Interlude V
I wanted to write a book, you know. Maybe a series of books. I got plenty of ideas, but precious little time to jot them down, and even less to craft them into any semblance of presentability. The stories are up here… but up here they're gonna stay. I think I'm gonna regret that, because I can't see my professional or personal life becoming conducive to writing anytime soon.
I've always enjoyed crime novels, mystery novels; Hughes used to tease me for reading those pulp magazines from the newspaper stand, you know, the weird menace stories, full of supernatural horror in the vein of those old Grand Guignol penny dreadfuls, which is pretty damn ironic when you consider the fact that I spend most of my real life, never mind any fictional life, fighting off monsters. The stories were tawdry and cheap and the writing was crap, but I loved them. They made me feel like a kid again, listening to those late-night radio dramas and hiding behind the sofa. And while Maes loved poking fun at me, he always made sure to have a dogeared paperback squirrelled away in his luggage whenever he came to visit. The Brigadier-General was always more into the detective stories and legal thrillers himself. He liked the stories that featured a closed circle of suspects, and each had to have their own credible motive for and a reasonable opportunity to commit the crime. The central character was always an eccentric, brilliant detective who eventually solved the mystery by means of his wits and logical deduction, drawing from the facts that had been fairly presented to the reader as well as the investigator. Made sense why Maes liked them so much: he could have stepped out of a Hammett dime novel himself.
He was always badgering me about writing that book. Dropped hints all the time, asking me to give a shout out to Elysia and Gracia on the dedication page. Yeah, really. He even got me a journal and an inkwell for the Solstice. You all know how Hughes was: when he made up his mind about something, there wasn't a force in Amestris strong enough to distract him from it. He thought I had the makings of a novelist. He believed it with his whole being, like it was the most important thing in the world. Like he really, really cared, which of course he did.
Maybe it came from hanging around the state alchemists during the War, but Maes thought the act of writing was a kind of transmutation in of itself. And even though he used to annoy me with the constant pestering –– as Hughes was wont to do –– I reckon he had a point. When you're writing a book, it's just not writing your thoughts. It's creating people. It's creating worlds, deconstructing the details from the life you know and reconstructing them as new, alternative universes. Alchemy with a pen and paper instead of an array or a pair of gloves.
As an author, you have the power to destroy life, but also to resurrect it. You have the power to see the future and change the past, while the people you create are left wondering if you will ever allow them that same prescience. You are their God, their Truth. You have the ability to make anything happen.
A part of me is prejudiced to admiring the more procedural side of writing. The analysing, manufacturing, inventing aspects of it. The whole process strikes me as being both a blessing and curse because while it brings the author a certain amount of satisfaction –– like figuring out a match beginning on a king's pawn opening and ending on move five with the knight-takes-rook checkmate –– it also reminds you of lives you don't have, people you'll never know, love you don't feel. It creates a whole novel out of nothing, and it forces your investment. Meaningless exchanges become huge stages of drama that irritate you to the point of anxiety. But the worst part is, your worries aren't even real: they're literally all in your head or on the paper in front of you. They're not real, it's not real, but to you, that unreality is everything.
And it's breathtaking, when you realise just how much power that scope of feeling gives you. And then you're forced to ask yourself what you will do with this power once you have it. I think Maes was right: writing is alchemy. It's the art of superhumans.
And me? Well, I ain't ever been much of a superhuman. But I'm still gonna regret not writing that book, I think, so maybe I'll try to make sure I live a life, and die a death, worth writing about.