Soul-Searching

Not mine. Someone far braver. (and yes, I’m going to call her that.)

Sometime in the last couple months, writing friends were discussing Lazy Writing that Pissed Us Off. (my name for it.) Stuff like Generic Viking Culture!, Generic Chivalry!, and Fantasy Quests Must Touch Every Country For Pretty Much No Reason. At times we went off on particular popular writers who consistently drove us nuts with the same issues book after book.

One author we talked about is Mercedes Lackey, and one friend said something along the lines of, “And please! Why are all her main characters so tortured?” And KD looked at her own writing and thought, “???”

Uh oh.

Eve’s mother abandoned her days after her birth; she was ignored by her father and her much-older brother raised her as one of the lab animals.

Other than losing his father very young, Ben had a safe and nurturing childhood–then his first brush with just how bad life could get shattered him.

Donte was used by slavers whose only purpose was to break him. And they did. Taro grew up an orphan in a gang, used for begging when he was a toddler, then trained as a pickpocket. Rafe was trained to be an expensive prostitute. Keen’s entire family was murdered.

From Elizabeth Bear‘s LJ, just stumbled upon today:

And that’s why my characters are almost all trauma survivors, because that’s who I know. (I am trying to write some undamaged people now, to stretch myself. It’s hard. I don’t know how people who don’t trigger react to stress. People who do trigger are predictable: once you know our triggers, you know when and how we will react.)

Umm…yeah. What she said.

Don’t get me wrong. My story isn’t a tale of horror, it’s more a misadventure, a farce–a long and rambling tale of KD being stupid at just the wrong moments (wrong being when no one smarter was looking out for me) and getting drastically hurt because of it.

What I do know, is that on the rare occasions I share the details, I get a HELL of a lot of “omg, me too!” I think there was one friend I ever told who didn’t react that way, in fact. I called her my normal friend–but often in late night conversations, I’d go looking for the flaw. Were her parents insane in any way? No? How about older brother? Hmm…never got cornered by a pushy cousin? No neglect, no trauma, no twisty sneaky mental abuse anywhere? Perhaps it’s not surprising that as much I loved her, we lost touch. What did we really have to talk about? She wore me out in her wonderful, joyous normalcy.

The friends who have stuck are the (pardon my adjective, beloved friends) the twisted ones. The ones who have lived through the shadow and the pain and pushed upwards, weathering the wind and storms like those few trees that survive just at the tree-line on a mountain, roots twisted deep into a cliff, leaning over a precipice they can’t quite escape.

Or, as a roommate long ago put it when I had a two-bedroom apartment that friends were rotating through at need, “What does it say about you that the people you get on with best are the crazy ones?” (she was one of a multiple collection)

Maybe I’m finally getting over stuff enough I can have those normal friends. Because I certainly cherish the one who made that comment. (and zomg, I bet she laughs when she sees I called her normal…) (as long as she doesn’t think I’m belittling her trials, which I sure as hell ain’t. Her soul-searing stuff isn’t trivial–it’s just not the same as mine. Not what I’m posting here about.)

God, my head hurts.

Wow, looks like my disclaimer in that first line no longer applies.

Okay, well, I didn’t start out searching my own soul. And I sure as hell didn’t mean to.