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edenfallingNonviolence means avoiding not only external physical violence but also internal violence of spirit. You not only refuse to shoot a man, but you refuse to hate him.
---Martin Luther King, Jr.
Yes, yes, a thousand times YES.
Hatred is corrosive. It turns on both subject and object alike. It destroys everything with no regard to your original intentions.
To quote Nietzsche, who knew something about negative emotions, "Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein." (He who fights with monsters should take care lest, in the process, he become a monster himself. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss looks back into you.)
You can stand against something or someone without hatred. That may be the hardest thing in the world to do -- to refuse to dehumanize those who hate and hurt you -- but it's one of the noblest things in the world, too.
Impossible goals are worth striving for. Ideals are worth keeping faith. Always, always, always.
---------------------------------------------
In other news, I think I may finally have figured out the structural problem in chapter 11 of "Guardian," which should let me get back to work there. I have been beating my head against the story for three months now, so this is both a relief and an additional source of frustration, because I can't believe it's taken so long to figure out something so simple. *headdesk*
Also, chapter 12 of "Secrets" is coming along nicely. Ginny is having moral conflicts all over the place and doing a couple incredibly stupid things as a result, the upshot of which is that I get to write another creepy dream sequence. Yay! And then I get to write a blackout, the aftermath of another attack, and Ginny scrambling to deal with the guilt and make sure Tom can't trick her again. *evil grin*
One thing I particularly like about "Secrets" is that I get to make Ginny an active character rather than a passive one who might as well be a plot device. For one thing, it's more consistent with her characterization in later books, and for another, the story just works better if you assume she's trying, however ineptly, to solve her problems rather than blankly wandering around under Tom's control. It's the only way I could account for the long gaps between the attacks, and for the way she abruptly steals the diary after leaving it in Harry's hands for three whole months.
I suppose I could account for that by saying it's all part of Tom's Sekrit Evol Plan to lull Harry and Dumbledore into false complacency, but I have no interest in writing a totally passive character. First, it's boring. Second, it doesn't make sense, since Ginny clearly carried on her life well enough that nobody suspected anything was wrong (beyond a minor health problem, perhaps). And third, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes of helpless women needing to be saved by big strong heroic men.
Yes, in the end Ginny does need Harry to save her, but I want to twist that so the point is that people fight better when they're not fighting alone, not that girls can't fight. Harry doesn't save Ginny alone, after all. He has Ron and Fawkes and the Sorting Hat (and the memory of Dumbledore's words) to help him. Ginny, on the other hand, has been trying to fight Tom without asking for anyone's help. She almost tells Harry something just before the climax, but she loses her nerve and keeps her problems to herself. Therefore, she fails.
It's the same lesson Harry had to learn in OotP and HBP -- you can't do everything by yourself. Standing alone doesn't protect anyone, because without support, you'll fall. Then your friends will still be in danger... only now they won't have you to help them.
I'm not sure how well I'm doing in getting that point across -- the importance of human connections, the dangers of isolation -- but it's something I've been trying to say since the beginning of "Secrets." The reason Ginny was so vulnerable to Tom, after all, is that she didn't have other friends, and she didn't seem to have much support from her family either. Count how many times Ron talks to Ginny in CoS. It's a small number. I think the twins and Percy actually appear more often -- or at least have more dialogue -- which is, to me, very telling.
Okay, enough blabbing. I'm off to work on the stories.
---Martin Luther King, Jr.
Yes, yes, a thousand times YES.
Hatred is corrosive. It turns on both subject and object alike. It destroys everything with no regard to your original intentions.
To quote Nietzsche, who knew something about negative emotions, "Wer mit Ungeheuern kämpft, mag zusehn, daß er nicht dabei zum Ungeheuer wird. Und wenn du lange in einen Abgrund blickst, blickt der Abgrund auch in dich hinein." (He who fights with monsters should take care lest, in the process, he become a monster himself. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss looks back into you.)
You can stand against something or someone without hatred. That may be the hardest thing in the world to do -- to refuse to dehumanize those who hate and hurt you -- but it's one of the noblest things in the world, too.
Impossible goals are worth striving for. Ideals are worth keeping faith. Always, always, always.
---------------------------------------------
In other news, I think I may finally have figured out the structural problem in chapter 11 of "Guardian," which should let me get back to work there. I have been beating my head against the story for three months now, so this is both a relief and an additional source of frustration, because I can't believe it's taken so long to figure out something so simple. *headdesk*
Also, chapter 12 of "Secrets" is coming along nicely. Ginny is having moral conflicts all over the place and doing a couple incredibly stupid things as a result, the upshot of which is that I get to write another creepy dream sequence. Yay! And then I get to write a blackout, the aftermath of another attack, and Ginny scrambling to deal with the guilt and make sure Tom can't trick her again. *evil grin*
One thing I particularly like about "Secrets" is that I get to make Ginny an active character rather than a passive one who might as well be a plot device. For one thing, it's more consistent with her characterization in later books, and for another, the story just works better if you assume she's trying, however ineptly, to solve her problems rather than blankly wandering around under Tom's control. It's the only way I could account for the long gaps between the attacks, and for the way she abruptly steals the diary after leaving it in Harry's hands for three whole months.
I suppose I could account for that by saying it's all part of Tom's Sekrit Evol Plan to lull Harry and Dumbledore into false complacency, but I have no interest in writing a totally passive character. First, it's boring. Second, it doesn't make sense, since Ginny clearly carried on her life well enough that nobody suspected anything was wrong (beyond a minor health problem, perhaps). And third, it perpetuates harmful stereotypes of helpless women needing to be saved by big strong heroic men.
Yes, in the end Ginny does need Harry to save her, but I want to twist that so the point is that people fight better when they're not fighting alone, not that girls can't fight. Harry doesn't save Ginny alone, after all. He has Ron and Fawkes and the Sorting Hat (and the memory of Dumbledore's words) to help him. Ginny, on the other hand, has been trying to fight Tom without asking for anyone's help. She almost tells Harry something just before the climax, but she loses her nerve and keeps her problems to herself. Therefore, she fails.
It's the same lesson Harry had to learn in OotP and HBP -- you can't do everything by yourself. Standing alone doesn't protect anyone, because without support, you'll fall. Then your friends will still be in danger... only now they won't have you to help them.
I'm not sure how well I'm doing in getting that point across -- the importance of human connections, the dangers of isolation -- but it's something I've been trying to say since the beginning of "Secrets." The reason Ginny was so vulnerable to Tom, after all, is that she didn't have other friends, and she didn't seem to have much support from her family either. Count how many times Ron talks to Ginny in CoS. It's a small number. I think the twins and Percy actually appear more often -- or at least have more dialogue -- which is, to me, very telling.
Okay, enough blabbing. I'm off to work on the stories.
