Jess Campbell  ✨

Because, honestly, that’s a question with no real answer. There’s no actual diagram for figuring it out. It just takes a lot of time, reaction and consequence. And time, reaction and consequence is what a book is, more or less. So every story about it is new and hard.

It’s also why I never mind when reviews give me shit about my characters crying and having angst. Pain is uncomfortable to watch because none of us want to think that, under all of us, that’s what’s left. But without looking at that, we can’t figure out what’s under the pain.

Because, I mean, what’s the alternative? Not tell the story? “Everyone agreed quietly to never speak of it again and go back to fighting dragons?” It feels dishonest to pretend we come away from our wounds just mildly inconvenienced. We change. Or so I like to think.

There was once an audience question on a panel where someone asked if relationships really matter when the fate of the world’s at stake and I think about it all the time because yes, they matter. Getting cut isn’t the same as a bomb being dropped, but it still fucking hurts.

But I guess that mindset isn’t uncommon because people are always trying to write stories to quantify, quality or otherwise measure pain so that we don’t have to be afraid of it anymore, but that’s so fucking stupid because you can think about it all you want and it’ll still hurt

People always want clean stories with satisfying arcs where every answer at the end is the right one, but that’s so fucking pointless because to have the right answer at the end, you have to have made every right answer along the way, which is just a lie. It can’t be done.

So you write characters who hurt and then you go with them as they try to figure out how to make it hurt less. And in the end, they’re either okay or they’re not. And that’s not clean and it’s not always satisfying, but it is truthful and it is real. So you just keep doing it.

It’s weird because the audience is almost tangential to this. Every great novel is just an author talking to themselves for 300-900 pages trying to figure something out. I say “almost” because you also hope that the answer you find is one that someone else was looking for.