Uncomfortable

I've been thinking a lot lately about what I can do to challenge myself and making my writing better. One of the things that I've thought about, and that has been suggested to me by a good number of people, is to write things that I wouldn't normally write. The thing about that though is that there are a good number of things that I don't write about very often for a reason. I don't enjoy those things. I don't want to read them. And I certainly don't want to write them.

But that's the thing about writing, right? You have to write some things, even if you know you don't want to. There are times when I'm writing, and I know that a scene is going to come, and I don't want to write that scene for whatever reason, but I have to because it helps build on what the rest of the story is going to be. And I want to write the scenes that come after it. It's just painful to get through that first scene.

I've been trying to do that lately, which means that I've been thinking more as of late about darker scenes. Even though I want to primarily write happy things, I know that there can be no light that doesn't cast it's shadow, and so sooner or later I have to write some darkness into a story to make the light brighter. That's resulted in posts like Break up and Terror. Regardless of what anyone might think, or how good or bad the writing in them may have been, I did not enjoy writing them. Looking back on them, I don't like reading them.

But I wrote them anyway. Because, limited as the view on them may be with such short stories, I know that further down the road in their stories there is a light at the end of the tunnel. I know that if their stories were to go on, the sadness that is presented in them would lead to a greater happiness than might exist were the sadness never there.

But just because I know that eventually it will get there doesn't mean that I feel comfortable doing it in the moment. I feel incredibly uncomfortable. I can feel my skin crawling at the words that I am writing, or the things that are going through my head. My brain tries to slow down to stop them, and my fingers become clumsy, making more mistakes in my typing than I already normally do.

But I also know that if I don't write the words down, they're not going to go away. They're going to sit there and fester, burning away at my mind until I put the words down on paper. They're going to make me even more uncomfortable if I don't write them down then they will by writing them down. Because like it or not, sometimes pain really is necessary to make something beautiful.

Sometimes I don't agree with that. Sometimes I wish the story was simpler and happier. And in those moments, I try to remember that they wouldn't be the stories that they are if they were the way I wish they would be. They can only be the stories that they are, not the stories that anyone wants them to be. Whether I'm writing or reading, that's just the nature of the beast, and we all have to go through those periods at some point or another.

So I might as well start getting the practice in.