on writing: writing out your anguish
Apr. 16th, 2004 07:24 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
lagilmanSo CGAG met last week, and as part of the conversation, somehow we ended up talking about writing out of internal conflict, a.k.a. "using the shit life throws at you."
One of our members (call this person 'Z') came out and admitted that s/he was uncomfortable with the entire concept of digging down deep (or not so deep, in some cases) and pulling the emotion out of his/herself. Z worried that in doing so, s/he might uncork things best left, well, corked up. And that it wasn't worth it for the writing. That, if Z had to actually dig that out in order to get something saleworthy and memorable, maybe writing wasn't worth the cost to Z's peace of mind.
I can understand that, I guess.
Well, no, actually I can't.
*warning: what follows is purely my own, deeply held, deeply felt personal opinion*
Pain hurts. It is there to tell you that something is wrong, and once you know something is wrong and are taking Steps, pain should stop. But for some kinds of pain, the best thing you can do for it (the only Step you can take) is to make it useful.
There's a line from... Gaudy Night, is it? When Lord Peter says to Harriet, (about something being painful) "What does it matter, so long as it makes a good book?" He was being the manipulative male, story-wise, but he was not wrong. In order to move the reader, the reader has to feel emotion in the writing. In order for there to be real emotion in the writing to feel, the writer must also know the emotion. And I don't mean know in a theoretical, dry, academic "I researched this" sense, either. For a total knockout punch of a story, the author has to have f*cked the feeling, as it were. Known it in the most intimate, biblical sense possible.
Or, to put in an equally crude but more socially acceptably phrased way, the first rule of smut is 'don't let the virgin write the sex scene.'
No, not every sentence I write has a deep-seated emotional trauma behind it. And not everything I write comes from personal experience (considering some of the things I write, this is A Very Good Thing). But when I create a character, or run them through a scenario, something of that comes from within me. And I've discovered that the deeper and more emotionally impacted the 'something,' the more powerful the story. And the faster it sells.
Case in Point: "Harvey & Fifth," which appeared in Flesh & Blood and really needs to be reprinted sometimes soon, damn it. I wrote that story in the summer of 2001, a year or so after the event (a visit to the Oklahoma City memorial) took place. I knew no-one who died there. I had no friends or relatives who where there at the time. I had never been to Oklahoma City before that trip. But I had loved and lost unfairly, and something there moved me so deeply and so painfully in the loved-and-lost category that this story simmered and simmered and then flowed out of me in one painfully emotional catharsis. (And after I had written that story, 9/11 happened, and I have yet to write a story arising from that. Perhaps because I was able to write it before it happened. Or perhaps because I haven't yet been able to touch the pain from that event. Check with me again in about ten years. Nobody said the using would happen fast. Or easy.)
Other stories I've mined from my own personal pain? "Turnings" (Realms of Fantasy, sold first time out of the gate. "In The Aftermath of Something Happening," which will appear in Oceans of the Mind in a month or two. "Don't You Want to Be Beautiful?" from Did You Say Chicks? (yes, humor from pain. Time-honored tradition, that). "Catseye" from Familiars, which is still difficult for me to read, and yet is in the top five personal favorites of all my stories ever. That one came not so much from the pain of experience, but the pain of wisdom gained from experience.
Even writing the Wren & Sergei stories, I'm mining my own depths. The joys I've never acknowledged. The pains I've had inflicted upon me. The sorrows I feel on observation of cowardice and prejudice on a daily basis. The guilt felt because at some point I should have spoken, or acted, and didn't (that's where "Aftermath" comes from as well, the helpless guilt of the culpable observer).
I look at the body of my work, and I see that the very best -- the material that hits readers correctly, that finds editors willing to take a risk on it -- comes from the most deeply felt part of me. So what if I then have to clean up a little afterward? Isn't (within certain carefully observed mental-health-for-writers-is-different-from-other-folk guidelines) the story worth the work?
I think it is, anyway.
End ramble.
Of course, I may also be completely full of shite.
One of our members (call this person 'Z') came out and admitted that s/he was uncomfortable with the entire concept of digging down deep (or not so deep, in some cases) and pulling the emotion out of his/herself. Z worried that in doing so, s/he might uncork things best left, well, corked up. And that it wasn't worth it for the writing. That, if Z had to actually dig that out in order to get something saleworthy and memorable, maybe writing wasn't worth the cost to Z's peace of mind.
