A quick thought, as I progress through my day: how do you keep your sanity when your writing starts to hit too close to home?
The Agartes Epilogues is often funny, sprinkled with a lot of my characteristic black humour, but it is also deathly serious–perhaps one of my most serious novels. The themes run deep. Poverty. Purpose. Legacy. Rebirth. But perhaps, more importantly, children. If there is one quote that defines the series, it is right in the Prologue for Jaeth’s Eye:
“He tried to remember what his mother’s hair smelled like, realized he couldn’t. He couldn’t even remember her face. He could still hear the laughter in the courtyard, could still remember the timbre in Aldeti’s viol and the way the candles flickered each time he kissed them good-night. One never forgets the taste of water or the smell of air. But water and air…is only water and air. He could remember the feel of his infant child in his arms twelve years ago, but could he hold on to everything for the rest of his life? They were all irrevocably behind him, now.”
Without a shadow of a doubt, that prologue is the hardest thing I’ve ever written to date. Some people wonder if it is even necessary, and I say this: it is, if you are to understand how the series ends.
Writing is often entertaining, but I think a lot of writers do it because it is their way of expressing their feelings or processing their view of the world. I think about how the Grey Havens is for Tolkien. Or the idea of Narnia, in general. Dostoevsky, particularly some of the chapters in The Brothers Karamazov that seem pointless until you understand the background. I can go on and on.
I don’t mean that novels always have to be cerebral or that you can’t have lighthearted novels at all. Heck, most of my work is lighthearted, and…don’t let other writers fool you, but we make most of that shit up. Write what you know can only be taken so far, because eventually you will want to either write about what you don’t know or you want to explore the limits of imagination.
I just mean that occasionally, there is this feeling, that a part of your soul jumps into your work. I don’t know how to explain it. I guess it’s just that I can imagine Agartes singing something like this to Vayna and the hurt is more than I can bear. Why write it at all? Because the story needed for it to be written. It was not done for effect.
I’ll tell you this: as much as I am looking forward to finishing this trilogy, I am dreading some very important parts of it.
