There’s a scene I’ve been avoiding all week.
Not because I don’t know what happens. I know exactly what happens—I’ve known for years, the way you know the shape of a room you grew up in, every corner memorised in the dark. I’m avoiding it because I have to go back inside it, and going back inside it means doing something I’m not entirely sure I have the right to do.
It means making it worse.
I spent years skipping Ramsay Bolton’s scenes.
Books and television both. That long, grinding arc of Theon Greyjoy—the systematic dismantling of a person, season after season, chapter after chapter—I’d fast-forward, I’d flip pages, I’d find somewhere else to be until it was over. Not because I thought it was bad storytelling. George R.R. Martin is not a bad storyteller. I skipped those scenes because I couldn’t hold them. Because there’s a particular kind of fictional suffering that demands something from the reader, and I didn’t want to give it.
I thought about that recently. I thought about it while writing chapter thirty-three of my novel, which is—among other things—a systematic dismantling of a person.
There is no irony I’m missing here.
Her name is Meda. She’s been with me for sixteen years, which is longer than some of my friendships and most of my certainties. I know the specific quality of her stubbornness. I know what she sounds like when she prays—not the formal tone, not the temple words, but the private ones, the ones her grandmother taught her, the ones she uses when she’s small and frightened and the world has stopped making sense. I know what she was supposed to become.
I’m also the person destroying it.
This is the part of writing long fiction that nobody tells you about—or if they do, you don’t believe them until you’re in it. The strange moral vertigo of authorship. You construct a person carefully, lovingly, over years, and then the story requires you to take things from them, and you do it, because the story is right and you know it’s right and that doesn’t make it easier. It just makes it precise. A precise grief, administered by your own hand.
I’ve been trying to work out what the difference is between suffering a story earns and suffering an author just inflicts. I’m not sure I’ve fully cracked it. But I think it has something to do with staying inside the person it’s happening to—keeping their inner life present and irreducibly human even through the worst of it, rather than letting them become a function of plot. The moment they stop being a person and start being a device, you’ve lost it.
So I stay inside her. However uncomfortable that is. I stay inside her and I don’t look away, and I try to make sure that whatever I’m feeling about it comes through in the writing rather than getting tidied away.
This is a story about faith. Specifically, it’s about what faith looks like under conditions designed to destroy it—not philosophical doubt, not the comfortable crises of prosperous people, but the kind of darkness that makes the question of whether God exists feel almost beside the point. The question the story is actually asking is: what do you reach for when reaching feels absurd?
I don’t write to that question from the outside.
That’s the uncomfortable admission. The character who prays and hears nothing, who keeps praying anyway, who holds onto a word her grandmother taught her like a rope thrown into a well—she is not me, but she is not entirely not me either.
I don’t know how to write honestly about faith being tested without that being true.
I’ll write the scene eventually. I’ll open the document and go back in and do what the story requires, and then I’ll close it and go make tea and sit with whatever I’m left holding.
I won’t skip it.
That’s the only thing I’m certain of. Whatever it costs to stay inside it, I won’t skip it. Because the character doesn’t get to skip it either, and if I’m asking her to hold on through something I won’t hold on through myself, then I’m not writing the story I think I’m writing.
I’m just administering suffering from a safe distance.
And that’s the one thing this story can’t afford to be.