I write about strong people, especially strong women, but I never know how strong they actually are until they’ve been tested, until they’ve been tried.

 

India, Rajasthan, Kota region

Great Mother Durga Slaying the Buffalo Demon, circa 850-900
Sculpture; Stone, Red sandstone, 34 x 25 x 9 1/2 in. (86.36 x 63.5 x 24.13 cm)
From the Nasli and Alice Heeramaneck Collection, Museum Associates Purchase (M.77.19.27)

The Los Angeles County Museum of Art

 

Maybe we like to read novels, maybe we like to watch our characters slay their respective demons, so that we can learn to find our own inner strength, so that we can face our own losses with better grace. I wonder about this. I know that some piece of me is reflected, at least in part, in the books I write. Not the events, of course, because I have never lived in a royal palace or been the pawn of a queen as Alais was. I have never been sold in marriage to pay my father’s debts as Caroline was. And yet, there are times when we have all been pawns, when we have put family needs before our own, and suffered for it.

I suppose we do find ourselves within the pages of books, between the pages of the books we read as well as the books we write. It is what these books reveal to us about ourselves that draws us back, again and again. Watching our friends battle their demons. Watching them win.

Here’s to demon slaying, between the pages of books and in our own lives. May we all face our hard truths with the courage of our characters. May we all win in the end, as they sometimes do.

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