Overbury Ink

Ian LeWinter and Don Richmond are The Brothers of the Silence, the creative duo behind “Blank Death” the first in the “Blank Must Die” Trilogy. Check it out at Blank Must Die

“The reasonable man adapts himself to the world. The unreasonable one [writer] persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore, all progress depends on the unreasonable man [writer].” – George Bernard Shaw

Some of us write to set things right. It’s as if we are secretly driven to the street corner, the podium, or the pulpit. Not only do we feel the intense recognition and projected damnation of acts and events that drives us, but also an uncontrollable need to reveal our shortcomings. In the end, we need to know the world knows. Everything is illuminated.

And many of us believe that if we offer up a convincing argument to the world, evidenced and explained, that a new age of enlightenment will dawn and humankind will be saved from itself.  No really, we do believe this, sometimes secretly, sometimes openly. And, we believe it long after it remains reasonable to do so.

As writers our perceptions of the world may be gilded and jaded at the same time, just as the perceptions and projections of the things we write about actually are. Often the descriptions of what occurred are forever altered in the warped fun-house mirror of our minds, genuinely believed to be true and plumb. The distortions are a matter of self-protection.

Orwell believed this. He called the altered perceptions often emerging from the minds of the severely traumatized, “Doublethink”, or in modern psychiatry, “dissociation”. Orwell coined the phrase to mean that one is “exercising the power of holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them.”

Writers often begin the journey of creation with interviews of both the directly and the marginally affected. Those who witness events from a distance, or who were privy to a part of a larger occurrence, often provide clear and accurate descriptions. We hope to piece enough of these accounts together into a ever-clearer montage of the truth, a jig-saw puzzle of reality.

But those we term “victims,” the people whose lives will be forever affected, can only provide us a narrative whose reliability is suspect. And as Orwell was convinced, they convey it with complete conviction and moral certitude. You can’t really be angry with them. We can all understand why some things are too terrible to think about, too terrible to remember. I suspect that every human on earth carries at least one thing, one event, or one memory that they hope to never think of again.

While I don’t blame them, I will always want to write about those very things. Not to hurt them, not to cause them the pain of remembering, but to make sure that whatever it was never happens again. I know I’m too chicken for the street-corner — but give me a sheet of paper any day and I’ll gladly jump up and down on it until you get my point. (To be continued.)