The Saddest 5 Pages

I was writing about the death of Kenny’s best friend, Bryan.  They’d been buddies from childhood through their twenties.  I knew the scene was coming, but I didn’t expect to be in tears while I wrote it.  Not simply watering eyes but tears running down my face, and a great knot of grief in my throat.

For me, writing is an act of empathy.  I try to conjure the emotions as I write about them.  I immerse myself in the world of the story, and when I surface again, I’m always surprised to find day-to-day life is going on around me. 

I’m certainly not a method-actor, and I don’t know if there’s such a thing as a method-writer.  All I can say is that writing requires absolute honesty.  When I’m working on a first draft, I don’t always have the answers at the ready, but I do trust the process.

This time, however, with Bryan’s death, I had to coach myself through the scene that everything was going to be okay.

I wrote that scene seven years ago.  Since then, the novel has been sitting on my hard drive.  I’ve made a few attempts to find an agent for it, but eventually I set it aside to work on other projects.  A few months ago, I pulled it out again, and I’ve been cleaning it up.

Yesterday, I got to that scene.  And again the tears.

I’m not suggesting the scene is the epitome of pathos.  The kind of scene that ends with an abandoned kitten.  All I”m saying is that it touches me in a very personal way.  An unexplainable way.

It’s a scene that I could plan for, but I couldn’t craft it until I wrote it, and what came out somehow transcends the writing experience for me.