Spending Time With People I Hate

Writing Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash has involved a frankly ridiculous amount of research.

I knew that would be the case when I started. There are psychological elements to this story that I wanted to understand properly before I tried to write them, and I have spent more hours than I can count reading about personality, attachment, relationships, behaviour and the sometimes enormous differences between how we understand ourselves and how we are experienced by other people.

At one point, I became so interested in the research that I seriously considered going back to school for a master's degree in psychology, which would be an exceptionally expensive and time-consuming way to research a novel. I haven't done it.

Yet.

What I didn't entirely anticipate was how different the actual experience of writing this book would be from writing On the Edge of After.

I've spent a lot of time with Merritt and Beau over the past few years, and I genuinely enjoy being with them. I realize they're fictional and therefore I am technically spending time alone at my computer, but this is an author blog and I'm assuming we can all agree to overlook that.

I like the way Merritt thinks. I like Beau's steadiness. I enjoy writing their conversations, their humour and the ordinary little moments between them. Even when I'm putting them through something terrible, I fundamentally understand them. There are parts of both characters that feel familiar to me, and slipping back into their perspectives usually feels comfortable.

Even the Fire has asked something very different of me.

There are characters in this book whose minds don't feel familiar or comfortable to me at all. Their internal logic isn't necessarily mine. Their understanding of themselves isn't mine. The conclusions they reach aren't always the conclusions I would reach, and sometimes writing them requires me to set aside my own immediate reaction long enough to understand how they got there.

And I've discovered that this is much harder than simply writing someone I disagree with.

I think most of us understand, at least intellectually, that people don't walk around believing they're the villain in their own story. What has been interesting to me as a writer is trying to figure out what that actually means when you're the one responsible for constructing the story they're telling themselves.

A character can do something I find appalling, but if I'm writing from inside that character's head, my opinion doesn't get to interrupt every few paragraphs to make sure the reader knows I disapprove. The character has to experience the moment according to their own understanding of it. They have to remember things the way they remember them, assign meaning according to their own beliefs and explain their choices to themselves in whatever way allows those choices to coexist with the person they believe themselves to be.

That doesn't mean I have to agree with them. It doesn't even necessarily mean I have to sympathize with them. But I do have to understand them.

Or, at the very least, understand them well enough to let them believe themselves.

I've found myself thinking about Cersei Lannister a lot while working on this book.

And I should probably make something very clear before I continue: I am not comparing my writing to George R.R. Martin's. At all. I enjoy having self-esteem and would like to preserve some of it.

What I mean is that trying to write characters whose internal worlds differ substantially from my own has given me a completely new appreciation for what he accomplished with Cersei in A Song of Ice and Fire.

Cersei fascinates me because Cersei believes Cersei.

She genuinely believes she is far more intelligent than the people around her give her credit for. She believes she has been underestimated and mistreated, and she has an explanation for her failures that allows those failures to remain somebody else's fault. Perhaps most interestingly to me, she genuinely believes she loves her children, even while the reader can see behaviour that complicates what she understands that love to mean.

That contradiction is allowed to exist without Cersei recognizing it as a contradiction.

I think that's extraordinarily difficult to write.

George R.R. Martin knows things about Cersei that Cersei doesn't know about herself, and the reader is allowed to know them too. But when we're inside her perspective, she isn't performing that lack of self-awareness for us. She isn't winking at the reader or conveniently recognizing her own hypocrisy so that we can be reassured the author recognizes it too.

She simply thinks.

And she's completely sincere.

I think that's one of the things I've become most interested in while writing Even the Fire: the space between a character's understanding of themselves and the reader's understanding of them.

It can be tempting, especially when writing someone whose choices make you uncomfortable, to protect yourself a little on the page. To make sure the reader knows that you, the author, know better. To leave little breadcrumbs of judgement so nobody could possibly mistake the character's worldview for your own.

But doing that would also mean never completely giving the character the page.

So I've been trying not to.

Instead, I've had to spend a lot of time asking questions I wouldn't necessarily ask if I were standing outside the character looking in. Not simply Why would somebody do this?, but What would have to be true in this person's mind for this choice to make sense? What do they think happened here? What do they believe they wanted? What do they believe the other person did? What part of the story are they telling themselves that I wouldn't tell myself?

Sometimes I find the answer fascinating.

Sometimes I would like to close my laptop and go spend some time with Merritt and Beau.

That, I think, has been the biggest difference between writing these two books. On the Edge of After certainly wasn't easy to write, particularly given the grief at the centre of Merritt's story, but I rarely felt as though I had to leave my own way of understanding people quite so completely.

With Even the Fire, I do.

And I'm being deliberately vague about exactly whose head I'm talking about because I'd quite like you to meet these people without me standing beside you waving warning flags and telling you what to think of them.

I want the characters to introduce themselves.

I want you to decide what you believe about them.

And then, perhaps, I want you to reconsider some of it.

For me, that means doing the uncomfortable work now. It means researching far beyond what will ever explicitly appear on the page, trying to understand perspectives I don't share and occasionally spending several hours looking at the world through the eyes of someone before thinking, Well. I have had quite enough of you for today.

Then I come back the next morning and do it again.

I don't know yet whether I've pulled it off. That's the slightly terrifying part of writing a book that isn't finished: there comes a point where you can know what you're attempting without knowing whether you've succeeded.

But I hope that all of this work means that when Even the Fire Loves You Until You Are Ash is eventually in someone else's hands, its characters will feel like people rather than arguments I'm making about people. I hope readers will understand why they make the choices they make without necessarily agreeing with those choices, and see the distance between who someone believes themselves to be and who they may appear to be from somewhere outside their own head.

Mostly, I hope nobody can see all the research underneath it.

Because, if I've done my job properly, you shouldn't.

You should just believe the character.

Even when you probably shouldn't.

Peace, love, and inspiration,
Britt 💚