They say writing can be therapeutic. It can be and i found i often used to indulge in my creative writing. I sacrificed i don't know how many hundreds of hours where i could have been out socialising, but instead i felt compelled to sit behind a computer screen and conjure up a world - or at least a variant of what we know and claim to understand right now - and try and turn it on it's head. My stories would never be as simple as 'A guy meets a girl.' They never have been about that, and i'm sure it'll be quite a few years before i ever consider doing anything like that; but i would transcribe all my thoughts all my feelings and i would put them on virtual paper.
However, there's more to the therapy than just putting down your ideas, unleashing your fantasies, or simply trying to conceive a place that doesn't currently exist. There's the bravery that's attached to writing.
Anyone who had anything better than a godawful education can write, and anyone who doesn't really care about their writing can put it out for the public to see without a care in the world. But it's only the people who care about their writing that are the truly brave ones.
These writers are the soldiers on the battlefield of fiction who have a wife and children to worry about at home: in other words they feel they have something to lose when people read their writing.
To be like Stephen King, to have that unique prose and wonderful writing style where he can dip his pen into the ink of almost any genre and still come out with an amazing book is something i always dream about being able to achieve. But when you do this, when you put these notions, concepts, thoughts - whatever they are - onto paper you're also putting yourself onto paper.
When you care about your writing you begin to bare yourself in your writing. Whether you care to admit it, whether you even realise it, there's a little part of you, a sliver of your personality - that doesn't come out in public - all of a sudden rears its questionable head. When you're on your own you're happy putting these things on paper but then you've got to come to terms with the knowledge that you are making this so other people can read it.
I think about this whenever i create a character that I think a reader would instantly dislike because he's socially shunned for example. Say i wanted to write about a rapist; i then have to get inside the head of a rapist, i have to think like one, i have to enjoy what he enjoys, describe what he feels, speak of all the senses that light up when he performs this horrific act. I have to put my own slant on it...i have to put ME in that part and then i have to put THAT on paper for everyone to read and for everyone to judge.
I don't want people to know that i have thought this indepth about a rapist or a terrorist or how a girl dying from the blackness inside her is feeling, but if i think it would make a compelling read then i brave it and bare my soul. And that's what I do - as do hundreds of thousands of others - when they open up and write. I put everything i have into my writing because if i'm going to let people know that i've thought about these details that some people wouldn't even like to think about let along talk about, then i want them to be compelled by the read. I want them to feel that engrossed by it all that they think they are reading from the perspective of the aforementioned despicable person FIRSTHAND.
There's that little voyeur in all of us, that little someone who wants to read some of these things, get inside the mind of the people that do some of these awful things that go on in the world.
I have written short stories about a terrorist failed suicide bombing attempt that left him alive and hundreds around him wounded or dead and having to deal with those consequences.
I have written a short story about a rapist and i have watched my fingers transcribe the voice of my mind as it details some astonishing thoughts that this rapist has...that i have.
I've written an entire novel about the end of the world, where the entire human race crumbles and everyone dies slowly from inside to out. I initially thought this was going to be published this year, but alas, life never goes as you planned.
All of this i will gladly let anyone read if they wish to and their reactions are the things i am most prepared for. Simply because I am the person that creates this monster. Maybe in the story i glorify the act, but never in real life would i condone such actions.
And it's not just the nasty stuff you write about, it's the glorious stuff you write about. It's the characters you create that you want everyone to take a liking to so that the story works. In every character and in every plot line there's a piece of the writer. Regardless of whether that character is inspired or heavily based on someone the author knows in real life, the author can't NOT apply a little part of himself to it. To create a character you have to know it inside and out. There is no one in this world that you know inside and out other than yourself. And the only reason i write these stories is because i haven't heard a good enough version or i haven't read a version that caters to what i wanted. So i put the Matt Weir into a zombie story, or an end of the world story, or a psychopathic plastic surgeon story and Matt Weir goes right into these characters as well. You spend so long with these characters and plot lines that you grow really fond of them, and when people don't like them: it hurts.
There's a handful of people that i care very much about and care what they think of me, and when they read my work they see a new side to me all the time, which is difficult for me. But it's a choice I make because I want to be a writer and I know i'm good enough. If only i didn't care what others thought of me...then again, at the end of the day, who in this world honestly doesn't care what other people think about them.
Simply put, this is why, to truly put writing that you care about into the public eye, you need to be very brave: because everyone you know and everyone who doesn't know you but still reads your stuff will judge you. They will judge YOU.
