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D.R. Ranshaw

D.R. RANSHAW

When The Fire Goes Out

10/31/2016

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Picture
All that is gold does not glitter,
Not all those who wander are lost;
The old that is strong does not wither,
Deep roots are not reached by the frost.
From the ashes a fire shall be woken,
A light from the shadows shall spring;
Renewed shall be blade that was broken,
The crownless again shall be king.
                -J.R.R. Tolkien
 
What happens when the fire goes out in a person? When the passion for something just shrivels up and dies, like a fire that has consumed every last bit of fuel?
 
I should back up and explain: this query was ‘sparked’ (sorry... awful pun) when I saw a comment in an article the other day referring to a specific person, which said she “remains a competent and dedicated individual, but the fire is out,” and it led me to ponder what that looks like, for either fictional characters, or real people. And why that happens. And what we can do about it. Because, frankly, it affects just about all of us at one time or another... relating to any one of a number of crucial things in our lives: relationships, career, creativity... life itself.
 
For story characters, it’s actually easy --- a helluva lot easier than it is for “real” people. (“Real” is often, I acknowledge, a very relative term, particularly among writers.) Why? Because story characters for whom the fire has gone out have to rekindle that flame, or we have no story. Sure, they may go through their own private hell rekindling it, but rekindle it they will. Must. Besides, it’s relatively easy to do that when you have a dragon singeing your britches. In our own mortal world, dragons are more often far more prosaic and less spectacular --- although just as dangerous.
 
We’ve all seen the passion fade, the light in the eye dim and go out. We all know what it looks like, and it ain’t pretty to watch, especially if the person for whom the fire goes out has a flair or gift in the area affected.
 
As to why it happens... well, that’s not particularly difficult. We (and our characters) are constantly being buffeted by the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. Sometimes we weather the seismic shifts in our lives remarkably well. Other times, not so much, and events beat us down. As in any disaster, it’s usually not just one thing, but an entire chain of causality, dumping crisis upon crisis down on our heads until we buckle --- sometimes temporarily, sometimes --- tragically --- permanently.
 
And, of course, possibly the most important musing: what we can do about it. Well, to start with, as Andy Dufresne says in the film The Shawshank Redemption, “Get busy living, or get busy dying.” It’s okay to curl up in fetal position on the floor for a while and rail against the injustice of it all, but ultimately, that’s not going to solve anything. Eventually, you have to move on and get that fire going again. Or decide that the fire in question isn’t going anywhere, even with a blowtorch or thermite --- although that’s definitely the less preferable option, I think. Because if the fire was worthwhile to begin with, it remains worthwhile.
 
The reason why the poem from The Lord of the Rings is there at the beginning of this post (other than my obligatory Tolkien reference) is that Tolkien offers us hope, too, when he says “the old that is strong does not wither/deep roots are not reached by the frost” and that “from the ashes, a fire shall be woken.” That is to say, for most of us, there’s more resiliency and strength to us than we are often willing to acknowledge.
 
You can find a match. Or generate a spark. And get that fire burning again. So what are you waiting for? It’s cold out here, and you’re beginning to shiver.

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Loss Vs. Sacrifice

10/24/2016

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Lara: Damn it, he can't hear me. I have to get to him. His signal's just over there.
Roth: No, we've got our own people to worry about. We'll need to regroup as soon as they find Sam.
Lara: (disbelievingly) I can't just leave him out there alone! I need to get to him.
Roth: (gently) Sometimes you've got to make sacrifices, Lara. You can't save everyone.
Lara: (annoyed) I know about sacrifices.
Roth: (patiently) No, you know about loss. Sacrifice is a choice you make. Loss is a choice made for you.
Lara: I can't choose to let him die, Roth.
 
I was thinking of this conversation recently in light of events in my own life. It’s an exchange between two characters in Tomb Raider, the 2013 reboot of the earlier (rather simplistic, from what I’ve been told) video game franchise. The 2013 version is not simplistic --- yes, I’ve played it, and yes, I like it a lot. Lara, our protagonist, goes through a nicely done emotional growth arc through the game, beginning as a scared young woman asking for Roth to come and get her after their shipwreck and washing ashore on a jungle-covered island leaves them separated, and ending with her as quite the kick-ass heroine who’s prepared to do whatever’s necessary to survive. And every once in a while --- quite pleasantly often for a video game (I’m really not trying to be condescending, I swear) --- there’s a little nugget of dialogue that is pretty good. Perhaps not deathlessly immortal philosophy, but pretty good and worthy of a little thought. Like the exchange above.
 
