Dealing with it.

[Ben]

So I recently got myself over a depressive episode that took over my life for a while, one which ate away my ability to write for a while.
Recently, I took up the habit again, but after writing a little while my contempt for the rest of the world came back.
A little experimentation later, it seems my ability to write well is tied directly to the various emotions I've got sealed off in another chunk of my brain. A sort of personal George Stark, if you will.

So the question is, how do you keep away your darker half when you're not using it?
(As a recovering alcoholic, booze probably isn't the best option.)

[Pat]

Your post caused me to reflect. As would-be writers we are always told we should dig inside ourselves to find our stories - build on our life experiences.

I have never heeded this advice, my story-telling allows me to escape from my own limitations and those of my circumstances, and be anything I want to be.

In the same way, rather than try and seal off the darker corners of your mind, just leave them behind. Use your writing to step out of your life for a while.

Just as your imagination can bring the world down upon you, it can also enable you to escape.

[M.L.]

Well, for my two cents, I would say explore your darker half, embrace it, harness it to propel yourself toward the light. One thing I've learned is that the journey you take in becoming a writer is a journey in self-exploration. Whatever you are will eventually bleed onto the page, whether you like or not, whether you want it to or not.

I wrote a whole novel to in essence overcome my life-altering fear of an abusive ex-husband. In that book, I painted him as he was and used a character to paint how I was, then I killed him so slowly and painfully that in the end I felt sorry for him. But at the end of the writing, I was also free of my fear.

It's all in what you choose to do with who you really are. True writers know that all fiction is based in honesty and truth, theirs and that of others. Use those qualities and emotions in yourself that you like or don't like to give your characters and stories life. Then no side really rules or must be sealed off, and you win, you win.

Mari

[Pat]

M.L. wrote: "Well, for my two cents, I would say explore your darker half, embrace it, harness it to propel yourself toward the light. One thing I've learned is that the journey you take in becoming a writer is..."

I have no doubt, Mari, that you walked a difficult road, no doubt that your writing about it (albeit in the abstract) helped you come to terms with it and I'm more than happy to assume that the result was a very good book. But the contention that this is what a person must do to be a good writer, I reject totally.

Many, many books are written that way - personal experience ones (I believe that are now confusingly referred to as 'autobiographical fiction') but they predicate an introverted and reactionary society. It is those who imagine what isn't, who speculate on what it is like to experience things outside human experience, who lead us forward.

And it is those writers who allow us to escape for a while from the constraints of our own existence. Please don't dismiss them so easily.

[Paul]

Pat, I agree.

It is simpler to 'write what you know', or explore what is inside you - painful as it might be. I prefer to think 'what if'; to construct a society or societies that don't exist, but could. OK, they are of necessity simplified to reflect just one element of actual society magnified or distorted, but it is precisely that distortion that allows the writer to more fully explore humanity - from the outside as it were.

The same with characters - composites of several people probably, and magnified to represent some myth archetype.

It's also very nice to write about yourself as you would like to be, casting aside some traits - self-doubt, fear, indolence - and it might even help you to become the person you would like to be!

[M.L.]

Come on now, are both of you gentlemen saying in so many words that you, the person that is you, will never be reflected in your characters? Your light, your dark sides, the things that give you joy and break your hearts will never be a part of one of your characters?

Can't believe that. Not for a minute. This is the writer's journey, whether you or I agree or not. You can't change the fact that for those who would write, especially fiction, for those who want to imagine the stars or life on another planet and share that with readers, for those who want to write the most escapist fantasy there is, for those want to study the human condition from the outside as it were--we can only do this from our unique human perspectives.

Whether you think it literary to dismiss or downplay or denigrate this truth by calling it simpler, as if there were any more difficult task on earth than digging within one's self and letting the truth flow onto the page. Each of our perspectives is colored by the roads we have walked in our lives. I'm not dismissing anything or anyone here--every writer is entirely free to pursue his or her own path in whatever manner best suits. All I'm saying is that a writer with half of his or her self closed off, even part of the time, even when he or she is not writing, is half the writer he or she might be if there were no self-limitations imposed. If Ben writes into and through his dark half, he'll find a way to unite the two halves on the other side. Then he won't have to ask what to do with his darker half when he's not using it. This union will give him the ultimate control of both sides of himself, when he is writing and when he is not.

My writing is warped, fantastic, way out there, funny as hell, sad as all get out, gross as it needs to be, it really is. Think Douglas Adams, one or a dozen steps beyond. That's my kind of stuff. But there's always a bit of me in at least one of my characters in each book, male or female, the good, the bad, and the ugly parts. It's all there, spread out over sixteen novels so far. The rest of my characters are parts of the good, bad and ugly people I've met in all my travels, in a lifetime of studying human nature close up and personal, good and bad experiences, my egregious errors in socializing and the shame, my joy, all of it saved inside me, whether I remember it easily or not, before I ever knew I would be a novelist.

