Character abuse

I don’t think anyone would say I’m easy on the characters in my books.  Almost all of them, in fact, are put through several flavors of hell before the end.  I have noticed something lately, a developing trend in my more recent work, that has bearing on the kind of hell I put them through.

By and large, I don’t write subtle books.  There may be a calm, low-key, reflective scene here and there, but there’s a good chance that stuff goes boom.  The conflicts my characters face in these book tend, largely, to be external in nature.  They’re trying to stop all hell from breaking loose and they’re getting shot, beat up, and sometimes killed along the way.  There’s a character arc as well, but usually running as background.

Then I write Lilly’s Song, and the internal life of the characters are incredibly foregrounded.  In fact if it wasn’t for the titular character’s internal crisis, there’d be no story.  Now, in Heretics I’ve written one of the more brutal scenes I’ve yet written.  In anything.  (And remember Geoff Landis commented on my “dismemberment theme” in Lilly’s Song.)  And, what made it so brutal wasn’t the viscera so much as the awful choice I gave the character before he sacrifices himself, what the whole situation means to him.

Maybe it means I’m growing as a writer.  Maybe it just means I’ve reached the age when I’m more worried about dealing with a mother-in-law with dementia than I am about being mugged.