THEAUTHORBLOG
Posted by THE AUTHOR, April 10, 2012 at 05:08 am, in THEORY
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It was an eerie and dark night, wolves howled and the wind crackled. It was on such a night dear reader that I came to know an unbearable truth.
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My internet connection would soon be severed for no less than a week.
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Seven days may not sound like a lot reader, but think of it like this, in the time it will take for me to regain connection over seven generations of mayflies will have lived, fucked, and died.
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Wouldn’t want to become a lord of them, that would be total anarchy. Heh Heh.
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Bad joke aside, today I would like to talk about war with you dear reader.
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I know it must seem out of the blue, but hear me out, war is bad.
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I understand that that is a very complex and nuanced statement, but if you’re still with me space cadet, I would like to ponder a question with you.
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If war is bad, how do you write it.
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More so to what degree should we display the horrors of war?
Can we even do it justice, or will writers forever give an incomplete picture of terrible events?
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Questions, questions, there are always so many, but rarely are answers given in return.
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Luckily, I am here to come to conclusions reader, and conclusions I’m sure to find.
This narrative has been purloined without the author's approval. Report any appearances on Amazon.
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Let us start with the relevance of war dear reader, not in a geopolitical setting, but one of fiction and fantasy. What can war provide us that other settings cannot?
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In as few words as I can manage: brutality, dear reader, brutality.
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One does not have to peruse grand libraries to find the accounts of wars long passed, it is a simple affair really, but one with great consequence dear reader. See, regardless of one’s sect, nation or creed, war will come to bring out the worst in people.
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And that allows for events one could hardly find a logical excuse for otherwise to be committed without many people asking for a why.
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Think of it like this, war is like a hammer driving in a nail, if you just use it often enough and with adequate force then you should reach your goal sooner or later.
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Of course, war can also be a precise tool in the hands of the skilled, with surgical precision an author can suture himself a world wherein the complexities of war are on full display, for all to admire or to be horrified by.
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Luckily, most authors are not so skilled, so a hammer it shall stay for now.
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Continuing on, if we know that war is a tool used to display brutality why choose it over something else, why not center the plot around a bar fight gone bad or an act of torture, both can display brutality, but both lack something that war has dear reader.
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Scale.
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Whether it is a band of 500 or 500 000, war allows for brutality on a large scale.
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While it may seem odd, I would like you to know reader that I do not think that it is the people involved that matter, but rather knowing that the horrific actions seen were committed and condoned by a group of great size.
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The individual falls away in the crowd, and the actions of the crowd bear burden on the individual.
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Hmm
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You lose the effect of person to person interaction, but gain something deeper when in group.
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Something like that.
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Maybe thinking of it like this is better: one, two or even a dozen of people committing great sin can be reasoned away as a few bad apples, hundreds upon thousands however, that’s not so easily thought away.
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My own inadequacies are bearing themselves dear reader, can’t quite get it right.
I think that somewhere there, there is a good enough answer for the ‘why’.
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Which is why I’ll be moving on post-haste.
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Assuredly great revelations aside, a question that I have had was about stories that don’t use this aspect of war, I realize after all that war, while being a horrible thing, is often times more about who wins and who loses and not the implicit actions needed to get to those victories, at least when used as a plot device in fiction.
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I think the answer can be found by making the scale of conflict a bit smaller.
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Overcoming the personal struggle or one’s personal war, in Islam they call it the greater jihad, in Buddhism it is the understanding of the four noble truths, in Christianity it is done through faith in Jesus Christ.
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Many more religions and ideologies talk about struggles, their origins and how they can be overcome, and while I’m sure that going into depth on these topics would be very, very interesting to you dear reader, I’ll spare you the philosophy in so far as I can.
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To keep a long story short I believe that the aspect of war used to display victory and defeat is the same one used to display a personal struggle, in this case it is likely that the group does not matter, but the protagonist who plays a role in this group.
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Combinations of the two are of course also possible, but I think that’s a topic for tomorrow as I need sleep.
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Sleep well dear reader. I most certainly will.