Tumblr Post #6 (June 2016)
Perhaps it’s a testament to my character that I try my best not to hurt anyone’s feelings or intentionally make someone upset to the point of tears. Why? Because that makes me feel like a pretty crappy human being. And I don’t know about you, but I have my own share of internal struggles that make me feel crappy from time to time and I don’t have enough resolve to do anything else to anyone else that would add on to the pile of crappiness.
So whether or not my need to not upset anyone stems from good intentions or just plain laziness, the fact of the matter is that I don’t like doing it. I really do not like to upset people.
Yet, here I am, traumatically upsetting one of my main characters.
And yes, it’s breaking my heart. It’s like pulling teeth to write this scene because it is so full of raw emotions that I can’t cut myself off from feeling them in order to just get the thing written. At the end of every sentence, I have to stop myself and allow myself to process what is happening. It’s really perplexing because I’ve known what’s going to happen for months now, yet as I write it down, I’m feeling myself be just as surprised by what is happening.
I am just as shocked.
I am just as hurt.
I am just as frozen in time as my characters are.
And I’m not sure if this is normal for authors to feel this way when they are writing hard scenes in their stories. But whatever the case, my emotional investment in these characters is beginning to manifest in ways that I was not expecting.
But I am not afraid.
In fact, I revel in the idea that there will be more instances in which my investment will cause me to feel what my characters are feeling; to process events in ways that they will process them as well; to accurately convey their emotions in ways that are both believable and relatable.
So even though it is paining me to break a character’s heart, I feel that it would be an even greater problem for this story if I felt no pain at all.
NANCEY B. PRICE 