Violence Part 1 - Violence Is A Part of Us
We live in a violent world. It’s a part of life. Animals die violently in nature to feed other animals. We walk across a beautiful bed of grass
… and crush the life out of how many ants and other insects that were busily going about their lives thinking, “I’m so happy to be doing this.” And then … crush. They’re gone. We may not have intended
violence, but tell that to the ant.
But violence, like the characters in your stories, is more complex than it may appear on the surface. Here’s a scene from Heavy Load:
Why do I hang around with this skinny freak?
Chuck jumps towards Rick and slaps down towards the ball, but misses. Rick, not expecting the move, shoots it across
the floor to Bob, but Baxter intercepts, elbows Bob and breaks for the basket. Chuck gets there first and spreads his arms up just as Baxter shoots. The ball collides with Chuck's left hand, as it falls, he tries to
grab it, but Baxter is right in front of him and gets the ball first. Chuck reaches down and grabs Baxter by his testicles and yells: 'Hoho! Got the balls! Got the balls!' Baxter's eyes fill with fury and, with both
hands, he smashes the ball into Chuck's face with a loud thunk, drops the ball and punches Chuck in the nose with a hard grinding right fist, sending a spray of blood past both sides of Chuck's head.
Fucking asshole! Fucking asshole!
Then his left fist crunches into Chuck's jaw, and Chuck's eyes cross as he falls onto the floor where Baxter kicks
him in the side of his chest and then in the hips, and just as Baxter is bringing up his foot to stomp it down on Chuck's stomach, Bob and Rick grab both of his arms and pull him back.
'Get your fucking hands off me!' screams Baxter, struggling against the other two.
'Jesus, Baxter, cool it!' says Bob.
'He's on the effing floor!' yells Rick.
The gymnasium is quiet. Everyone stares at Baxter and the two teenagers holding him, and at Chuck on the floor, blood
streaming from his nose. Chuck rolls over on this side, both hands pressed against his rib cage where Baxter kicked him, and he groans.
'Cool it! Cool now, Baxter!' yells Bob. 'He's your best friend!'
Baxter stops struggling.
Shit! What've I done?
Baxter stares at Chuck on the floor, his eyes filled with disbelief. 'OK. OK. I'm cool now. Let go of me.'
Bob and Rick exchange glances, decide that Baxter has calmed down and let him go.
'Oh shit!' says Rick, looking at a man with white shorts and T-shirt with a metal whistle hanging down on this chest.
The man is making his way quickly towards Chuck.
'Jesus, Baxter,' says Bob. 'What was that all about?'
Baxter, still looking at Chuck with Rick over him, asking where it hurts, looks confused. 'I don't know. He just
pushed me. He grabbed my balls. I …'
Don’t much like Baxter, do you? He’s overbearing, violent, self-absorbed, and not much of a good sport. But, in the next few lines:
'Man,' says Bob, putting a hand on Baxter's shoulder. 'It was something more than that.'
Baxter looks into Bob's eyes, anger starting to flare up in him again: 'What's that supposed to …'
'While you were kicking him you were yelling: 'Fuck you, Mom, fuck you, Mom!''
Baxter was sexually abused by his mother when he was a child.
You have to ask yourself: Why did that person commit that act of violence?
No human is a single person. We’re all each of the people we’ve always been … when we were children, when we were teenagers, when we young
adults, when we were middle aged and when we’re old. We carry around with us all those people we’ve ever been – all the fears, all the joy, the anger and the love. Most of us deal with these things over time
and manage to bring all those people into a balance that allows us to function. Some of us never quite bring those people in us into that balance and this can cause us to act in ways that surprise us. We might
suddenly snap at someone for no reason, or we might overreact to some little thing that goes wrong. We have no idea where this comes from. It could be from problems in our everyday lives, or it could be from some
long unresolved hurt in our childhood, still festering and calling out for help in our adult lives.
It’s this richness of inner experience and the emotional impact it has on us for our entire lives that makes all of us complex and
multi-dimensional.
No one person is completely bad and no one person is completely good. If you have a character in your story who is completely evil with no redeeming
characteristics, then you have a piece of cardboard. Even a psychotic personality may have a deep fondness for chocolate ice cream. Adolf Hitler played a game with his general staff. When one of them saw a man with
a beard, they yelled beard. The one who saw the most number of beards won. Hitler had a sense of play. But he still caused the death of millions of men, women and children. And just about any one of us can become an
Adolf Hitler.
Here's something else I've written about something nasty at the base of human nature:
Some people say the human race is no better than flu … that we’re a virus threatening to spoil the universe and if aliens ever find out about
us, they’ll cure us right out of existence.
I have a theory about this.
Viruses never turn on themselves. They may be suicidal, but they’re not homicidal. They kill their host by accident and excess and
take themselves down in the process, but they never turn on themselves.
We do.
We kill our own kind. We kill our host. We kill ourselves. We kill everything that’s killable. We kill our children and our mates. We
kill for pleasure and recreation. We kill because it feels right and we kill when it feels wrong. We kill for our gods. We kill for nations and governments and ideals. We kill because voices in our heads tell us to
kill. We kill for profit and prophets. We kill to even the score and then we kill because there’s nothing else to do. We kill because it’s in our nature and we’re good at it.
Trust me. No aliens are going to mess with us. They’ll wait till we’re finished killing and then they’ll explore our garbage.
Feel free to disagree with me.
We’re all a mixture of many personalities, but we all have two sides … a dark side and a light side, and there's a lot of gray in between where
each of us can fall into either the light or the dark. And sometimes, we may dip between the two. When I was very young, I stayed with my grandparents for a year. My grandfather was a big tough Irish cop in Toronto.
When I stepped out of line, he beat the living hell out of me. But later, in the kitchen, he would be making up sandwiches for my lunch at school the next day, and one evening I watched him making one on. He took
great care as he made the sandwich and packed the lunch - he did it with loving care.
Most of us manage to stay within the bounds of the light side, but the dark is always there.
In our writing, it starts by loving our characters. If we love them enough to create them in our writing, then we have the responsibility of loving
them enough to give them life. We need to show not just the bad, but the good, or at least where the bad comes from. We need to show their good, but not neglect the bad … everyone has faults and we need to let our
characters, no matter how good, have their faults.
If you have a violent character, don’t let the violence just hang there. Show where it comes from. You have the breadth of story-telling in a
novel to do that. It doesn’t always come across in a movie … but it should be there in a novel. Sometimes, just the mention of a scar that the character rubs after committing an act of violence may suggest
something deeper and give some understanding of meaning to the violence or the character.
Writing Exercise
Write about a man or a woman punching another man or a woman in the face, over and over. Get inside the person doing the punching. Write only about
what's going on inside the head of the person doing the punching. You can state it explicitly or you can hint at it, but try to show where the anger and violence are coming from.
Discussion
Can violence be a good thing?
|
