Writing…
I was over at one of my favourite homes-away-from-home on the web, and Aunt B. was talking about the difficulty of the writing process and how the issues she’s dredged up while writing a particular chapter of her novel are clashing with other issues in her real life.
Whenever anyone talks about writing professionally–and I’ve read hundreds of interviews and Being A Writer FAQs that address this–they always say something along the lines of how it isn’t as hard as digging ditches. Or something. Like factory work or road construction etc.
People seem to have this misconception that writing fiction is this easy bit of a lark where you sit around and just make stuff up. And as a person who has laboured over more than one novel in her lifetime, I promise you that novel writing is NOT easy. At least not if the novel you intend to produce is any good at all.
No, it isn’t digging ditches or filling potholes. Nor is it brain surgery or rocket science. But it is a practiced cruelty, a dragging of your own mind into places that are unpleasant, uncomfortable or sad. Imagine sitting down and describing the worst, most embarrassing, most uncomfortable, most intimate moments of your lifetime. Word by word, exposing the musty corners of your brain. And picture doing that for hours and hours and hours. Because that’s the emotionally exhausting experience of writing fiction.
Sure, you are making things up. But since you are not a deity, everything you create must start with something. Just as any cake starts as flour, sugar, eggs and butter, the story you tell about someone you’ve made up starts as things you’ve seen or experienced. You swap them around a bit, embellish with other things you’ve imagined. But the ingredients are all pieces of experience which live inside your head. Bugs you’ve seen become monsters. Arguments you’ve had become fights between characters. The exhiliration of falling in love–its own kind of exhausting wonder–you live through again as you have a character fall in love. The heartbreak of breaking up, of watching dogs and parents die. It all gets remade in the form of the story you tell.
And I promise you that after five years of doing this nearly full time, there are many many days that I would rather dig a ditch or fill a pothole.
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Thank you, Katherine Coble. I love this post. I’ve dug ditches for a living, and I’ve done other manual labor, and I’m currently laboring over what I plan to make my first novel (for better or worse). I know exactly of what you speak.
The freedom of digging ditches is that your mind can go where it pleases. We are not animals; our lives exist through our minds so much more than through our raw senses. I know that’s a clumsy way of putting it, but I think you get what I’m saying. You may have a sore body at the end of a day of digging ditches (I usually did), but your mind may still go where it pleases while your body rests.
No such luck with writing. For the last few weeks, and last week it was particularly intense, I was working on a couple of difficult scenes in my story, and I discovered how much I had become attached to the characters (one in particular). As their words, thoughts, and feelings were coming to life in my mind, and as I wrote them down, I found myself breaking out in tears at times. I was envisioning what they were feeling, and those feelings apparently dragged this out of me. Have I ever experienced a close approximation of what my characters have? Hardly. Where did it come from, then? Then I would find myself starting to break down when I was barely thinking of the story. So I’m thinking: am I losing my effing mind, or is there some emotional damage being revealed here?
But I see you understand completely what was happening to me. I’d never gotten this far or this invested in any characters or their stories. It’s taking a toll from me, and I have to really be mindful of that. But it’s also rewarding and challenging. I’ve dredged up these emotions (from somewhere; maybe I don’t want to know exactly), so now I have to do them and my characters justice.
Let the work go on, and let no one doubt that it is work.