Mercy! Mercy! That Dang Nabed PERCY!

Good and Bad

Good and Bad

One of the reasons I like fiction is because I’m fascinated by the interplay of good and bad (evil). Most writers skew their protagonists too far to the positive side and their antagonists too fare to the negative. Readers like this because they don’t have to think too much and can focus instead on the story line. They can love the good guys and hate the bad guys. Reading fiction is not about truth as much as it is about entertainment.

For my part however, I love to see characters trying to give the good in themselves ascendancy over the bad. These are characters who marshal the goodness in themselves and use it to control the badness. One of the things I like about Stephenie Meyer is that the story is about a family of Vampires that struggles to control a dark force that is so huge it can’t be concealed. The whole story revolves around that struggle. Yesterday I read the short “second life of bree tanner.” (Note the lower case.)

This novella takes a compelling character that emerges briefly and develops the world around which she evolved. How she came to perceive the world in which she lived until flowing into the main Twilight story thread. She is one of three compelling characters (Diego and Fred) that emerge and no doubt Fred will emerge as a future character in the series. Bree is a character Bella sees in a conflict and begins to wonder about. So does the Author, Meyer. She says in the Introduction, “I imagined the world as Bree understood it…I started thinking about living in the basement with the newborns and hunting traditional vampire-style.“

She uses the words, “I thought” and “I imagined” and clearly from her understanding the ideas originated inside her mind. That could very well be…the difference between the way she sees it and the way I do is simply this. I think she asked her muse to tell her what was going on between Bella and this “Enemy” Bree and her muse started telling her and Ms. Meyer started writing like heck. She became so caught up in the thread that she backed off from editing her best selling novel series to capture what was being revealed to her….in the process she was introduced to some new characters that are fascinating indeed.

There is a trade-off between focus and digression. We as writers definitely need enough focus to put aside matters outside the scope of the central thread and finish what we start. The down side is that when we refuse to digress and explore we never get to hear the side stories. I am glad Meyer took the time to digress and share Bree’s story.

I read a lot of things on Writing.com that sound like digressions from a larger work and they have a freshness that is often their signature. Sometimes, particularly in a contest entry, I suspect the structure of one of those digressions is being used to capture the prompt. It’s fun to read contest submissions and I encourage everyone to participate. The same holds true for some of the classes that are offered at a bargain