I wrote earlier this week about wolves being a metaphor for internal issues that can impact the writing. I liked the image of the big, bad, wolf from Little Red Riding Hood, standing by the straight and true path of my plot. The wolf was offering a basket of goodies and a red cloak to help me stray off the path, but today I remembered that there’s more than one kind of wolf. Little Red’s wolf was a surprise issue that just stands beside the plot of the book and waylays me, but today’s wolf was a little more personal.
Some issues are old ones. The issue that I’m trying to exorcise in the current scene I’m writing is one that was created starting about fifth grade, or so. Maybe earlier, but I think I didn’t really fight back against my grandmother’s rules until I was at least eleven, so fifth grade. From the moment I began to balk successfully at the law of the land, she wasn’t very happy with me. She raised me to be strong, independent, but she didn’t mean for me to be independent of her. That was one of those unforeseen consequences that parents run into when they think they’ve got their bases covered, only to find that someone has snuck from third with the bases loaded, and your catcher is running for a fly ball on the wrong side of home base.
As most rebellions go, it started quietly, small victories, small losses – on both sides. It’s a common parental/child struggle. The child wants to be their own person, the parent wants to keep control; a very old story. My grandmother found a new addition to that old see-saw of parent and child. At some point she began telling me that I was evil, a monster, for wanting to do anything that wasn’t to her liking. I wasn’t a wild child. What I wanted to do was be in drama society, work on plays, try out for parts. I was evil for wanting to do it, but do it, I did. I loved drama and speech team, even as the public parts terrified me. Then I wanted to play Dungeons and Dragons at other people’s houses, which took me out of our house and kept me out late. That was a bigger fight, and I was a monster for wanting to go and leave her on the weekends. My grandmother had already spent my childhood telling me how evil my father was, he’d divorced my mother when I was a baby, and to all accounts it wasn’t a good marriage, but I was half my father, at some level all children understand that they get half from mom, and half from dad, and though he was never a real father to me, growing up being told he was bad, made me feel bad. Then she added actually calling me evil and a monster, and my answer to that was to look her in the eye, and say, “Fine, I’m evil. I’m the monster.” And then I’d go do it, whatever it was that we were fighting about. I thought I’d handled the situation well. I thought it was as healthy a way to handle it as I could find as a teenager, and into my early twenties, but as it turns out, not so healthy.
I internalized the words, “I’m evil. I’m the monster, but I’m going to do it anyway.” It made me fiercely independent, stubborn, and just plan determined, but under it all I felt like I was evil and a monster, because words have power and if you hear them often enough, say them often enough they gain more power. The woman who raised me, the only “nuclear” family I had was a loud voice in my subconscious. My reply to her words was louder. Together those phrases had carved their way into the depths of my being, into the core of my sense of self. It wasn’t a great message to carry around in my head, about myself.
I’m writing a scene in the latest Anita Blake novel. It’s a scene where Anita does something legal, but Zerbrowski is actually using her as the bogey-man behind the closet door to frighten the vampire suspect into giving a location of vampires that murdered some police officers. It’s all legal, but it’s not entirely moral, or is it? Anita debates with herself, because this will make her feel badly about herself, but she is willing to do it in order to save lives of the next victims. Larry Kirkland, another U. S. Marshal and vampire executioner, flatly refuses. He says, “It’s an evil thing to do, Anita, and you know it.” At the end of the scene, Anita calls herself a monster, and manipulates the conversation so that Larry calls her one, too. Sometimes the echo of an old issue just rises up and slaps you across the face; today was one of those days.
