Wild Bill Hickok
I’m reading a novel right now, by a very good author, which is taking me forever to get through. (I won’t say what novel—maybe I’ll review it at the end of the line.) It’s a pleasant story with an interesting narrator. But it’s so… languid. It starts with a murder, but then the plot takes the hero (and the villain) to an entirely different location, and the villain proceeds to do nothing very sinister for a considerable time. The hero is wearing himself out trying to catch the villain at something, but there seems to be nothing to catch. Thus the book lacks that sense of urgency that drives the reader to keep turning pages, and pick the book up anxiously whenever there’s a free moment.
It’s slow.
My analysis of the problem is this—the author has failed, thus far, to raise the stakes. In order to keep your audience’s attention, you need to keep the villain busy doing bad stuff. And that stuff must be devastating and costly. People who matter to the reader, and to the hero, need to be placed in imminent, horrifying danger (unless it’s the hero himself who’s in peril). The good characters’ awful pain and fear are the very elements that transfix the reader.
I think there are very few authors who don’t have a problem raising the stakes like this (I know I do). Most of us are nice people. We don’t enjoy inflicting pain. Raising the stakes is emotionally hard.
This relates to life too. I’ve written more than I have a moral right to about heroism. I believe in the necessity of heroism. I believe that faith and heroism are closely related (all heroism isn’t faith, but all true faith is heroism).
It’s easy to forget that heroism has a high cost.
When I was a kid, two of the western TV shows I enjoyed were “Wild Bill Hickok” and “Kit Carson.” Both were based (loosely) on the careers of real American frontiersmen. Each week on their programs, aimed at kids, some deadly peril was overcome. The heroes always shot straight. Their stratagems were always successful.
It’s not like that in real life, as you may have noticed.
I’ve read a fair amount about the real Wild Bill Hickok, and my impression is that, from the moment he read the first national newspaper article about himself printed in Harper’s Weekly in 1865, he made it his goal to actually be most of the things his press clippings said he was. He was a lawman, not an outlaw. He was one of the good guys, protecting life and property.
Until the night in 1871 when, in his capacity of town marshal of Abilene, Kansas, he was quelling a mob in the streets, and heard footsteps running up. He spun and fired, killing Mike Williams, a friend who was coming to help.
Hickok never made a public statement about how the shooting affected him, so far as I know. But I think it’s telling that he meekly accepted dismissal a couple months later, and is never known to have fired a gun in anger again in his life.
Kit Carson guided an Army detachment in the attempted rescue of a white woman named Ann White, kidnapped by the Apache, in 1849. As the soldiers attacked, one of the Apaches tomahawked the woman, killing her. Later, when the soldiers went through her possessions, they found a dime novel called Kit Carson: Prince of the Gold Hunters. It nagged at Carson for the rest of his life that the woman might have heard a rumor that the great hero was searching for her, and hoped that he’d be able to perform for her as he had for fictional ladies in distress.
Heroism has its cost. The part the TV shows and dime novels mostly left out was the part where the hero fails, where he can’t meet the impossible demands of a fallen world, when people who depend on him get hurt.
In the heroism of faith, I think, this is where many fall. If our faith leans too much on our own performance, and not enough on the fact of grace, the weight of heroism can crush us.
I find that those who set out to be heroes are generally a danger to themselves and those around them. True heroes tend to find themselves in a demanding situation and rise to the demands.
I recently did a funeral for a man who’d been awarded both the Silver Star and the Bronze Star for his WWII service on Okinawa. I mentioned this to my Father-In-Law who had served as one of the Iron Men of Metz, marching across Europe under Patton’s direction. He noted that many more of those medals should have been given out but for officers who didn’t take the time to write up certain incidents.
He shared a couple of incidents where squad-mates had sacrificed themselves for the unit and were never written up. Reading between the lines I wonder if there wasn’t a bit of political posturing in that some of these incidents would have cast less than honorable light upon the officer involved.
Good post, not that I need to say it.
Thanks for your words.
I share much of Greybeard’s cynicism about those who want to be heroes; it seems very much easier to claim a position of heroism, sometimes, than examine the truth of one’s own position.
But that said, a prime element of writing–or doing–anything worthwhile is embracing the potential of failure. In writing this is particularly acute–the whole point of making a book is to have a lot of people read it, and if that happens it seems almost certain that a portion of them will hate it. If the book engages deeply with evil it will, as you put it, inflict pain. There may be readers for whom the book inflicts pain, but doesn’t provide healing, or readers for whom the book simply inflicts more pain than they feel capable of encountering–readers who, like Ann White, are harmed by the book.
As an author, one has to face this (I think) and tell the truth, in a manner appropriate to one’s media and vision. An author writes (at times, if he has such a vision) horrors, because literature is one of our great resources for dealing with horrors. And then he sits back and take what comes, as courageously and honestly as possible.
An author does this because the only other option is to remain silent, and because without the courage to risk pain there would have been none of the great works that have come before.