Here’s a question for my writer friends:
What challenges do you find in writing about sensitive subjects? Is it easy to insert bits of your life into your stories, or does it feel like a tooth extraction without anesthesia? (By the way, if you’ve never had a permanent tooth pulled without a numbing agent of some sort, don’t. It’s the second most painful thing I’ve ever experienced.)
I’m not talking about little things here, like what color kite you flew or what model bike you had when you were a kid. I mean big things, worthy of being thematic elements. That secret you’ve carried for years, that pain that burdened you for the longest time (and maybe still does). How do you put those into the story? Or do you?
Something writers know – whether they be authors of novels and short stories, poets, journalers, journalists, bloggers, whatever – is that our life can’t help but leak onto the keyboard and into the notebook. It can be traumatic, or it can be healing. Sometimes both.
So, to reiterate, what challenges and/or obstacles do you encounter when you try to “write what you know” from your own life? How do you deal with them?
There’s no easy answer to this. My own writing has led me to sob as if I would never be comforted. That emotional pain is much worse than any physical pain I have ever experienced (and I have hit ten on the pain scale). So, if we decide to face that in our writing, we simply have to suck it up and realize it is going to hurt!
I hear you, Sheila. I’m going through that now with Brigitte’s Battle. It helps that I’ve already written about it a bit; you may recall last May’s blog chain post “My journey” (http://tracibonney.com/2011/05/08/my-journey/), and that I’m being more public about that part of my past. Still, I sobbed my way through the first writing of the scene where that is revealed (trying not to post a spoiler here…
). Prayer helped me through it, and remembering that God has forgiven and put that under the blood of Jesus.
Hmm. In a way the theme of the novel I am working on deals with some of the insecurities that I have faced in my own life. I think it needs a little work to bring that struggle more to the surface of the story. Of course in the fictional setting it is ramped up to the extreme. I guess it’s just part of the writing life to share parts of yourself with the world in that way.
Very true, Adam. If we keep our own experiences out of the story completely, our writing is likely to come off as cold and unfeeling. How do you deal with it when something painful from your past ends up in a story? Does it affect how quickly you’re able to move on to the next scene, or is it just writing as usual?
Well, I have not written about anything deeply painful from my own life, but I could imagine that it would not just be ‘writing as usual’. It would be harder – particularly if those wounds have not fully healed.