The last couple of nights have been pretty great! The blog posts have really boosted my mood as I’ve talked about the people closest to me and how much they inspire me to be the best writer I can be.<\/p>\n
So tonight, let’s keep the positive vibe train going with–<\/p>\n
Wait, THAT’S my topic tonight?<\/p>\n
<\/p>\n
Okay.\u00a0 Fine.\u00a0 Let’s dive write in.<\/p>\n
As I said yesterday, the most important skill a writer needs is perseverance.\u00a0 I talked about how my family helps me persevere.\u00a0 On the other side of that, some writers need to persevere difficult events in order to be able to write from a place of truth.<\/p>\n
I think I’m coming at this backwards.\u00a0 Let’s try again.\u00a0 I’ll start with examples from my own life and go from there.<\/p>\n
I started writing after my friend Douglas showed me something he wrote for a class assignment.\u00a0 He wrote about a detective that was following a murder case.\u00a0 The most distinctive thing I can remember about that particular story was that his fictional reporter called the case “The Peanut Butter Murderer” or something along those lines, because a jar of peanut butter had been left out near the body.<\/p>\n
When I got home, I thought, “I bet I could write something like that.” And I did. I wrote something\u00a0like<\/em> that, only I went way bigger.\u00a0 My guy was a private investigator, and he was super rich! And smart! And a master of disguise! And he lived on The Moon! And he knew martial arts! And…<\/p>\n I was 10 or 11, and I was having fun.\u00a0 I did all this writing in Appleworks on my Apple IIc.\u00a0 I mostly wrote when I was bored\u00a0with the limited number of games I had for the computer.\u00a0 The word processor itself became my game.\u00a0 And it was fun!\u00a0 I might even still have some of those old stories on floppies in my garage.<\/p>\n My stories started as pure wish fulfillment.\u00a0 They changed after my Dad died.<\/p>\n I stopped writing for a little while.\u00a0 It was about 6 or 7 months before I even thought about it.\u00a0 I still wasn’t doing great, but I was okay.\u00a0 I sat down at the computer and even though I had games I could play, I went straight to the word processor.<\/p>\n Looking back at that early draft of The Arthur Kane stories, I can see that I was writing as a way of processing my grief.\u00a0 I didn’t think of it in those terms.\u00a0 I had this inspiration that I should make the main character flawed.\u00a0 He was still a private investigator living on The Moon, but he was no longer super rich.\u00a0 He still had a lot of wish fulfillment about him, but he became more real.\u00a0 I projected too much of myself into him for him not to be real.<\/p>\n In that story, Arthur needed to save The Moon from a bad guy.\u00a0 He deeply missed the man that loved him and raised him, and that loss and grief shaped his decisions.<\/p>\n There were some good ideas in that story.\u00a0 More importantly, there were real emotions shining through the poor prose and the gimmicky writing.\u00a0 It wasn’t a great piece of fiction, but in the process of dealing with a powerful grief, I created something real in the text.<\/p>\n A writer doesn’t need to experience trauma in order to write about it.\u00a0 That’s not what I’m saying.\u00a0 But if you’ve gone through some difficult experiences, you can use them.\u00a0 There is emotion you can tap into and channel into the words.<\/p>\n Not all trauma has to be death.\u00a0 I mentioned the break-up with Christine yesterday, and I guarantee you that had an impact on my writing.\u00a0 The trauma from that experience came in the shape of a crisis of faith.\u00a0 The next several stories I wrote involved characters desperately trying to deal with their hopes and dreams shattered.<\/p>\n To this day, the importance of love, faith, and hope are themes that I prefer to explore in my writing.\u00a0 I’m not laying it all on that one event in my life, but that break-up traumatized me significantly.\u00a0 Getting to the other side of it taught me quite a bit about myself and how to write about characters struggling with deep emotional loss.<\/p>\n Boot camp.\u00a0 Marriage.\u00a0 The birth of my children.\u00a0 My Dad’s alcoholism.\u00a0 \u00a0Getting fired for bullshit reasons.\u00a0 Not all of these things sound like “trauma” but they’re all significant events that have tested me.\u00a0 They’re experiences I can draw from to make my characters more real.\u00a0 The experiences are wells of emotion I can tap and transmit to my readers.<\/p>\n Not all traumatic events need to be personal in order to become writer fuel.\u00a0 Anyone paying attention to the news in the US for the last couple of years has been experiencing trauma.\u00a0 It doesn’t matter if you’re red leaning or blue leaning, the news has been stressful for everyone.\u00a0 And frightening.\u00a0 I think there’s going to be a lot of dystopian fiction coming out soon, and it’s going to be too realistic.<\/p>\n <\/p>\n How do you take trauma and use it in your fiction?<\/p>\n First, you have to process it enough that you can put separation between yourself and the characters going through the reflection of your trauma.\u00a0 Without the separation, you’ll get lost and lose track of the story you’re trying to tell.\u00a0 Also, if you’re too close to the trauma in your story, you’re going to find the pain too much of a distraction to form good words.<\/p>\n Second, don’t try too hard. Ease into it.\u00a0 Let it sit in the back of your mind while you focus on the characters and the nuts and bolts of writing.\u00a0 In this way, the real emotion will flow naturally into the story and the reader will experience it in a way that is more satisfying than if you try to force it.<\/p>\n Third, make sure the traumatic event you’re drawing from is right for your story.\u00a0 Make sure it’s something you want to tap into at all.\u00a0 If you set out to write a light Urban Fantasy that doesn’t take itself too seriously, you might want to wall yourself off from the experiences that will drag the story down.\u00a0 If you can’t do that, consider writing a different story until you’re ready to move on.<\/p>\n Don’t use writing as your only therapy for trauma.\u00a0 If you’re having difficulty eating or sleeping or functioning at school or work, if your emotional palette has been reduced to different shades of gray, if you’re experiencing symptoms of depression, get help.\u00a0 Writing can be a great way to deal with depression and trauma, but it shouldn’t be your only treatment.\u00a0 It also shouldn’t be the first way you cope.<\/p>\n If for some strange reason you think that you need to hold on to your trauma in order to write, please reconsider.\u00a0 I broke my pinky a long time ago.\u00a0 I had to wear a cast.\u00a0 I remember how much it hurt when I fractured the finger, and how much the skin itched as it healed.\u00a0 It smelled funky after a week or two, and when the cast finally came off, the skin was pale and pink.\u00a0 I don’t have to have a broken finger to write about the experience.\u00a0 That memory is locked in my head and I can draw from it whenever I want.\u00a0 So it is with depression and other trauma of that nature.\u00a0 Heal yourself, then let the memory guide you when you include that kind of experience in your story.<\/p>\n You don’t have to have the exact identical trauma to write about it.\u00a0 If your parents are still alive but you want your character to go through that kind of loss, just think of a family pet you probably lost when you were little.\u00a0 I’m not saying that losing a pet is the same as losing a parent.\u00a0 I’m saying that the pain of loss can be used to extrapolate and imagine another kind of pain.<\/p>\n I think that’s all I have to say on the subject.\u00a0 Tomorrow, I promise the topic won’t be nearly as depressing.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" The last couple of nights have been pretty great! The blog posts have really boosted my mood as I’ve talked about the people closest to me and how much they inspire me to be the best writer I can be. So tonight, let’s keep the positive vibe train going with– Wait, THAT’S my topic tonight? 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