I once rode a horse one hundred miles in a day, through a forest fire with a woman on a mule named Danny who sang songs she’d made up to help pass the time. That day was nine years in the making, and the story is capsulated in over 300 blog posts- many of them dreadfully boring to read. However, I have been reading them because I am going to tell the story in a book I’m starting to write.

I have been a writer since I can remember. As a teenager I always kept a journal and still lug around bags and boxes of these tomes when I move. I have only burned a few, but the ones I kept, no one, even I, should should probably ever read. I wrote my first book a few years ago and I suppose that is when I crossed the line into “Author” though I didn’t think too much about the process at the time. One chapter after another I simply I poured out the things I learned going through the (so far) hardest time of my life, not exactly a story, it was about the process of letting go of the things I used to know in order to embrace the things that would take me into my future. As with most transformational experiences, I had to come to the realization of let go or die, and I wasn’t ready to die. So I let go. Then I wrote about it.

Now I’m working on telling the story of the journey I called Green to 100. I learned this a specific genre of writing called Memoir, and like anything today there are resources available to help improve your skills. A particular piece of advice came from many sources of insight, and it wizzed into and through my mind straight to my heart where it embedded with a thud:

You must love all your characters. The heroes and the villains. If you do not love your characters you will fail to write them well.

Thankfully my story is an adventure tale intertwined with mountains and valleys, great victory and grand failure, but it’s not a dark or difficult memoir of trauma or war. This means I don’t have any truly dark characters to portray. Regardless, there are people who were a challenge for me understand or love in they way they intersected with my story at the time. I made perfect sense when I heard this advice, that if I did not love these characters, I would fail to create multi-dimensional real people in the retelling. No one is truly one-dimensional so if I portrayed people this way it would be minimally bad writing, but also unfair and untrue.

The application of this widened out for me quickly and I thought of a TV series we’ve been enjoying. It’s called Once Upon A Time and the premise is about fairy tale characters who were cursed by the evil queen to take away all their happy endings. The curse transported them from the magical forest to exile in a small town in Maine where time stood still called Storybrooke. Considering it’s based on fairy tales where the heroes and villains are as obvious as black and white, the writers have impressed me as they turn such simplicity on its head and add complex layers to characters I once assumed were “neutral” (could Little Bo Peep have been a mafia like thug collecting protection money from the farmers in her area?) or “good” (I hadn’t thought of Peter Pan luring teenage boys out of their unhappy lives to become a Neverland gang, up to no good!). The creators clearly love these characters and have made them so complex, that even those clearly evil have a backstory, and outrageously, even hope for redemption.

A new character this season is The Author… he doesn’t have a name at the point because The Author is a post, like The General, or The President, but he’s been trapped inside the book of fairy tales for bad behavior, and his writing can change the stories. What a fantastic twist! The characters are trying to get clarity on how much they control their choices, and how much The Author controls the story. Do they have free will? Can they petition the author, or threaten and force him, to give them a better future?

Brilliant! It’s a little cross section of truth. I believe there is also a great Author of our stories who created the world and all of us. I also sometimes struggle with the concept of free will and who is truly in control and how does that work and what does it mean? These are weighty issues to wrestle through in a lifetime, but one thing was easily clear to me: The Author, though he himself went a bit rogue, loves his characters.

For God so loved the world that he gave his only son…

For the heroes and the villains. For the naughty and the nice. He did this in the hope that we would all choose redemption, because it is offered to everyone. 

After I smiled to myself in meditation about this, I realized there was a circle to close. This perspective was now personally challenging. God loves all of his characters, but I have a hard time loving them. Don’t we all enjoy rooting against the villain sometimes? It’s so much easier than to repay evil with good and likely be burned for our effort?

I can see that I have to love the characters I will be writing about. Thankfully enough time has passed that I can be grateful for the people who played a part of my story- even if they weren’t always easy for me in the moment. As I began to form the book over a rough frame in my mind, they all feel like family now. When I thought about this it became equally clear that I am in a current story where people are challenging me, making life difficult, and sometimes just plain spiteful (it seems). These people are harder for me to love, and as I look at the trouble they bring to my day I paint them flatly one-dimensional and enjoy my moment of rooting for their demise. 

Whenever we do this to ANYONE we are believing a lie. No one person is truly a flat single-dimension of all good or all bad. Our own weaknesses are easy to cover over with rational excuses while for others we see only that they are clearly bad or wrong. The less we know the person the easier this is. That means when my close friend disappoints me I am more inclined to understand why. I know her. It also is likely I will take some of the blame (and rightly so). However on the extreme other end of the spectrum, a politician I disagree with, who is only to me a talking head, and who I only hear soundbytes or a prepared speech- I can flatten them down with my judgement because to me they are clearly evil and should be cast into a magical black hole for eternity. They can have no good at all in my closed mind. 

It turns out preparing to write this book might be helping change my story today as I ask myself if it’s possible the people making my life harder could have a complicated layers than I give them credit for. Maybe it’s possible they infuriate me today, but in five years I will look back and almost see them as family, an honored part of my story? Maybe The Author is helping a little author change some stories right here right now? I hope so. I love a good story!

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Notes: Blog image is from “Once Upon A Time” of actor Patrick Fishler as “The Author” The series ran on ABC Sunday nights and I’ve only seen about half of the entirety I think it’s a great family friendly show and worth a watch!

There is a video compilation of the Old Dominion 100 mile event I mentioned. You can see Khaleesi (my horse) and me along with Nancy and her mule Danny – available on YouTube at Ride Through Fire: The OD 100 June 2023