A soft heart and a hard heart

Writing stories requires a challenging balance of a soft heart and a hard heart. 

A soft heart so that you can empathize with your characters and understand the depth of feeling that they might be experiencing in situations that are painful or uncomfortable. 

A hard heart so that you can push them beyond their limits and put them in predicaments that might cause them—most probably will cause them—to experience pain. 

Sometimes I wonder if I have the heart for writing stories, my heart too soft, or not hard enough, so that I find myself writing stories without danger, without the kind of challenges that will test my characters, because I don’t want to see them suffer, and because, if you want to know the truth, I don’t really want to suffer with them. 

Stories without these kinds of painful challenges, or tests, or obstacles, no matter what you call them, end up somehow flat, while stories that bring pain into the world of a character-- and into the world of people who you come to know and love on the page as you write about them, spending time with them day after day--are somehow more compelling.

It’s why I admire a writer like Kristin Hannah who can balance a hard heart with a soft heart, and whose sprawling novel, The Great Alone, has been on my books-to-read list ever since I finished her novel, The Nightingale, a book that I wished wouldn’t end, despite the pain its characters had to endure. 

The Great Alone is filled with the kind of pain that takes a writer a hard heart to face, but it's filled with an abundance of love, too, an overwhelming love, for which a writer must possess a soft heart to stay with characters in such pain and not abandon them. 

Hannah writes about a young girl in The Great Alone whose father has suffered enough pain for a lifetime, a POW who returns from Vietnam a broken man, changed from the man he was when he left his wife and daughter to go overseas.

He’s a little like Chekov’s gun. You read and see his anger and frustration and you can’t help wondering when his temper is going to explode… and hurt the ones he loves, the characters—his wife, his daughter—who you’ve come to love, too.

The family moves to Alaska in what turns out to be a failed attempt to help him live a normal life. The long nights of darkness that far north overwhelm him, and his anger deepens as the nights lengthen, as does his jealousy over his wife’s glances at other men and his daughter’s budding romance with the son of one of the enemies that he’s made in town.

Before long he becomes so violent that you wonder why the girl and her mother stay with him rather than leave or escape… and it all comes down to their love for him and their fear of him. They love him despite the pain he causes and despite their fear--the mother afraid that she’ll lose his love, the daughter afraid her mother will suffer more pain at his hands if they stay.

I won’t spoil the story for you if you decide to read it, but I have to say that what impressed me about the story, and what got me thinking about the balance between a writer’s need to have a hard heart and a soft heart, was the way that Hannah dealt with the material, so filled with the deep pain and emotion of each character’s life.

Hannah didn’t shy away from putting her characters in dangerous--indeed, life-threatening--situations. She kept pushing them. And they kept going, unable to stop (because Hannah kept pushing). And I wondered as I turned the pages if the characters would break or survive the challenges placed in front of them. 

Even though I was prepared to put the book down early on because I wasn’t anxious to see how the father changed into a more violent, desperate man, I kept reading —I had to keep reading!— because I needed to know in the end if the daughter—and her mother—would survive.

Hard heart. Soft heart. How do we balance our compassion for our characters with the requirements of our story, to test them to the limits of their endurance (and our own)? 

Something to think about, I guess, as we return to our works-in-progress.