I admit it: this was a hard episode to write. Part of that was timing: the deadlines hit right when I was in the final stretch of my first semester of the master’s program, and there’s nothing quite like getting your brain to switch between academic Spanish and creative English for inducing a major case of writer’s fatigue.
But a huge part of it was the enormity of what I knew was coming in the episode. Spoilers ahead, but knowing all of the pain and heartache I was about to evoke for Will, Diane, Rafe and Kaab felt at once like an exciting creative challenge and like a powerfully awful thing I didn’t really feel like doing to the characters I had grown to love and care about. Obviously, I knew it needed doing. The writing was on the cork board, as it were—poison the duke, make Rafe desperate and miserable, force Kaab into her terrible choice. It all seemed simple on the note cards, but when it came to truly conveying those beats in an episode with enough emotional generosity for the final revelations to truly cut, I felt myself shying away. Why did Kaab have to make such a harsh decision? Why couldn’t she choose her friendship with Rafe? But, on the other hand, the Kaab I knew would never betray her family or destroy an opportunity to protect them. Or maybe Diane could repent and just hope that Will wouldn’t continue to drift away from her and strip her of her hard-won power? Obviously, none of those choices would make for a good story—in this case, the good story was the hard story. The hard story to read, the hard story to write.Recently on Facebook, Ellen was joking to me about how we’re sadistic writers—loving the way we make readers hurt with the dark twists of the story of Tremontaine. But as we realized, in order to make that sort of pain work on the side of the readers, we have to make ourselves hurt first. Which I think means that we’re at least as much emotional masochists as literary sadists, forcing ourselves to do cruel and terrible things to our well-loved characters for the sake of a higher pleasure: the one of a hard story told well, and unflinchingly, and truly.This is also my last episode for Tremontaine, so perhaps that also formed part of my reluctance to part with it. I knew that when I did, I wouldn’t be able to rejoin these characters or this world for a long while. It’s been a great ride, and I hope the difficulty of writing this episode has its reward in the hard pleasure of reading it.
