“No one ever told me that grief felt so like fear.” —C.S. Lewis (A Grief Observed)
Cut its stem—down to the vine—and a rose will return the next spring in vibrant red rebellion. Its buds multiply with satin leaves and colors coursing through unfurled petals. Sentimentally, you hold its face with tender fingertips as you inhale its boozy cologne.
Without warning, a deadly thorn presses purposefully against the heart, assaulting its compassionate host with a single stinging kiss.
Your story must have its toxic thorn—sharp as an ax on a butcher’s block—that pierces the soul of the reader, striking at their senses and stripping their ideals. Stab your reader sweetly, then watch as the poison spreads, bringing into question love, hate, courage, faith. Feel the final, fatal surge of venom snuffing out the good you’ve written so carefully into perfect rows of blossoms now callously laughing.
An antagonist’s delight.
Now place your pen to the injury—as thorns smile—and write the wound with even grander conviction. Author of a cut that finds nothing redeeming in a bandage of human charity. For without the lethal scratch, from where would redemption rise? How are miracles wrought if there are no villains that thrive? It’s the power of pain that feeds our greatest complaint and achieves our highest gain.
And as quickly as a rose with its mean thorn steals joy, the blood dries, the puncture mends as the alarming splice of the gardener’s hand brings the story to an unexpected and victorious end.
The thorn that kills, sheds the blood that heals.
Bleeding In Black and White 