The prequel duology I’m working on scares me. Though it’s set in the same world as my Purification Era series, it’s at a darker point in their history. An ugly, horribly wicked time.
If I’m honest, though I love the characters and their story, the main guy (Hasi)… He’s dark, guys. Really dark. He’s not a good person. He’s not a noble hero. He’s fallen. Sinful. Cruel. Racist. Violent. Hardened. He has good qualities too, of course, but he does awful things, makes bad choices, uses people.
And I’ve worried so much and so often about whether I can get readers to like him eventually, whether I can write him in a way that people root for him – not hope he meets a fiery demise. I’ve wanted to shy away from his darkness, tone him down, make him better/less offensive. It’s easier to redeem characters who aren’t quite at the bottom of the pit, who aren’t seen as reprehensible monsters.
The duology is a love story, a war story, a story of healing and hope…but it’s so much more than that.
It is my heart poured out. It is the answer to the question, “Who can be saved?” – an answer I will speak until I have no more breath in me, an answer I will write until my body crumbles.
It is redemption. It is hope for those the world has given up on, written off.
For this is what I believe, what I stand on, what I bleed: NO ONE is beyond redemption unless they refuse it. No one is too far gone, too dark, too broken, too dirty. Who can be saved? Anyone who accepts the Hand reaching for them. There is no pit so deep that God’s love is not deeper still. And though my stories are not explicitly Christian, we always write from what is within us. Jesus is in me, so He is what comes out at the core of everything.
Thus, regardless of fear, I MUST write it. Some may hate it. Some may blast me for it. Some may never read my writing again.
But it’s not so much about how it is received as it is me doing what I feel called to do – writing the story God has put on my heart. Writing the ones trapped in deep darkness to show how the light can find them even there.
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