Agony! Beyond Power of Speech!

I've been overhauling a very gloomy story lately. Several characters have distinctive Great Tragedies, and nobody comes out on top. Bad things happen to everyone and no punches are ever pulled. With apologies to Stephen Sondheim, every time I contemplate heaping more misfortune upon my poor characters, all I can imagine is said characters banding together to sing their own rendition of Agony from Into the Woods.

"Agony! / Far more painful than yours! / When you know she would kill you / if it opened plot doors!"

Replotting the story and figuring out the fates of all my named characters has gotten me thinking: it's not just me who's cruel to these fictional people; it's popular for writers and authors all over the Internet to detail just how much fun they've been having torturing their brain babies. What's up with that? Are writers just all sadists who turn their desire to maim and harass to people they can torment without going to jail?

I'm still not ruling out that particular possibility, but I've spent some time thinking about the question and I think I've come up with an answer:

Life is pain, Highness, and not everyone knows how best to deal with that pain. Life is long and full of misfortunes big and small, and humans being who we are, we've come up with many varied ways to cope with that. Some coping mechanisms are healthy, some are destructive, and some are so common and vital that there's an entire industry devoted to them: namely, the publishing industry.

Books, I think, are one of humanity's shared ways of coping with all the bad stuff. We writers heap all this misfortune on characters because misfortune is part of daily life, whether that misfortune comes by way of losing keys or by way of something bigger and much more painful. As writers, we know all about how no matter how fantastical a world, there has to be a tie to reality. That tie, it seems, is that everyone goes through unpleasant things.

We heap these horrible events on our characters to see how far it takes to break them, and what happens when they break. Some fall, some die, some transform into unimaginable beasts. Some, though...some use their pain and their anguish and transform into something shiny and new. Some make it through the horrible events their writers heap upon them, and they come out victorious.

We as humans know the world is full of darkness, and we as writers take that darkness and throw it at our characters. We as readers devour these stories. And why? Because we want to see people go through hell and come out shiny and new. We want to see people succeed and we want to know that no matter what demons the characters face--whatever demons we face--there is still a chance to defeat those demons and find safety, security, happiness.

People go through hell, and they don't always come out on top. Similarly, not all characters come out on top. But as long as there's a chance for those characters to win, we'll keep reading and writing about people going through hell. Misfortune is unavoidable, but if people in books can get through it...well, maybe we can, too.

Or maybe writers are just sadists. Who knows?

'Til next time,
J.