A Wedding and a Funeral (Read: Lawful Assassination)

The lovely Moira McGann has completed the character concept for Bramar!

Ok, so I feel it is only right that I weigh in on these two important current events: The Royal Wedding and the death of Osama bin Laden.
Here's the thing, I don't want to give my personal opinion on these goings-on. While I do have strong opinions on both subjects, I feel I would be straying from the core principles of this blog to give you my take on either topic. Instead, I will discuss them as I think they pertain to writing. And yes, I think that both of them are valuable teaching tools.

1. The Wedding
   So, whenever the royals have a wedding, there's always a big to-do and the whole world gets to celebrate/hate on it. How great is that? We all get to stop obsessing about the natural disasters and wars and famines and death and destruction and decline of the world as we know it and tune in to a lovely morning of fairytale matrimonial bliss.
   I think of this as the perfect reminder that not every major event in my story has to be awful. I mean, I put my characters through a respectable regimen of hellish happenings. So much so that I often forget to have a wedding. Or a baby. Or a victory. Or a kit kat. Anything positive, really. It's good to be reminded that a little romance never hurt anyone, and while everyone has an opinion on it, we all have to admit that it was kind of a nice break.


2. The Funeral
   Killing off a bad guy is one of the most powerful events in a story. To America, at least in this century, Osama bin Laden was like the Boss in a Nintendo game. His death is considered a victory. Now, I've been saying this for a couple of days, and I'll say it now because I think it applies to the big baddie in my story:
Most people do not relish the idea of murder. The loss of human life, whether it is an infant or an old man or a mass murderer is as awful thing. We are all human, and we must treat human life as precious. However, when a person commits unspeakable acts, it is not an inhuman thing to want him or her dead. I think it is the evil most of us revel in vanquishing, not the human being.
   This applies to evil characters in my story. In my opinion, a good writer acquaints you with the villain, allows you to get to know them a little, to understand, perhaps, some of the reasons for their abhorrent actions. This may not be to garner sympathy for the evil-doer. I allow you to know a bit about my villains so that you can know that the evil within them is a true poison, that they can never be separated from it, that they feed on it, and that there is truly no other course of action than to permanently prevent them from ever causing harm again. You kill the evil, not the man. Otherwise you are no better than he.


I have another spin on this. Yes, my plot comes from major tides of good an evil sweeping over the world of my characters and the parts they play in standing against or moving with these tides. That does not mean that important events do not happen outside of my characters' reach. Sometimes, a major event, like a (spoiler!) rebellion occurs far away from my characters, leaving them virtually unaffected (except, perhaps, for having an opinion on them), until sometime in the future. Or not. Sometimes hugely important events happen without our being affected by them in any clearly discernible way. It's a small indication that the world is vast, and I think it enriches the story to include some carefully-thought out non-effectual events.

In other news, Thesaurus.com is the best thing ever.