Changing and growing

Someone asked me the other day whether I always wrote the same way – and the answer, of course, is no.

I’ve said this often: sometimes it feels as though it’s flying, as though I’m a conduit for something larger than myself. Sometimes it plods, it drags its heels. But other things happen too. (It’s called life.)

We change, we grow, and it’s ridiculous to think our personal lives won’t affect our writing. Every event in our lives changes us a little bit. It’s going to change the way we see the world, and the way we express it.

The events themselves may creep into our writing in a way we didn’t quite foresee. I once had a huge fight with a good friend. The next day I was writing about a husband and wife. Almost of it’s own volition, some of the aspects of the fight crept into their relationship – and worked very well, I thought.

But I mean more than that. Each fight, each love, every battle with bureaucracy, alters us. It’s natural it’s going to change our writing. I can feel that my writing gets better as it goes along. It’s true that I grow more into my characters. I become more confident in seeing the world as they do.

I change too, though, and it does have an effect. That huge fight makes you look at the world a little differently, and you find it coming out in the way you express the life of your characters. That’s the nature of a piece of writing that takes months or years to write. That’s what second drafts are for.

But what happens if something monumental happens: someone dies, we have to move houses, towns, or perhaps even countries? These are events that profoundly change us, and are bound to alter us irrevocably as writers.

I have heard some writers say they looked back at what they had written and found it trivial, lacking in depth. They could no longer face it, let alone continue writing.

Look, I think this is understandable, but it may not be a completely realistic feeling.  Everything we go through forms us as writers, so it may be that a work-in-progress will never match the new person we have become. In this case perhaps it should be seen as raw material, put aside, and restarted.

But that’s an extreme. Mostly, I think it should just be placed to one side for a while. It may well be salvageable.  Again … that’s what second drafts are for.

We may be different people on each side of a traumatic event, but what happens while we’re going through it?

We may not be able to face what we’ve been writing, or feel ourselves able to write at all. Be a little gentle. Put your work-in-progress to one side and write something else. Or put it aside and don’t start anything new.

But writing really does help us through the process, even if it’s never intended to be made public. So continue writing, but write for your own peace of mind. Write profoundly, heart-breakingly, intensely – but just for yourself.

Other writers have reported writing intensely through traumatic times, escaping the pain through a narrative that took them as far from their own lives as possible. Nothing wrong with that, but the pain is still going to express itself through the writing. Is that intensity appropriate to what is being written? (Well, that’s what second drafts are for.)

I went through the break-up of a marriage through the writing of one of my books. I think I poured in far too much of those feelings for the story at hand. A friend, who acted as my reader, was forced to reread it more times than she’d read To Kill a Mockingbird, which was her favourite book. (Six drafts, if I recall.)

Now, as I was writing this, I felt myself growing as a person. I’m not sure I can continue with it. It just doesn’t …

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