TEARING Your Soul Apart- Being A Writer

And now, another rambling from yours truly...

It's not an easy gig being a writer. It's easier for some for various reasons, but over all it takes strong will power. I won't get into how hard it is for most writers to break into the market and become a huge name. I know of several authors who have been popular about as long as I've been alive, and still they are not household names. I'm talking about authors who are just as good as the legends everyone knows about. I won't get into learning the nuts and bolts of the editing side, which I've been learning on my own for the pass year (I was a bored kid in school, and didn't pay any more attention than I had to. Yes, I want to go back in time and smack myself.) But the part that I'm talking about is taking a part of yourself and inserting it into your fiction.

There are some writers who don't do this, and still turn out great fiction; this post isn't about them :^) I'm talking about writing about the stuff that's hard to write. For me it's easy to a point, but it's only easy because I'm an honest person. I hold very little back, and the stuff I do hold back ends up coming out later on. The impact, however, is felt hard. I live my life inside of my head. While I can connect with a lot of people, more and more everyday, there are still things no one can relate to me on. I guess this is true for a lot of people out there; all of us have things no one else can completely understand. This has become a staple in my life. Maybe for me it's a mental illness, not sure, but some things get to me that don't get to other people. Or things that most don't see the big picture while it's freaking obvious to me. I may not get to travel around the world, or get to various writing classes, but in my head I go through more alternate timelines, more looking from wearing the shoes of others than most do.

In my head I live out various alternate timelines. "What ifs" is a part of my life. I exclude no one from this. And it doesn't matter if I'm happy or not. I always flip it in my head. If something tiny nags at me, I envision it becoming the focal point of a crisis. If there is a crisis, I imagine what it would take to resolve it. I also imagine what the other person would say if I brought up the problem, which the better I know that person the better the conversation in my head. All of this is fodder for my stories. Might as well, if I'm going to toil over things that either are just my problem, or things that wouldn't be good to bring up, I might as well use them. But I also use the good stuff too. Not everything is bleak. There are a lot of positive inspirations in my life that are included, but my point on this is that nothing is off limits. Most of which never happened.

A good writer writes what they know. Granted a lot of amazing authors shake their heads at this, but it's true. Not just for the story itself, I don't have to work for the CIA to write about it, but I do have to know what it means to be human before writing about people. I know what it's like looking from the POV of others at a situation. I also know what it's like to be different. I know what it's like to be the only one who understands me (outside of my mother). I know what it's like when I have to choose the lesser of two evils (anyone who knows me knows just how much I hate to do that), when I must decide which is worse? Being alone? Or being around someone who strips my nerves raw?

People sometimes think I come to my opinions easily, that I don't care as much as they do, if at all. Bull Hockey! As a writer I probably care more, or at least just as much. As a matter of fact, I might even understand their POV better than they do. I can also build on it, on what would be consistent based on their behavior, which may or may not be what they would do. The problem with real people is that they do things that don't make sense. They don't follow the rules of writing. But, as a writer I can make them do so in my head.

A few years ago, I was with someone who was almost raped. She was also raped when she was a teen. She was going through so much I didn't even know how to act around her. I was supportive of course, and I wanted to cut the nuts off of the guys that did this to her. She tried hard to handle it, but it became the reason of the break up. The last time we had together is one of the worse in my history of dating, and not at all her fault. We had communication issues, and we argued, but all of it stemmed from something that wasn't our fault, but the fault of a couple of degenerates (putting it nicely). Throughout the relationship, I tried to picture the right way to handle things, and of course reality didn't match up with what I had in my head. I could only think for myself, and not for her. In the end nothing I could write in my head could save the relationship. But it continued to play out in "what ifs" in my head.

As much as I hated what happened, I wanted things to be fixed. Even though her and I were through, I wanted closure. I wanted to see her and I at least end things on a hug. Instead of one day waking up to find she has restricted my way of contacting her. I had a couple of means to contact her, but I didn't. I knew she needed to hunker down, and focus on herself. She needed space. But still, in my head I wanted to see this story have a better ending. Not one together as I felt that it wasn't meant to be, but one where we part on good terms. She is a good person, smart, and capable doing great things. Naturally I hated the schism that was now and forever formed between us.

One out of a hundred examples of how my head works, one of a hundred "what ifs" that have tormented me, and one that has inspired a lot of my work, some of which hasn't been published yet. She isn't the girl that inspires great love stories for me, but she does carry a huge impact on the muse of characters for my stories. On the bright side, I do have someone who inspires the love and romance that I will be including in my writing (who by the way is one of the best things to ever happen to me). I'm not all grim. While darkness is where I live, I reach for all wedges of light that shine down on me, and I never turn them away.

Writing from your soul is more than writing about conflict, more than beauty, it's about writing for resolution. It's about writing the ending that fits, fixing the endings that didn't end right in the real world. Think of it as a form of karma, this is a chance for karma to fix what was broken, even if it is just in our heads.