Cruelty

[William Ramsay]

I don't know if anyone else has had this problem. After immersing myself in sources treating the thirteenth century, I found myself giving one my kind of nicey-nice characters in my novel "Dark Princess" a penchant for dashing infants' heads against the wall and such like. In my "Me and King John," too, I found myself building up the "evil" king as a pretty ruthless guy -- but coming out of it thinking of it as ho-hum, he's just like everybody else. The point is, not that men haven't always been wolves to other men, as the Latin tag has it, but that even in this time of holocausts and ethnic cleansings, do we take cruelty to other human beings more seriously than they did back then? Has anyone else noticed this phenomenon?

[William Ramsay]

Well, maybe the lessons of the Holocaust, Bosnia, Rwanda, Darfur -- not to mention names closer to home like Abu Ghraib -- are that the beast inside is always with us. So what can we writers dealing with tales based on the historical record contribute in all this -- if anything? Many of you, my colleagues, deal primarily with the other side of the human coin -- love, romance, the things we say (beautiful) dreams are made on -- but still, without the substratum of hate, anger, viciousness, we authors usually have no story. Stories aren't made on the middling events of life, but on strong passions in conflict. Jane Eyre and Mr. Rochester wouldn't be very interesting without Mrs. Rochester. It's human nature to try to cover up the terrifying bestiality of the human psyche -- but still, what really fascinates your readers is if you can provide them with an original way of glimpsing into the abyss (without getting them too disgusted or scared off!). [See also the blog on my own site on this]