On Writing: Live. Write. Rinse. Repeat.

[lagilman]

Over in debg's LJ we're discussing one-liner advice to writers. Mine was "Be true."

I'm going to go further on that subject at a later date, I think -- possibly on Storytellers. But I'm at a point in the book where the words are resonating, and not in a good way.

See, I have to write a scene. A very emotional, highly charged scene. And in order for me to get the emotion down into the page, I have to drag it up out of me.

To be true.


But that's going to take me to a place I don't want to be, using memories that are painful. Things that hurt. Being true to the emotion -- not shortchanging the reader of the full impact of the scene, as best as I can provide it -- has a cost.

And I'm not sure I want to pay it. Again.


What it comes down to is the question of which is more important: my short-term emotional comfort, or the book.


There's not really any argument. Just a lot of reluctance, until I'm actually there.


And then all I can do is hope that the final scene is worth it.

Comments

[debg.livejournal.com]

Love, I send you peace and strength and courage.

I just wrote 77,000 words in four weeks that was the ficitonalised version of the first great love of my life. When I lost that, I went into a fugue state for the better part of a year - I literally lost most of my memories. I just tried getting it back by writing it.

I have been fucking bleeding this book out. The discussion has been nonstop, in a locked list; it's been obsessive. There has been nothing, nothing at all, that didn't hurt. I think, at one point, that I said I felt like Hypatia, scraped to death with oyster shells and tiles by the Christians in Alexandria. It's been horrible.

But the book is kickass. And I feel cleansed.

And if you want to read any of the discussion about it - on the basis of misery providing major support - I'll click you into that list. The novel is very locked down and no one outside the list gets to deal with it, but if you want to see what I've been going through, on just this subject, say so, and I'll put your name on the guest list...

[liuseth.livejournal.com]

OOh I can empathise here.
mine wasn't a book, it was a series of many poems.

In the space of 5 or so years I found my fiance in bed with another female, and was betrayed by every friend i had in pretty major ways, even the new ones i'd made after the debacle of the first two groups of friends betrayed me.

I was at such an ugly place for many years. The poems and writing was a kind of catharsis that without, i don't think i could have moved on and forgiven what happened. I won't ever forget but i can look back and learn from what happened.
I still use some of what happened in my writing to this day. The times I need to use them i too do so very reluctantly. But i am grateful that i have experience to draw on, else my characters would be pretty damn one dimensional indeed.

Use the pain, revel in it, make something good come of it. Then, let it go. Put it back in its box where it belongs, and celebrate how far you've come as a person since those events take place.

Kada's 2 cents worth.

[debg.livejournal.com]

Use the pain, revel in it, make something good come of it. Then, let it go. Put it back in its box where it belongs, and celebrate how far you've come as a person since those events take place.

It's hard. It's incredibly hard. It's as hard as anything I've ever done.

I want him - that first great love, dead now - to be whole again, in my memory. I want to find a way to make what we had a size that will enable me to carry it around in my heart, instead of being on my knees for the past, grieving over it.

Bleeding - no fun at all.

[liuseth.livejournal.com]

{hugs}

For that kind of bleeding, time is the only bandage. And, unfortunately, sometimes, there's not enough bandage to stop the bleeding.

It's taken me ten years to start to move on, and without the warm loving man i have now, i couldn't have moved on to the final stages of healing.
Some people are strong enough to heal completely on their own. i wasn't. It still impacts on our relationship in many ways, but i try not to let it.

I hope that one day you can remember the bad and celebrate the good without such an aching feeling inside.

[debg.livejournal.com]

1976 will make it thirty years. I don't think time is going to heal this.

Writing may make it manageable. I hope it works for suricattus, as well.

[liuseth.livejournal.com]

Nope, maybe not enough bandage.

I hope you find some measure of solace with the writing. If anything, it may help ease just a little of the pain and make it a manageable level.
Here's hoping!

[lagilman]

This particular scene's dredging up a pain of a relatively recent emotional vintage. And it had a (mostly) positive long-term ending (I think). So I can ease myself into and around it, get what I need and get out.

There are some wounds I can't touch quite yet -- just touching on it creates a flow of blood that's too thick to dip my pen in.

That's one of the things haiku is so wonderful for. The structure of the form gives you distance from that rush of blood, sends it down specific channels to create something specific. And if that brings to mind a slaughterhouse, well... probably the right visual.

you turn, storm;
summer rain is hot
you blow cool.

The deliberation of finding the few words to carry maximum weight distances you at the same time it brings you face to face with the exact emotion that made the cuts.


"Lion Says" was born of blood, absolutely. But it marked the scar tissue, not the wounding.

[debg.livejournal.com]

I try to write everything in the language as freight train vein - everything fiction, that is. I want one word to carry many meanings.

It's why I love drabbling. Some of the drabbles of the last year's digging at the scar tissue have found their way into the book.

Man, I wish you were out here. We could go find a quiet cafe and hang out and talk all night, damn it.

[liuseth.livejournal.com]

for me it's not the haiku, but the flow and the rhyming of the words that works as the buffer to the pain and the lance for the emotional pus.

Haikus i can't do unfortunatley. i'm not that concise. lol

DEb, what are drabbles?

[debg.livejournal.com]

Drabbles are a piece of writing, exactly 100 words, on a specific theme.

Here's a recent one I did as an example, where the scar tissue is apparent. The assigned theme was "two people in a confined space":

Alive in Memory

We're in here and it's dark. I try to see you, hold on, clinging for dear life because there are things behind every corner and I'm frightened, frightened

but

sometimes there's light, we touch, hand to hand, sometimes belly to belly, and in the bits of light that break through there are no hidden places and the eyes in the shadows are shut, cowering back, afraid of the blaze we make

so

it seems that you and I, in this tiny undefined place of no horizons, belong together, holding on, being what we are

wait

make that, what we were.

[liuseth.livejournal.com]

Very poignant.

{hugs}