For as long as I can remember, I have enjoyed writing and wanted to write novels. I've started a number of them, even gotten quite far on a couple, and then stopped. Part of it is just not knowing where I wanted to go with a story. But if I'm honest, a big part of it is fear.
Writing anything is dangerous. It is final. Writing takes on a life of its own after it leaves your pen or is typed onto a computer screen. When you write honestly, you leave yourself open to the criticism, judgment, and scorn of others. To have written something means that you have thought it, and so all your innermost thoughts are laid bare.
To some extent fiction writing mirrors life. You experience something in life and it will somehow make its way into your writing. You experience people and there they are, looking back at you from the page. What if the person upon whom you base a character reads your story and recognizes himself in it? And what if it's not very flattering?
I'm less than 100 pages away from finishing a 600+ page biography on Ernest Hemingway. Hemingway was a writer who used real people and real events (sometimes not even changing the names until forced by an editor) in his novels and lost many friends over it. As a Christian I'm charged with living at peace with everyone as far as it depends on me. Does that mean I should never base a character on a real person who might someday take offense to what I write?
Besides the concern that I may someday hurt someone's feelings through my writing, I fear the judgment of others. Writing fiction as a Christian, and especially as a pastor's wife, I censor myself. I'm not talking about curse words or sordid sex scenes. I'm not interested in those. I'm talking about writing scenes where
anything bad or immoral happens and then imagining some old lady from my church reading it and thinking I'm a terrible person for coming up with such a scene. But in order to be true to life, good writing should deal with life—all of life. Not just the nice parts. Evil and sin exist in life and so they should exist in art. Ignoring them doesn't accomplish anything.
This evening I managed to write a 3-page synopsis of a novel I started while we were up at camp. Start to finish, every step is laid out. I've never done this before. Always before in my novel writing attempts I have started with a great first scene or a great concept with some vague idea of how I would continue, but I have always ended up stuck somewhere. I've lost interest. I've revised and edited the beginning so many times that I've begun to wonder if it's boring (since it has become so predictable to me on the 20th read-through). I've abandoned one story only to start a new one a month later. I realize now that these stories all stopped when I got to a point where conflict needed to kick in or characters had to start misbehaving in order to be real. Deep down, somewhere in my subconscious, I think I didn't want a reader to know I could come up with bad things for characters to do, that my thoughts were not pure.
The synopsis I wrote this evening involves some bad behavior. It involves greed, cheating, lust, betrayal, abuse, neglect, opportunism, and selfishness. And that's why I started thinking about fear.
But I will make an effort to simply write, to push away all thoughts of fear, judgment, criticism, and scorn and save those for another day, off in the future, when the book is actually published. And I really believe that's finally a possibility. This time around, I think I may finish something. I think I may actually get it all out of my head and into the hands of readers.
And that's sort of scary, but also sort of exciting.
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