A Little Devin Green Never Hurt Anyone (Unless It Did??)

 

I think The Wild Charge has out been in the wild (ha!) long enough for me to safely discuss more spoilery topics. But I’ll still put the majority of this post under a cut for those who haven’t read it yet. You can grab the book HERE or HERE if you still need to get caught up with Dartmoor book nine.

Typically, my favorite aspects of any project tend to involve secondary characters. While this was Reese and Tenny’s book – and Fox’s, too, to a lesser extent – one of the things I enjoyed most was having the chance to bring Devin back into the picture. I knew before I started drafting that I wanted – no, needed – him for the tail end of the book. Him taking off in Prodigal Son was never meant to be the last we saw of him, and so I love that he reappears here when everyone is feeling their most stressed and vulnerable. He's a little bit supernatural – I mean, he isn’t really – when it comes to getting under his kids’ skin. Albie wants an all-out fist-fight, a good old-fashioned beat-down; Walsh, too, but he’s calmer about it. He’d rather get him alone than make a scene in front of everyone. Fox hates him because he’s so afraid that he’s just like him. Tenny thinks he has no opinion about the man, that he’s only a sperm-donor, but that theory gets blown up in short order when Tenny’s the first to deck him. And here’s Devin, smiling, charming, manipulative, and not hate-able even if he deserves it – mostly because he’s fun, and creates all this interpersonal drama amongst this otherwise cool batch of siblings; but also because, quite often, what he says makes an alarming amount of sense. He’s honest…to a degree. He doesn’t pretend to be a good father and so the gaslighting in play is subtle and brutal.

For me, Devin is always a favorite because, like most of my characters, he’s an idea and a theme as much as he’s a fully-fleshed character. Whenever possible, I like to dial things up to eleven, and Devin takes “daddy issues” all the way off the charts. It’s like I mentioned in my last post about the MC setting providing a dramatic backdrop for otherwise mundane scenarios: the depth and breadth of Devin’s dad crimes allow us to explore the resulting emotions on a much larger scale. And writing, storytelling, is an exercise is emotion exploration – most typically not my own.

Take away the plot of the novel – Abacus and all of that – and it’s Devin, his actions and influence, that drive all the character drama of this book. Fox’s doubts about fatherhood; Tenny’s struggle with his new circumstances and all his new feelings. The contrast between his relationship with his boys and Hunter’s relationship with Reese: a rare chance for Devin to come out the good guy in a scenario. Despite the grand scale and the wild drama and action of it all, the characters are a product of their pasts and their associations, good and bad, and that’s where reality comes in; that’s the way fiction mimics real life.

But here’s where fiction is safer and, oftentimes, better than real life. Devin is the sort of character who we love to see in media – but who we’d loathe in real life. The chaos he brings to a story heightens the conflict in a way we find enjoyable; in real life, his chaos would give us all an ulcer and land most of us in a therapist’s office. The same could be said of the majority of my characters; my fans understand the distinction. But there will always be the casual readers – and the not-so-casual haters – who seem to think that the point of fiction is to present characters as a guide for the way people should behave; that fiction’s duty is to instruct and correct, rather than entertain. Who want to open a book and find a mirror; who decide that a character who behaves differently than they would in a given situation is badly written. Who find lousy fathers, unsafe sex, accidental pregnancies, and all the messy family drama to be poor writing that needs correcting…rather than the point of the whole exercise. Rather than a vicarious venture into a life not their own which can’t, in effect, cause them actual harm.

This puritanical nonsense view of fiction is something I witnessed firsthand in fandom, and which is slowly gaining more and more traction in mainstream publishing. I find it baffling. Generally speaking, I think it’s the result of readers wanting to be catered to; readers who either do not or cannot write wanting their own preferences, biases, and behavior codes put down to paper by the authors they read. Still others are job-hunting (the infamous “I could help make your books better” emails are still coming a whole decade into this business). Some are authors with sock puppet accounts trying to sway opinions. Some simply need to go outside and touch grass.

I always assume it doesn’t need to be said…but then I’m reminded that perhaps it does. Perhaps it doesn’t go without saying that I don’t endorse the terrible things that happen in my books. I love writing Devin – but I don’t think he’s a good guy. I don’t condone torture but Mercy loves his twelve-pound hammer. I don’t see myself having kids but a lot of my characters do. Aidan’s a grown man, yeah, but he’s still going to do stupid shit (are you telling me you’ve never met a 30-something fuck-up??). I write characters who make poor choices; who forgo a condom, or say something hurtful just to get a rise out of someone, or who handle their trauma in unorthodox, even unhealthy ways. But I’m not out here recommending the Mercy Lécuyer Mental Health and Wellness Center for any previously trafficked, depressed young men.

Approaching fiction through the lens of “this is what a character should have done” is, in essence, wishing your own storytelling ideas onto someone else. A well-written story should establish vivid, fleshed-out characters with clear motivations and vulnerabilities; it should offer resolutions to the scenarios built up within the narrative; and it should remain consistent throughout. A character might make a “poor” choice, but that’s only poor writing if that choice betrays the trust the audience has placed in the narrative so far. You may not like that character’s poor choice, it might even trigger painful or upsetting memories for you, but that doesn’t mean it wasn’t the correct creative choice for that character.

One of these days I’d like to do a really detailed, unemotional breakdown of the ways both GoT and the MCU backtracked and failed to follow-through. I’ve learned a lot about writing in watching those storytelling failures. Those failures do happen – and are almost always the result of too many cooks in the kitchen; of stories told by too many people with competing motivations, and with factors like shock, or toy sales driving the decisions. (Also gonna write that editing process post at some point, too) 

But when it comes to novels, and novelists, the goal is not – at least for me personally – to write you a dissertation on all the “should”s of life. How very, very boring that would be. I’ve got packs and packs of messy AF characters making wildly terrible decisions at every turn, and it’s a lot of fun.

Thanks to those who are along for the ride. 😊