Tales From The Troubled Brow

(via R.I.P. Reggie Bannister, Phantasm star)

Hmm. I can't speak for others, but I don't go in for the cackling too much, as a rule.

I may be kind of an outlier in this regard, admittedly... but once you've been doing this work more or less constantly for twenty or thirty or forty years (and I'm coming up on fifty years of this, now), you'll increasingly have it borne in on you—if you're at all observant—that what pain you inflict on your characters, you yourself (if you're doing your characters and their experiences justice) are going to have to experience inside your own head. Briefly, maybe, sure. But often repeatedly. Often excruciatingly. ...And the more universes you're working in, the more pain you're going to have to "live" through in order to describe it adequately.

Got sufficient skin in this game to play the game well? Then that skin's gonna bleed in ways that sometimes subtly, but unavoidably, affect you personally. Do this for long enough, and you may find you don't have a whole lot of cackling on tap when you shove one or another much-loved (or even much-hated!) character headfirst into the grinder. (And shouting "Trust me, this is for your own good!" after them is only going to get you so far. It's way too easy to imagine a level or so of reality more central, further inwards toward the white-hot Core of things, from which someone's yelling that at you.)

What does make me snicker, though—and pretty frequently—is the thought of how one or another of my readerships is going to take one or another piece of character or plotline-event business. "Oh cripes, they're gonna want to kill me when they see this." (grin) That I absolutely do do, repeatedly.

And you know what? What I usually tell myself at such times (regarding the readership in question), if the subject comes up for reflection, is "And if they're cranky about it, well, they brought it on themselves." People who read my work at all regularly know by now that I won't shy away from the pain—for the readers or the characters—when the drama requires it. Certainly I am in service to great Thalia, on and off: but by and large, mighty Melpomene commands more of my attention. Draumaturgically speaking, joy does often come after katharsis. But the pain has to happen first, or there's no contrast to make the cathartic content do what it's meant to. And that's where my primary loyalty lies: the core of Drama, and what it was invented for.