COMPROMISE IS ANOTHER WORD FOR GIVING-IN
By Chéri
Vausé
The other day I sat with my hubby and dogs and watched that
great old John Ford classic, Stagecoach. Not only is there one of the
greatest stunts of all time performed in the film, but I suddenly realised,
with my author eyes, that the film isn't about preparing for a battle with the
native population, but one of second chances, of letting go of the past, of
believing what you're about to do is right even if the law is after you. But it
really is about not compromising what you know is right. When you watch the
film, you see people taking hard-lines everywhere, from the very beginning when
Claire Trevor is ostracised and exiled by the women of the town for her
questionable moral behaviour (it's suggested but never fully explained), to the
Sheriff bound by the law to bring in John Wayne for his breaking out of jail to
kill a man. The Sheriff doesn't want to do it. He's rather loathe about it, but
feels he must stand firm in the law. From the first moment when you see John
Wayne standing beside the road waiting for the stagecoach, you know you're in
for one helluva ride. And it does not disappoint. There have been several
remakes, but none hold a candle to John Ford's classic. It is one of the most
beautifully filmed of Ford's classics.
The subject of taking a hard-line, or holding true to your
position, is very much in every realm from politics to religion to my
profession of writing. As much as compromise has found a solid home in our
western culture these days, and usually lauded as the only means of getting
things done, it's not always the best means of settling anything. Compromise
has become king, and anyone who takes a hard-line is deemed intractable,
difficult, among other awful terms. But nothing could be further from the
truth. Sometimes we need to stand up and say, "No!", or "This is
the right way", in spite of what people may call you. Once upon a time,
and within my lifetime, people who had strong values, believed fervently in
their faith, their political persuasion, or in an ideal, used to be called "principled individuals" or "people who know their own mind" or
"faithful". They usually
knew what true difficulty was. Many sacrificed their lives for their belief in
freedom. Their lives were forever altered. They knew what it was like to
experience difficulty, to know what it felt like to be the only one in a room
who sees clearly, who will stand against what others want you to do.
Recently, I went through something with my publisher I didn't
want to happen, but I had to stand firm. When an author has written a story and
turns it over to their editor, there is a point that may be reached when the
author should defer to the edits suggested to make the language better or the
story clearer, or defining a character better. Sometimes the editor finds
things that the author has missed. Blindness toward your own writing is a
common malady among us, and I'm certainly no exception. But, there are times
that you might compromise too much. Then, you lose a sense of yourself, of your
original idea, of the purity in your idea behind your story. I didn't think it
would ever happen to me, but it did. I listened, I altered, I changed, I
travelled down the path the editor wanted me to go. I compromised, and
compromised, and compromised.
Realise, of course, that I'm the sort of person
who listens to everything, then quietly goes along because I believe that the
experts know what their talking about. And I'm not temperamental type, plus, I
take criticism rather well. I've always felt that I can learn something new
about myself, about my work. And I'm always open to improvement.
So, we travelled down that road until the last edit, which
settled on or around the fifth one, and likely to have several more if I put in
my editor's edits. It was a hydra. One change gave birth to two or more
changes. Then, something inside me snapped. I realised, as I began to read my
editor's comments, that I'd lost my story quite a few edits ago, that I'd
allowed myself to become too distracted with the minutia of train schedules and
stations, and titles, and professions, and scene changes, and this character
should be a Methodist rather than a Catholic, and on and on. It was supposedly
to make it historically accurate, that my story became less horror tinged and
more in tune with my editor's drive to de-religious the story. I had originally
written a Gothic horror story, of ghosts, spiritualism, and seances, but my
editor was trying to turn it into an historical fiction with all her changes,
to remove the Catholic aspects of the plot, even though it was essential to the
story.
My idea, my work lost something in the translation between its original
simplicity of pure fiction in a mythical place, and became a sterile piece
accurate only to history. Instead of the futility of having no belief (the idea
behind my story), of my hero coming to the realisation that there was more in
the universe than dreamed of in his philosophy, I had some watered down action
yarn, where people seemed to spend more time on trains than in the countryside
encountering the ghosts and demons. We had excised the overtly religious
practices of the folk and the Roman Catholic priest. I then put an end to it,
and will not return to it until I feel that I can return the story to its
simple form.
