From Sorrow to Wisdom to Words

or The Art of Writing While Crying Your Damn Eyes Out

Photo by Fischer Twins on Unsplash

My current work-in-progress, The Grave Thereafter, is difficult to write.

Not in the usual sense that makes any novel difficult to write, but in that this is a story that hits very close to home. At the beginning of the story, my main character suffers an emotional blow very similar to something that I, myself suffered through.

Insert lesson here on how good art derives from real life, and so on.

Anyway. Though the specific context of the story is different from my life, the feelings that he goes through, the depression, the grief, the mourning, the hurt, the isolation, all of it, is identical to what I felt. I am, in essence, dredging up the worst years of my life, and trying to channel them into this character, onto the page.

So I wind up crying. A lot.

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To be fair, I cry a lot, anyway, when I get swept away in a story.

I don’t recommend going to the movies with me, especially when you know that it’s going to be a tear-jerker, because I am the very large guy sitting there, letting the tears stream. I might even be ugly snot crying.