The "It's Too Real" Portions of Your Novel - When It Gets Hard to Write

Have you ever done that in your novel? As you're writing, you start getting emotional (sad, angry, etc) because you realize you wrote something that happens every day in society? I am just writing a rough portion of my novel, and it kind of scares me because I know stuff like this happens all the time. It's scary seeing those words come out of my pen. It feels harsh. Almost too harsh, but I keep writing it anyway.

This is when writing gets hard, I think. There's a big difference between "that was a difficult scene to write how I pictured" and "that was hard to write".

Has this every happened to you?

all the time

no fear for the writer = no intrigue for the reader

trust the process and your gift!

I've just reached that point in my novel where my MC is starting to finally put to words the feelings he's having and the realizations he's come to, and a lot of it is stuff that's very personal to me and my experiences, so that's pretty hard to put on paper, yes.

A minor character who has just been introduced in this part of my novel and will play kind of a big part for a while, based loosely on a couple people I really care about, just had a mental breakdown. He's a drug addict in denial (he was addicted to heroin for a brief period of time, but went to rehab and got off it by switching to methodone and thinks he's cured, but he's now addicted to methodone and cocaine but won't admit it to himself or anyone else) and an alcoholic with a drug addict mother and a father who killed himself. He's so, so, so damaged and it's actually really hard for me to write it right now because these were the exact type of people I was always attracted to for a long time. I would have fallen in love with a person like him and wanted to heal him and take away all the pain he's been in, but it's useless because he needs professional help. Like, serious professional help. And it's hard because he reminds me so much of this unrequited love I had in high school who was too damaged to be functional and ended up dropping out and becoming basically permanently stoned on something, anything. Ugh. This hurts me to even create this character and put him through all this.

I've hit that point in my book, I'm writing series of two books and I've got about three chapters left in book one and I've hit the part where it's really getting hard to write, I can't even seem to bring myself to write any more because I know I will be crying and be in a really painful place.

I have a character who dies. Or maybe not. I've written it two different ways. It's painful to imagine these scenes taking place in real life. I don't like to have bad things happen to my characters, but in this story it can't be avoided. I have to kill off a minor character first, and another character , too. My main character must endure grief for two people before the misery of impending death. Lovely. The next story I write had better include rainbows and puppy dogs and unicorns.

sometimes when I get to the dark parts, the really painful parts, I let the character come back to life in a happy place for awhile (in a different part of the story)

An important part of the back story to my novel that comes up throughout is a character named Cynthia, who is this really eccentric and fascinating person until she gets addicted to cocaine and falls apart. By the time that the events of the main story are taking place, she has been missing for year and is presumed to be living on the streets, using.

When I got to somewhere around the 40,000 word mark and was writing a flashback scene in which Cynthia is brought into the hospital by police while high, I realized that I was structuring her and what happens to her after a girl I knew in middle school, who I didn't see for a few years but then bumped into at the hospital one day while she was, you guessed it, flying high on cocaine and handcuffed.

Of course, the name is totally different and all of the rest of this character's story is totally fictional, but when I realized how closely I had paralleled this character with this girl I knew, it made it really hard to tell the story of her slow demise from there on in. I stopped writing mid chapter and went back to the beginning and dedicated the book to her.

I'm writing an autobiographical novel, so "too real" in the sense of "painful to write," is par for the course...=sigh=

I feel bi polar because I think my novel slides into more than one type of genre but I'm coming up on a part of the book and I'm getting frustrated and sad because it's becoming hard for me to tear apart these two characters so well and then it all pretty much goes down hill for a while from there including a death scene ;_;

All the time! Well, in the past. I get it in small bursts still, but mainly my characters make me laugh these days. I actually miss feeling that total absorption, too.

But yes. There was a part in my originally planning of my book, though, that was so hard that I actually cut it out and didn't even try to write it. It involved the brutal death of a cat, and since I have two cats of my own... Augh, I couldn't even bear it!

I have a character who's based on a member of my family who I was really close to, who in the past few years has become mostly unrecognizable because of a mental illness. So every time I write about her (which is often) I can't help but get emotional. Glad I'm not alone though.

Friends and family who have read my manuscript constantly ask me if I'm sure it's fiction and not my life's story, but it's not for lack of detail or attention to the gaping differences between my character and me; my character's family situation is similar but still very different, he has his own relationships that are completely unrelated to my life, and the more pivotal experiences were inspired by my life but manifested in completely different events. I find that the more similar what I'm trying to put to paper is to my own life, the easier the story comes out. It's the completely made-up parts that I get stuck on usually.

In a way, I'm sort of using my MC as a vehicle to explore aspects of myself. Granted, my traits are pretty exaggerated or distorted, but there are many parallels between my MC and myself. That sort of makes the entire writing process very personal, at least in my case. And my main character shares a lot of my experiences, albeit usually altered so as to distance myself from the character a bit or to be more entertaining or significant.