Something I seemed to revisit in my writing is the subject of loyalty. Many, though not all, of my stories have conflict of loyalty as the a primary source of character tension.

I know that I have always been bored by stories where the issue is merely: how do I win? For a story to be compelling there must be something personal at stake and there must be a personal decision the character must make that can never be unmade. What struck me this week is how often for my own characters it is a question of loyalty.

When I started writing Cawdor I had originally thought I would explore the avarice of ambition as the overriding theme, but when I crawled down into the trenches and fought and grappled with the plot, it became something different. Most of the characters are faced with tests of loyalty.

What I liked best in the way it turned out is that there was no simple answer to the puzzle of loyalty. It is not always good to be loyal and it is not always wrong to betray. That’s because as in so many things there is a hierarchy  to loyalty and the test is understanding that incline of competing demands for loyalty.

For example, Von Stauffenberg had taken an oath to be loyal unto death to Adolf Hitler. For a man of his social class this is not something one tosses away lightly, but he did betray that oath with treason and an attempted assassination. We do not look upon his betrayal as a bad thing, we honor it and make movies about it. Here disloyalty is prized, because the greater cause of virtue demands it.

That of course is an easy case. We vilify Benedict Arnold  because of his betrayal and the reason for his betrayal is more complicated. It might be because he felt slighted and insulted, which would hardly be sufficient to justify his treason. On the other hand it may be he was motivated by pure and consuming love and that is harder for us to emotionally reject as a cause.

In Cawdor I have characters that I think act rightly by betraying their oaths and their people and I have character who I think acts right by not doing so. I have never been fully aware just how much loyalty means to my writing. Even in my horror shorts loyalty often expresses itself.

I wonder why?