It used to be that I didn’t realize what issue I was working until after the book was finished, but the last few books I know while I’m doing it, and sometimes, like today I know before I write it. I hate knowing ahead of time that a painful issue is about to step onto the paper. It makes me feel self-conscious awkward, or just plain bad. This issue, this wolf, lived behind the door of the bedroom I shared with my grandmother. This wolf has been by my side for a very long time. He offered me up my toothpaste in the morning, sat beside me in my car, just been there, beside me, waiting for me to do something about him. Waiting to see what I would do. What I did in real life was to get good therapy, to understand that my grandmother didn’t mean it the way it sounded, and that she probably had the same thing said to her by her father, or her older sisters who did most of the raising of her since she was the next to youngest surviving child of thirteen. She was only three when here mother died trying to give birth to a fourteenth baby. Her life was hard, it made her hard, and she made sure that I wasn’t soft. By the time I left home at twenty-one I was cooked all the way through, no doughy parts in this cupcake. It made me stronger. It made me who I am, and certainly the writer I am to have this wolf at my door from such a young age.
People ask where I get my inspiration for Anita and her world. There are lots of answers to that, and they’re all true, but reading the above, it’s sort of painfully clear where a lot of Anita and her world come from. Anita is afraid she’s become a monster. She’s afraid she’s been one all along, because of being able to see ghosts and raise the dead as a child. She’s afraid she was never really human. Jean-Claude is afraid of becoming the monster that Belle Morte, the creator of his bloodline, was, and is. Richard, our tortured leader of the local werewolves, hates being a monster so much that he self-destructs over and over again. I’m hoping recent good fictional therapy will finally stop that destructive cycle. I had Edward from the first book, who was an assassin who specialized in monsters, and Edward was happy being the scariest monster of all, but as the books have gone on he’s discovered there’s more to him than that. Edward is less monstrous, and Anita continues to doubt her humanity. My books are littered with characters that are monsters, or fear they are, or are happy to be evil. Some enjoy their depravity like Raina the ex-lupa of the werewolves, and Gabriel the ex-leader of the wereleopards. They happily ate the scenery and anyone else they wanted to for a few books. I have a lot of serial killers in my books, too, and if the term monster is ever accurately applied to humans this is one of them. A lot of people are fascinated with that darkest of sides of human nature, but I now know that there’s a reason I research monsters both fictional and nonfictional. I write about monsters because I grew up being told I was one.
The wolf is tall and stands beside my chair as I type this. He stands upright on wolf legs like the illustrations in the old Brother’s Grimm. He pants and looks at what I write with yellow wolfy eyes. My what big teeth you have . . . His breath is hot, as if it should burn as it touches my skin. I have at least one more day of this scene, maybe two, and while I write it the wolf will be by my side. He’ll stand guard, a reminder of the past that was so interesting, so painful, that it created a lifelong fascination with monsters. I loved monsters before my mother’s death. She died when I was six, and then it was just me and my grandmother. Oh, I had aunts, uncles, cousins, but what goes on behind closed doors is secret, because my family’s rule was that the truly awful things were said and done only to family, we were great to strangers. They got your company manners. Family got something else.
I hate knowing that this scene has to be written. I hate knowing that I get up to it tomorrow, but a part of me is relieved. A part of me knows that I have to kick the wolf in the ass and put it on paper to lay this burden down once and for all. I’ve almost worked this issue, but Anita isn’t as close to resolution on it. It’s one of the issues we share, we don’t share all the same issues, not even close. In fact, Anita has acquired some issues that are just hers, and that I’ve never had at all. Even a fictional life leaves it’s scars. Tomorrow this tall, furry, issue gets run through it’s paces, again. My theme of monsters and who is, and isn’t one, won’t be gone after this week. The issue is too much a part of my muse for it to be gone completely, but it will be better, smaller, more manageable, if seven foot tall bipedal wolves can be manageable?
I just realized that I chose Red Riding Hood’s wolf, and he dresses up as her grandmother, and then eats her. Wow, that’s a therapy bill waiting to happen, or maybe it’s just a book that needs writing, and I need to find a woodsman with a really sharp axe to cut me free. My fictional friends will help me kill the big, bad wolf, and then maybe I can rescue the grandmother that got eaten first, and rewrite this story.