Dear (My main character),
You might be wondering why I didn’t let you be as good and perfect and noble as I know you truly wanted to be. Why?–you might ask–did I not protect you from those moral dilemmas that you’re still not sure you dealt with the way you should have. Why didn’t I remove the obstacles to your purity and kindness? Why did you have to get your hands dirty and find out that you’re more of a hypocrite than you ever thought you would be? Why did you have to find out that you too (not just your enemies) had prejudices and hatreds and bitterness?
Well, I have to admit, it’s because I love you. And I wanted you to live, even though I knew it would lead to this painful result. When I shielded you from complex situations, from mixed motives, from selfishness, from ruthlessness–from lies of omission–you were dead on the page. Less even than a puppet, you were as flat and bland as cardboard. I could scarcely see you, you were so unreal. You had the dry dust taste of something that cannot really nourish, cannot satisfy, cannot strengthen.
It isn’t that I wanted you to make mistakes. It isn’t that I wanted your heart to harden, till you turned back and looked, aghast, at what you have become, at how you’ve treated those you claim to love. I want you to do right and be righteous too, believe it or not. But I had to provide opportunities for failure, otherwise it would all have been a sham, a fake. Empty, empty, empty. And once I provided those opportunities for failure, guess what? Sometimes, you failed.
Look, it was inevitable. Being pretty emphatically not perfect myself, I just don’t know what perfect looks like. So if I tried to portray it, it would never work. I can only give you my own flaws and my own same wish that I did not have those flaws.
“For what I want to do, I do not do, but what I hate, I do…what a wretched man I am!”
Obviously you’ve never heard those words, being fictional and in a fantasy world, but think you understand them in your bones. Anyone who is even the least bit alive and the least bit honest probably does.
I think authors usually imagine that their characters would complain about all the turmoil we put them through. But I don’t think that is your complaint. You are the sort of person that accepts that hardship is part of life. You assume it. So I won’t address that. For your turmoil, I have my reasons.
But here is the answer to the question that really plagues you. Not why didn’t I protect you from hardship, but why didn’t I protect you from the darkness within yourself.
Well now you know. I had to shed light on it lest you be a shell of a person. If I have to face the brutal facts about my own soul, so do you.
Love,
The author
If you like a character with strong convictions, fierce beliefs, and a deep desire to do what is right, but whose hands don’t always stay clean, and who doesn’t always live up to their own ideals, you might like the main character of my book: Azetla. He’s a pariah, a debt-soldier, a leader (so long as it’s not on the record), a lefty, and figures that ‘the only way out, is through.’
J. L. Odom 