The Dark Side of Writing

On Monday, Melissa posted about coming back from the dark side of writing and I had a long enough comment on the dark side of writing and characters to turn it into a post.

Writing deeply flawed, tortured, or ill characters can be immensely challenging. When I started writing, I was ill. There is no way around that fact. When I started writing, I was immensely depressed. As such, in some particularly challenging times, my writing took on a quality that was visceral, a fist-clenching-the-heart type of pain that hit me when rereading it. I took a lot of my raw feelings, pain, and loneliness and put it onto the page.

Writing it wasn’t the challenge. Writing it, I was so depressed that it felt like crap anyway. It was all a series of simple words that couldn’t possibly add up to much, I thought. But if I was feeling healthier, when I looked back at those words, they had the power to drag me right underwater again and drown me. The physical sensations of depression would trigger anew reading about this quasi-fictionalized pain that I had bestowed upon the character.

Source

And I realized that I had to learn to soften the blows on my characters. Because if I put all my pain into one character, the narrative would be too heavy. I had to learn that I needed to give slivers of that pain to each character to avoid overwhelming them, their scenes, and their stories with my experiences. Just as I have to split up the rest of my learnings and experiences among characters, I have to split the pain to make it bearable.

If I do have to write more darkly for a specific character, I try to layer in what I need the character to feel. Rather than dive deeply into the character’s psyche, which can be dangerous for my own mental health, I layer the scene with edits to achieve that I need. I censor my approach so that I don’t drown in it all at once. I absolutely agree with Melissa in that telling friends and family that you might need some support from them is a good idea.

Do you find some things easy to write but emotionally challenging to read later?

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