: Re: Should I write scared? Is it better to push yourself in your writing? To attempt bigger and deeper stories than you've done before? K.M. Weiland says so. But then there's this thread (which

@Deb2945533

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It can be exhausting.

You can bang out a story line and move people around and have them 'do stuff' and still have time to take your dog for a walk. You can do that and the only cost to you is some time.

Or you can do some emotional strip mining and really plumb that scene.

What i find is that the more strong emotion I put into a scene, the more it wears me out. I'm invested in the characters, possibly unlike other writers here and there's no right or wrong to it. I feel my characters come from within my own life experience. The parent in the story is one aspect of my own parenting, and I pull on that. The child has fears, drawn from my own childish fears. The villain is destructive. I think we have all that stuff in us, and that's how we recognize it in stories. But to dig it up to make something authentic means pulling it up, turning it over, putting it into compelling words, constructing something. Doing more than floating along.

It can be cathartic.

Occasionally two characters, presumably two parts of my own experience, engage in dialog that goes somewhere I don't expect - and it hits me like a ton of bricks that what they are saying to each other ... is me talking to me, possibly me talking to the part of me that lives at the bottom of a dark pit, or the me that rallies every day to get the work done that needs to be done. Or whatever.

The two lines below got typed out mindlessly in the middle of a long dialog a few weeks ago, and as soon as they were staring at me they completely undid me. For reasons that won't be clear, but possibly you can relate to something within your own life.

"You did your best."

"It wasn't enough."

I haven't returned to that scene yet, because I think it will be emotional for me to work with it.

Should you write scared?

I'd say you need to know the cost to yourself of writing scared and it may be different at different times. I'd say push yourself as far as you can without it costing you too much.

Hemingway said writing is easy - you just sit at your typewriter and bleed. That might be useful for you to keep in mind.

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