Greetings my fellow scribes. This week I want to revisit a subject I have written about before in these blogs. It is the concept of writing the “hard things.” I am talking about the things that scare you, or wound you, or that you hesitate to write because they are too raw or too personal. As I have said before, those are the only things really worth writing.

I am nearing completion of my Honors Thesis. Of course, it is a creative writing project and what started off as a series of related short stories has now become a) a novella, and b) a thinly-veiled autobiography. As such, the subject matter is very taxing. I have been crying for most of the week. I have been crying about things I thought I was over. But in reliving them, I open fresh wounds and poured my salty tears into them. Why, you may ask, am I putting myself through this? I could have picked some writing craft element, like setting and written three ten-page short stories showing how setting affects the plot and the characters and been done with it. But no, I have to, to paraphrase Red Barber, “sit at my computer and open up a vein.”

The reason has to do with a lot of things. I am a go-big-or-go-home person. If you are going to do something, do it to the best of your abilities. I didn’t just want to be a bass player. I wanted to be the best bass player. I don’t just want to write. I want to write well. And I think that part of writing well is writing what is hard, because the reason it is hard is because you care about that subject or that circumstance. It hurt you, it changed you, it thrilled you. So when you begin to write about it, you begin to relive it and all that passion is poured out onto the page.

The funny part of the story I am writing for thesis is the character based on me is dead throughout. Now, before you call or text me with suicide prevention hotline numbers, that just happens to be a coincidence not an insight into my state of mind. I began writing a story that was much less autobiographical and the main character, or the character with the best arc I suppose, was not the character that had anything to do with me. The character based mostly on me died in that story. Now that I have incorporated that character, who is now the secondary character into the novella, he is still dead, but now he is the sun that the story orbits around. In any case, I found myself writing a scene where my two sisters grieve my loss. It was quite surreal.

In any case, I urge you, my scribbling friends, not to hide in the shadows when it comes to telling your writing truth. As O’brien says to Winston Smith in 1984, “I will see you in the place where there is no darkness.”