The same is true for our lives. I learned something valuable
in the process. I realised that it's not always right to compromise, that
making changes to an original idea to appease an opposing side does not mean
that you've created something good, it means you've created something mediocre,
something the other side wants to see happen and not you. Compromise then
becomes giving-in to the other side, it means sacrificing your values, your
faith, your belief in what is right.
For all the hard-lines taken by the characters in the film Stagecoach,
even the Sheriff, who was bound and determined to take in John Wayne because it
was his job, learned something valuable: Justice is sometimes a terrible thing,
but must be exercised outside the accepted norm. John Wayne was the wielder of
that justice, and he would be undeterred in his quest. He had to kill the evil
man so he wouldn't kill any more innocents. Yes, it was an act of revenge, but
Wayne knew in his heart, he had the right to stop that evil from continuing to
hurt others, and he was the only man capable of doing it. Anything less than
that was just wrong. And the Sheriff then let John Wayne go, because it was the
right thing to do. He chose to not follow the law, but follow the path of
justice, which is more noble and a greater calling. The Sheriff saved two
lives; that of Claire Trevor and John Wayne. He let them ride off toward a life
together, where two wounded souls could love each other and make a future.
There was no compromise. These were hard choices, but right ones.
When I watched the film, I felt that sense of knowing that I
must end the struggle, that I had to kill the book. None of it felt right, so
it had to end. The battle for the story had reached a point that it needed to
die, to have a just end.
How many of us reach those moments where we know we must hold
fast, draw the line in the sand, stand up against everyone around you, but can
be too easily bullied into a compromise? I use to think that the person who
never had to experience such adversity must be fortunate. Now, I think that
it's the opposite, that Nietzsche was right. In those moments, when you know
that you must take a stand, even though you are humiliated by those around you,
and you are told that you must go along to get along, don't. We must take a
stand against the bullies, to go the distance, and go to war, if necessary.
There are such things that we must hold fast and never sacrifice to the god of
compromise. Although I think of that year of wasted effort too often, all that hard
work sitting in a file on my desktop, I still know I was right. I had to take a
stand. My work had been compromised into non-existence. It wasn't my story any
longer. It was my editor's story.
What will I do with it? My plan is to move it to a different place, like
Maine, at an earlier time, and take out all the changes that made it so
distracting and frustrating for me. It will become a new book, a better one, in
keeping with my original idea. And in life... Well, I'll compromise when it
doesn't matter that much to me, but from now on that line is not moveable. It's
fixed no matter what. So, I say to all of you out there, thinking that
compromise is a nobler pursuit, it's not true. However hard it may be for us to
accept, sometimes we must fight for what we believe to be true.
Chéri Vausé spent more than
twenty-five years teaching theology and volunteering her time at a Crisis
Pregnancy Center. She decided late in life to change careers, and began to
write mysteries, but with a noir atmosphere, and psychological terrors. With
all her children grown, she turned her dining room table into a desk and
research center, and now she serves up murder on an icy platter, and
psychological thrills rather than meals.
She lives on a small ranch in
Central Texas with her husband and two dogs; Scully and Mulder. Scully is a
Coydog (half-beagle and half coyote). Mulder is a Great Pyrenees. And three
ducks; Samantha, Fowley, and Krycek.
The
Touch of a Shadow Blurb:
Esther Charlemagne and Aiden “Mac”
McManus have just settled into their brownstone in Manhattan when the FBI comes
knocking on their door, sending them back to a case they worked in 1959 while
on the elite homicide squad of the NYPD. After the US Attorney Fitzgerald
secures a very pregnant Esther in a safe house, and others involved in the
case, Mac returns to New York to find the killer that has threatened his
beloved Esther.
Set in the sixties, this noir
thriller is not your usual mystery or thriller. In its genre twisting, The
Touch of Shadow continues the story of Esther and Mac (from the first in
the Shadow series: The Night Shadow) as they traverse the trials and
tribulations of being brilliant FBI consultants and former NYPD superstars.
To buy The Touch of a Shadow:
http://www.amazon.com/Touch-Shadow-Ch%C3%A9ri-Vaus%C3%A9/dp/1910603023/ref=sr_1_27?ie=UTF8&qid=1442256146&sr=8-27&keywords=the+touch+of+a+shadow
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