All writers feel the need to be able to write about the entire gamut of emotions, everything that we plop into that pile we call “the human condition.” Of course, that makes sense. Regardless of genre, form or theme, everything we write does boil down to what it means to be human. Nonetheless, some things come more easily than others and I started to think about this while I was rereading the draft of my latest novel.
In that book, and throughout my writing, I have certainly written about love, death, anger, joy, curiosity, loss, betrayal, fear, humiliation, surprise, hate, good, evil, perfection and ruin. But while some of these elements are immediately accessible, both by me as a writer and me as a reader, others take a lot more work. Surprisingly, I can write much more easily about anger and loss than I can about love. Although in my “real” life I can say “I love you” much more easily than I can say “I’m angry with you,” the opposite is true on the page. Without becoming all Freudian about it (or is it Jungian?), it is obvious that all this says quite a lot about me. I know that to be true and yet I still find it very surprising.
What about you? Are there things that you struggle to write about, and are those things the same as what you struggle with in your life? Or is the opposite true? This may not look like an earth shattering question at first, but the more I think about it, the more I realise that it addresses all sorts of important, hidden challenges.
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| courtesy of healthmatters2day.blogspot.com |
Interesting question. It is much easier to explore in our characters emotions that do not expose us as people. The negative emotions are perhaps less ‘threatening’ to portray in our characters, and therefore easier. But for this writer, anyway, it is important not to let that sense of being threatened stop me writing closely, and well – I know its only another variation on the inner critic.
I know when I first started writing all of my stories were sad. Whenever I tried anything happy it was horrible. I’ve worked on that and I hope I’ve improved, at least a bit. I didn’t pick at it much to see the reason. Kind of didn’t want to know.