Loss vs. sacrifice.  Choice made for you vs. choice you make. Hmm. It’s a good thing to keep in mind regardless of whether you’re doing it in terms of your own real life context, or a literary one.
 
Sacrifice is something we have control over. We can choose to sacrifice, or not --- although sometimes, as Lara makes the point above, we don’t always feel like we have a great deal of control over the situation. But we do. In the case of sacrifice, we always do. Choosing our actions is, really, about the only thing in life we do have control over. Even Gandalf says so. (There. That’s my obligatory Tolkien reference for the day taken care of, for those of you who are keeping count.) The only question to be resolved --- and sometimes, you admittedly don’t have a great deal of time to toss the issue around in your thoughts (particularly in a crisis situation) --- is whether you can look at yourself in the mirror afterwards and live comfortably with what you see.
 
Loss is a totally different thing, as Roth patiently points out to Lara: it’s a choice made for you, and frequently, it’s very hard to live with, even though it’s an inescapable part of the human condition. I think this is primarily because our culture is obsessed with the idea of being in control all the time --- although as I’ve said before, I find such obsession peculiar, because control is, frankly, an illusion. How do you come back from loss? Dodinsky, a bestselling author who seems not to have a first name (at least one he wants to share with the rest of us, anyway) says, “Grieving is a necessary passage and a difficult transition to finally letting go of sorrow --- it is not a permanent rest stop” and I think he’s onto something there. Sorrow is not useless, contrary to what Samuel Johnson asserted --- as long as it’s not endless. We grieve loss. Our characters grieve loss. It needs to be done as a part of letting go.
 
Perhaps we should leave the (nearly) last words to C.S. Lewis. He was devastated by the loss of his wife when she died of cancer, but was eventually able to observe, in the midst of his devastation: “Grief is like a long valley, a winding valley where any bend may reveal a totally new landscape.”
 
There’s hope in that.

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On Loss and Tribute

10/17/2016

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Picture
Anyone who regularly reads my blog may have noticed a gap in new material lately. In recent weeks there have been some reruns of earlier material and then a halt altogether. The reason for this is that my father, after a lengthy (96 years) and mostly happy life, passed away a few weeks ago. It was quite sudden --- he fell, broke his hip, had surgery but declined rapidly afterwards and was gone within the space of a couple of weeks. Nobody has tried to comfort me with the cliché, “But he lived a long life,” for which I am grateful. Because yes, he did live a long life, but that doesn’t really do much to lessen the sense of loss. Loss is loss. And while it may not be as tragic as losing someone at a very young age --- a child, for example, who has not lived through life’s ups and downs that we somehow regard as everyone’s birthright --- it’s still loss.
 
Grief’s a strange thing in a way, isn’t it? We all know intellectually that every single one of us is one day going to, in the words of Hamlet, “shuffle off this mortal coil” and travel to “the undiscovered country from whose bourn no traveller returns.” But most of us don’t dwell on the concept over much, and it we grieve the loss, even of those who have been here a long time.

 One thing I’m really glad about, though, is the cover of my first novel... which may seem like a pretty flagrant non sequitur at first glance, so bear with me.
 
Dad spent his career as a commercial artist, and he was a damned good one. A craftsman of the old school, he began as a lithographic apprentice in England in the 1930s. He also loved painting fine art, chiefly landscapes, and I have many memories of him loading us all up in the family car on Sunday afternoons to head out into the country to photograph grain elevators, abandoned barns and homesteads --- anything that looked like it would make a dramatic painting.
 
He also would do covers for the endless secondary school reports I had to write, and this is where my novel cover comes in. 

 A couple of years ago, even before my first novel was going through the self-publication process and I was mulling over things like cover design, I had an inspiration and asked dad whether he’d like to do a painting of a gryphon. He may have raised his eyebrows a little, as I recall, because fantasy was never his gig, and in fact his reading tastes were almost universally nonfiction. But I provided him with several pictures and illustrations from numerous sources, and he said gamely that he’d give it a try. I was delighted with the result, and when it actually came time to select a book jacket design, I decided it was good enough to grace the front cover. So it did, and you can view his work for yourself.
 
I’m really glad now that I did. It was kind of like the last title page he did for me.
 
Thanks, dad. For the cover... and for everything.
 

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    D.R. Ranshaw's Blog

    Author of The Annals of Arrinor series.  Lover of great literature, fine wine, and chocolate. Not necessarily in that order.

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