I can understand that, I guess.
Well, no, actually I can't.
*warning: what follows is purely my own, deeply held, deeply felt personal opinion*
Pain hurts. It is there to tell you that something is wrong, and once you know something is wrong and are taking Steps, pain should stop. But for some kinds of pain, the best thing you can do for it (the only Step you can take) is to make it useful.
There's a line from... Gaudy Night, is it? When Lord Peter says to Harriet, (about something being painful) "What does it matter, so long as it makes a good book?" He was being the manipulative male, story-wise, but he was not wrong. In order to move the reader, the reader has to feel emotion in the writing. In order for there to be real emotion in the writing to feel, the writer must also know the emotion. And I don't mean know in a theoretical, dry, academic "I researched this" sense, either. For a total knockout punch of a story, the author has to have f*cked the feeling, as it were. Known it in the most intimate, biblical sense possible.
Or, to put in an equally crude but more socially acceptably phrased way, the first rule of smut is 'don't let the virgin write the sex scene.'
No, not every sentence I write has a deep-seated emotional trauma behind it. And not everything I write comes from personal experience (considering some of the things I write, this is A Very Good Thing). But when I create a character, or run them through a scenario, something of that comes from within me. And I've discovered that the deeper and more emotionally impacted the 'something,' the more powerful the story. And the faster it sells.
Case in Point: "Harvey & Fifth," which appeared in Flesh & Blood and really needs to be reprinted sometimes soon, damn it. I wrote that story in the summer of 2001, a year or so after the event (a visit to the Oklahoma City memorial) took place. I knew no-one who died there. I had no friends or relatives who where there at the time. I had never been to Oklahoma City before that trip. But I had loved and lost unfairly, and something there moved me so deeply and so painfully in the loved-and-lost category that this story simmered and simmered and then flowed out of me in one painfully emotional catharsis. (And after I had written that story, 9/11 happened, and I have yet to write a story arising from that. Perhaps because I was able to write it before it happened. Or perhaps because I haven't yet been able to touch the pain from that event. Check with me again in about ten years. Nobody said the using would happen fast. Or easy.)
Other stories I've mined from my own personal pain? "Turnings" (Realms of Fantasy, sold first time out of the gate. "In The Aftermath of Something Happening," which will appear in Oceans of the Mind in a month or two. "Don't You Want to Be Beautiful?" from Did You Say Chicks? (yes, humor from pain. Time-honored tradition, that). "Catseye" from Familiars, which is still difficult for me to read, and yet is in the top five personal favorites of all my stories ever. That one came not so much from the pain of experience, but the pain of wisdom gained from experience.
Even writing the Wren & Sergei stories, I'm mining my own depths. The joys I've never acknowledged. The pains I've had inflicted upon me. The sorrows I feel on observation of cowardice and prejudice on a daily basis. The guilt felt because at some point I should have spoken, or acted, and didn't (that's where "Aftermath" comes from as well, the helpless guilt of the culpable observer).
I look at the body of my work, and I see that the very best -- the material that hits readers correctly, that finds editors willing to take a risk on it -- comes from the most deeply felt part of me. So what if I then have to clean up a little afterward? Isn't (within certain carefully observed mental-health-for-writers-is-different-from-other-folk guidelines) the story worth the work?
I think it is, anyway.
End ramble.
Of course, I may also be completely full of shite.
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no subject
Date: 2004-04-17 10:18 am (UTC)I understand Z's dilemma. I think you do have to reach deeply to write stories that while they may not be real, are true. Sometimes in order to do that, you have to go places inside yourself you don't like very much, or are scared of. Or you have to codify and crystallize a response to a person or event that on the whole you don't really want to know that well. If you are going to be a fiction writer, if you are going to be a good writer, I think you have to go there. If not, you can still be a writer, and sometimes you might write good stuff, but it will never be true the way good fiction is true.
And if I might digress for just a moment, I think that if you write -- anything -- you have to read a lot, too. One of the most boring mistakes new writers make is not having read much in the area they are writing in. Somehow they seem to think this makes their prose purer. What it usually means is that they have denied themselves a whole universe of background riches.
So saith the book reviewer. I will stop now. Laundry (and the Yankees) call.