Fear and Fiction

Fiction writing is not a place for the safe, for the easy, for the sweet and the shiny.

Tell the story you fear to tell.

Currently, I'm outlining chapters of my manuscript rewrite for Gems in the Rough (formerly Ruby Rising). I avoid stories about fathers. Mine was difficult, distant, demanding. I've spent quite some time and money trying not to think about fathers. So, I was struck when it was pointed out to me that my story partly was a story of father-child relationships. I spent a time denying it, looking to reframe the story. I wanted it to be about feminine power. Not that men in the story were secondary or weak, but, dang it, I was not going to write about fathers. After awhile I came to realize, central to the story is the nature of the father-child relationship. I won't be able to do this story justice by skirting around it.

It feels like I'm bracing myself to rip off a band-aid. I hope the skin's healed underneath.

Words on writing and the psyche:

"You have to sink way down to a level of hopelessness and desperation to find the book that you can write." - Susan Sontag

"Writing is a form of therapy; sometimes I wonder how all those who do not write, compose or paint can manage to escape the madness, the melancholia, the panic fear which is inherent in a human situation." - Graham Greene

"It's a nervous work. The state that you need to write in is the state that others are paying large sums to get rid of." - Shirley Hazzard.