This week I have been sucked back in to writing (And rewriting) parts of my novel. Does anyone else get a second wind, so-to-speak, with their writing? I have been so happy with the initial draft of it for a few months now, but suddenly I had a flurry of new thoughts that I wanted to add in. I feel excited by the parts I’m changing and adding in, and how much more information I’m learning about my characters.
Isn’t it bizarre how despite creating these characters yourself, there’s still things you don’t know about them?
I rewrote a major part in the story last week. I don’t feel like there’s one chapter you could miss and still get the gist, however, I do feel like there are a few stand out chapters that are the pillars of the story; and this is one of them.
The chapter I rewrote was one of the first parts I wrote in the entire book, and it includes emotional and physical abuse. As you can imagine, it took a lot out of me to write it. As I write, I become the character and I slip into their mind and body and see the scene as if I were an actor playing the character. It felt exhausting to flip between victim and abuser and feeling both sides of the abuse in my mind.
Writing from both sides is hard. Imagining towering, tall before a small woman that doesn’t deserve the pain she is receiving, and then switching and imagining receiving that pain, it was hard to get into that mind set. In my past I have experienced emotional and mental abuse, but never physical, which made it difficult in two very different ways; I knew nothing about one side and a lot about the other.
The first time I wrote the chapter, my heart was racing, I didn’t want to write it. It felt uncomfortable but it had to be done, and I was happy with it, (Well, as happy as I could be) but after having a new wave of creativity, I realised I didn’t know as much as I wanted to about the man in this chapter.
When I have an idea or a question in my mind, I can’t let go of it, so naturally I took some time aside, got my pen and paper and wrote everything I needed to know about this character. Five pages later I felt like I knew him. I knew who he was before the moment we meet him in the story, I knew what he studied at university, I knew his family, his thoughts, his feelings, and I knew what he did after the story. Knowing all this new information made him seem different to me. When I first wrote it, I just wanted to paint this evil picture of this evil man, but even in reality, there’s a person under every evil and I discovered just who he really was and what that felt like.
Someone who was magnetic and gorgeous, someone who worked hard for what they want, and someone who ended up being completely stripped of their worth by others, and in turn needed to strip it from someone else to regain power.
Yes, he is still an evil person, and I still want the reader to hate him, but I now know his motive and that changes how I wanted him to appear to the reader. The way he says things is different, and the way he holds himself is different.
Finding out this new person injected this fire in me to write him, but that meant I had to get in the zone of the character that experiences this man too.
I assume all writers have a place in them within where they can go to safely dig up old wounds in order to write certain things, right? Or maybe they just do extensive research and learn about what they’re writing about. Maybe they don’t write about something they’ve experienced? Either way, I prepared the only way I could and that was to listen to music I listened to when I was in the relationship I experienced my emotional and mental abuse in, and buckle up.
Armed with music that reminded me of that pain. Much like a vaccine shows your immune system a weakened version of what it is granting you immunity from, the music gave me a weakened version of the pain I experienced.
It was exhausting, and I haven’t been able to go back to the chapter since, but I was able to complete it again. When I have the strength, I will go back and add more and get it to the point where I can slot the new chapter in the space of the old, but only when I have the strength.
I love writing, and I love writing from the heart, but I do acknowledge that sometimes it can be hard. Tapping into very real feelings and adding colour to them, like painting with water colour – adding colour and tone to clear water.
Bringing these feelings to life is exhausting.
But what’s that saying? What is right, doesn’t come easy? No pain, no gain? You can’t have a rainbow without rain? I think all of them stand with what I’m trying to say. I don’t think I would feel as if I was putting my most into my writing, if I didn’t feel a little trying at times.
Gwen Richards 