![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Writing as Catharsis
Feb. 8th, 2014 06:00 pmI've been listening to some different types of books lately -- romance novels, though most of them have been postmodern romance, so they've got romances taking place alongside mysteries, hauntings, and other types of stories. (This has mostly been the work of Jennifer Crusie Smith, if you're familiar with her work) Alongside this a friend of mine managed to finish a gemstone piece I started in 1979, a red jasper heart. My creative response being what it is I soon thought of a novel idea, and the idea worked perfectly as a metaphysical/paranormal romance story, which has the working title of Love Spell.
This story has cut close to the bone for me, with a lot of the elements involved in it autobiographical. And in writing it (I'm not finished, but I'm 115 single spaced pages and 51,500 words into it so far) I've dredged up a lot of stuff I didn't realize was in my psyche. My characters have also taken the story in directions I didn't expect them to, (expectations decrease joy) and some things have happened in ways that shocked me.
My main character has a lot of similar experiences in her life that I've had in mine, especially in the romantic arena, and some of it has been intense. For one thing, I came to the realization this last week that walking out on someone who has already experessed fatalistic views about the way things went down and leaving that disabled person without much food in the house and no way to get some more in short order is effectively leaving that person for dead No wonder I took it all the way I did, and no wonder my friends are still enraged (not just angry) about it almost three years later.
But writing has also been therapeutic for me, especially with something so close to my perspective. I've become aware of how far I've come in my life from that crux point, and how much my perspectives have changed on a lot of things. For one thing I'm a lot more capable -- this blindness thing keeps challenging me to readjust my concept of what I can and can't do, in both directions. And since my guide dog is no longer able to really handle busy street crossings I'm having to reassess again, a process I seem to have in spades since 2003 when my sight took a hiatus.
Even if I don't publish this book I'll have gotten a lot out of it, though I hope to publish it some day, as it's got some fun stuff in it. But of course I have to finish it first.
This story has cut close to the bone for me, with a lot of the elements involved in it autobiographical. And in writing it (I'm not finished, but I'm 115 single spaced pages and 51,500 words into it so far) I've dredged up a lot of stuff I didn't realize was in my psyche. My characters have also taken the story in directions I didn't expect them to, (expectations decrease joy) and some things have happened in ways that shocked me.
My main character has a lot of similar experiences in her life that I've had in mine, especially in the romantic arena, and some of it has been intense. For one thing, I came to the realization this last week that walking out on someone who has already experessed fatalistic views about the way things went down and leaving that disabled person without much food in the house and no way to get some more in short order is effectively leaving that person for dead No wonder I took it all the way I did, and no wonder my friends are still enraged (not just angry) about it almost three years later.
But writing has also been therapeutic for me, especially with something so close to my perspective. I've become aware of how far I've come in my life from that crux point, and how much my perspectives have changed on a lot of things. For one thing I'm a lot more capable -- this blindness thing keeps challenging me to readjust my concept of what I can and can't do, in both directions. And since my guide dog is no longer able to really handle busy street crossings I'm having to reassess again, a process I seem to have in spades since 2003 when my sight took a hiatus.
Even if I don't publish this book I'll have gotten a lot out of it, though I hope to publish it some day, as it's got some fun stuff in it. But of course I have to finish it first.