If you write enough, you can't help knowing yourself. You will be forced to see all the good and bad parts of yourself, from chewing your nails to too much enthusiasm to plain naivete about certain aspects of the world. But it's this knowledge that you draw on, this growing body of knowledge collected as you live and have lived empowers you to give real 3-D life to those beings and worlds you would dare to create.

To write without fear, without limitation, self-imposed or otherwise, is the greatest gift you can give yourself. But to write without fear, you have to disarm your fears, to write through them, all of them, own them so that they cannot own you. Ben expressed one of his fears when he asked what to do with that darker side.

In my opinion, any writer who thinks the journey along this path isn't one of self-discovery is only cheating themselves and their readers out of what they could be and know and experience by limiting themselves to what they think they ought to be, or know, or admit to experiencing.

Still, this is only my opinion. But I have the dark side Ben's talking about, and it used to run my life in a sense, for decades--depression, suicidal thoughts (and attempts), contempt for those different than me or less knowledgeable, the whole gamut--because I never fully faced those bad parts of me, the fears, that grim darker half of me, until I began writing fiction, and writing freely, without fear.

All good fiction is predicated on an element or many elements of truth that allows the reader to identify and thus suspend their disbelief.

I have sat at this keyboard over the years now and laughed to tears and cried a river because some small thing a character did touched off emotions I didn't even know were hiding there inside me. But think, too, that if you don't get to those emotions, if you aren't allowing them to color your characters and your work to even the smallest degree, if you the writer are not laughing or crying or at very least feeling something, your reader won't feel anything at all.

You know we're all psychos, we writers, don't you? You have to be plumb crazy to want to write, to live for and within the story you're spinning, to wake up every morning unable to restrain yourself from your work. I say embrace your inner psycho, let the full range of your emotions bleed onto the page, and let that learning experience carry you to greater heights. To thine own self be true. Lot of truth in that, especially for writers.

Again, this is only my opinion. Please feel free to see it differently than I. If we always agree, one of us is wholly unnecessary...LOL

Mari

[Pat]

Is my writing coloured by my personality, by my experiences? Of course it is. Are my stories based on these same traits and experiences? Absolutely not!

Do I say this to appear literary? I don't considered my work literary at all, I aspire to tell stories, nothing more, and as a writer be invisible to the reader.

And 'truth' is the most abused (and possibly contradictory) word in the English language, even 'natural' doesn't come close.

Pat.

[M.L.]

My stories aren't based on my experiences, far from that, with the exception of the one book I mentioned only to illustrate a point. And even that book incorporates the paranormal to a degree, so it may or may not be solely based on one experience I had. The rest of my stories are so far out there, I have to arrogantly imagine that I'm an acquired taste. All the better, too, at least to my way of thinking.

Truth may be an abused word, and contradictory, where you come from, but around here in my house, it's all there is. But to each their own.

As I said three times in that post, this is only my opinion.

Mari

[Joanne]

Well, the reason I have slacked off from this site is because I am a published author, and not really a professional spam enabler, which is what Goodreads seems to be, a side junket to help Amazon in its current sluggish sales environment. I am too old school just to pummel out 90,000 words in some genre I don't care about, pay for software to proof it, and then pay to have Amazon list it and hope for the best. I believe in the traditional role of editors and publishers, and though the web is altering the economics for authors, when it was already difficult before we could indulge our worst tendencies of shunning work, and actually learning our craft, I am not working now because I am a prisoner of my broken body which our laws were supposed to rectify, but don't when the process becomes more important than the actual person with the disability: Medicare is giving me months of entertainment at the follies in my need for a new power chair, and to my landlord I am presently no better than chattel to be bounced from floor to floor while they renovate--and you think you have it bad with bursting your housing bubble with mortgages you couldn't afford.

I've always battled guttersnipe poverty, so yes, I have episodes of depression, but I stopped kidding myself a long time ago and learned how to do my job as a poet, as a journalist, and as a fiction writer, and that doesn't include posts about mood, or why books need labels.

Ben, if you are a writer, then you ask how you learn the tools of your trade, learn them, and get over fear of failure and rejection, as even prominent authors get told by The Atlantic Monthly to take a hike.

As soon as I resettle in my charmed public housing studio in May, one of my first pitches to publications on health will be about the evils of capitation when it comes to medical care for the poor and middle class--and eventually I will sell it.

Gee, how did I learn to do that? Get off your duffs people. Treating the business of publishing like child's play means you'll never get out of the sandbox.