Happy Thursday, everybody!
Okay, today's post has been brewing for a while.
Where does life become fiction, and fiction become life?
I've been asked more times than I can count if I base some of my fiction on my own life. The answer is, 'yes, of course.' Do I draw from real experiences and put them in stories? Again, a resounding 'YES.'
But find me a single writer who doesn't.
I am not suggesting for a moment that any of my novels or stories are my own life-story. If they were, they'd be categorised as autobiography and not fiction. I am not a carbon copy of any character I've ever created, and yet there are elements of me in most if not all of them. How could there not be? They are my creations, products of my own mind and imagination.
But I do take inspiration from things I've experienced. So then, if something actually happened and it ends up in a story, is it still fiction? If I twist a few things and change a few things, does that mean it crosses the line between reality and fiction? What about if I take something real, or an element of something real, and then take it to an extremes and make that into a story?
Is it still fiction if it happened, but not exactly in the way I tell it? Or if I remove myself and put a character in my place and swap around a few details? And is it still real life if I'm rewriting the ending?
Where is the line - if there even is one?
Isn't the point of good fiction the absolute belief that it COULD happen? Even in a completely fantastical story, it should be convincing enough, real enough, for a reader to suspend their disbelief and feel that what they are reading could actually happen. So is it possible to write really good fiction without drawing, however loosely, on some elements of one's own life and experience?
So maybe the line is there. Maybe it's just more blurred than it seems.
Thursday, 3 February 2011
Saturday, 29 January 2011
Writing as Therapy
Hi,
So I'm back again after quite a long absence. Christmas and New Year have been a bit of a hectic, up-and-down time for me. Hope you all had good ones! So I have not been writing as much as I should (bad Jess!)
But here I am, and ready to get back to the writing. I've handed in all my assignments at uni for semester one, and semester two starts in just over a week. So considering writing is what I do for my course as well as my passion, it's really time to get back to it.
Anyway, the topic of today's blog is something that I have been mulling over in my head for a while. Writing as therapy. That is, using writing as an outlet, a release for difficult and painful things, and ultimately a tool for validation and perhaps even healing.
As I wrote a couple of entries back, writing to me was an escape back when I was frequently in a lot of pain. My imaginary worlds made more sense than my reality. I could write myself into being somebody I wasn't, into a life that was not my own - but that took me out of my own when I needed that. Of course, years have passed and things have changed, but the way that writing acts like a kind of therapy still very much rings true.
Take a few days ago, the incident that triggered the idea for this post. I've been struggling with some stuff recently - mostly not really heavy stuff or beyond my ability to cope, but lots of little things all mounting up. So a few days ago I just got my notebook out and what followed was a five-page RANT that I didn't even think about. It just came out. Okay, not exactly the height of great literature, but what was on those pages eventually fashioned itself into a poem of sorts. It will probably never see the light of day, except perhaps to explain where my mental state was at to my loved ones. But the point is, it helped.
It's always a topic of debate, using one's own experiences in writing. For example, if I take a bad experience and twist it around and change things and turn it into fiction.... is it really fiction? (But the line between where life becomes fiction and vice-versa is another post I've got brewing, so I won't go into that now.)
But whichever way you look at it the fact remains that writing, for me at least, is an incredibly theraputic thing to do. Whether I'm ecstatically happy or horribly sad, angry or lonely or whatever, it's a way of processing everything and putting it into an order that makes sense.
The way it works is twofold, I think.
Firstly, seeing everything written down on paper is validating. It makes it real. It makes something concrete and understandable out of the tangled-up mess that's in my head in that moment. And if it's on paper, it's not inside of me. Writing something down or channeling it into writing something in whatever form is like a kind of forcing out of all the negative stuff, removing it from inside where it can do harm, to a physical space - on paper - where it cannot.
Secondly, getting something good or something creative out of all the crap. It means that it wasn't all bad. It means that even the worst things can be made into something worthwhile, because then they are there as raw material to draw on when it's needed.
Does anyone else use writing in this way?
Thanks for reading. If you enjoy my blog, please subscribe and link to it on your page! Thank you!
Jess.
So I'm back again after quite a long absence. Christmas and New Year have been a bit of a hectic, up-and-down time for me. Hope you all had good ones! So I have not been writing as much as I should (bad Jess!)
But here I am, and ready to get back to the writing. I've handed in all my assignments at uni for semester one, and semester two starts in just over a week. So considering writing is what I do for my course as well as my passion, it's really time to get back to it.
Anyway, the topic of today's blog is something that I have been mulling over in my head for a while. Writing as therapy. That is, using writing as an outlet, a release for difficult and painful things, and ultimately a tool for validation and perhaps even healing.
As I wrote a couple of entries back, writing to me was an escape back when I was frequently in a lot of pain. My imaginary worlds made more sense than my reality. I could write myself into being somebody I wasn't, into a life that was not my own - but that took me out of my own when I needed that. Of course, years have passed and things have changed, but the way that writing acts like a kind of therapy still very much rings true.
Take a few days ago, the incident that triggered the idea for this post. I've been struggling with some stuff recently - mostly not really heavy stuff or beyond my ability to cope, but lots of little things all mounting up. So a few days ago I just got my notebook out and what followed was a five-page RANT that I didn't even think about. It just came out. Okay, not exactly the height of great literature, but what was on those pages eventually fashioned itself into a poem of sorts. It will probably never see the light of day, except perhaps to explain where my mental state was at to my loved ones. But the point is, it helped.
It's always a topic of debate, using one's own experiences in writing. For example, if I take a bad experience and twist it around and change things and turn it into fiction.... is it really fiction? (But the line between where life becomes fiction and vice-versa is another post I've got brewing, so I won't go into that now.)
But whichever way you look at it the fact remains that writing, for me at least, is an incredibly theraputic thing to do. Whether I'm ecstatically happy or horribly sad, angry or lonely or whatever, it's a way of processing everything and putting it into an order that makes sense.
The way it works is twofold, I think.
Firstly, seeing everything written down on paper is validating. It makes it real. It makes something concrete and understandable out of the tangled-up mess that's in my head in that moment. And if it's on paper, it's not inside of me. Writing something down or channeling it into writing something in whatever form is like a kind of forcing out of all the negative stuff, removing it from inside where it can do harm, to a physical space - on paper - where it cannot.
Secondly, getting something good or something creative out of all the crap. It means that it wasn't all bad. It means that even the worst things can be made into something worthwhile, because then they are there as raw material to draw on when it's needed.
Does anyone else use writing in this way?
Thanks for reading. If you enjoy my blog, please subscribe and link to it on your page! Thank you!
Jess.
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