Humans seek the battle of opposition — Good vs Evil. Love vs Hate. Death vs Life. This is a human truth that I reject in my writing. Why? I believe we are fooling ourselves and it is an Untruth.
The reality of our actions seems to be that we only push the opposites into dualities…we never eliminate or conquer, we push and pull on a constantly shifting scale. Honestly, has Evil or Death or Hate ever been defeated? No, in the course of the human drama, it has only been diminished to rise anew.
Such oppositional forces co-exist; and as much as we want to strive to banish them since they are in each of us, they never go away, they only swing one way or another on a pendulum.
The tension of unresolved oppositional forces creates the atmosphere, the back-and-forth, that makes for any story to come alive — and thus, these forces can never resolve, their reality is too tangible, their battle too endless, the stakes too high for any resolution. These forces of dramatic visceral opposition are dualities, attached and forever bound together.
War is an exception — or the ascendance of craven Evil, as we see in Ukraine with Russia. But I am speaking to individuals in the daily pursuit of their needs, dreams, impulses, and behaviors and their application to fiction.
My perspective is that we humans would love to vanquish the opposite force of that which we embrace and believe in, especially when that passion is deeply personal. But in the end, the best story embraces the turgid duality, the strained friction of Good and Evil, never resolving, always unfolding.
