I actually started it about 18 months ago, but with all the other work I was doing to that point, it was surreptitiously pushed to the omnipresent back-burner. Since then, however, I'd like to think I've gotten quite a bit done, with 16 chapters completed and only a few crucial ones remaining.
I've often wondered the same for writers as it is for actors in terms of bringing characters out of your creative being. Obviously, there is such a thing a "Method Acting," which allows for elements of an actors actual persona to permeate into the character they're portraying, be they heroic or evil. For every technique there seems to be for acting, there also seems to be twice as many for the writer.
The most cliched and overused trope is write what you know, as if any writer will sit down to craft a story based upon things for which they have no proper context or understanding. This novel of mine, while it dabbles heavily into the realms of speculative and science-fiction is still, at its core, a very personal story. I've poured a lot of myself into it, both through the characters I've created and the situations I've put them in. But I've had a serious problem over the last week.
The chapter I'm working on now, the twenty-eighth for those keeping score, is probably going to be the hardest one I have to write because to do so requires me to go to the parts of my own persona that I really don't like to go to. Those base, primal, angry parts of me that I know are there, but I just keep on either on an incredibly short leash or in a very tightly-sealed box and out of sight altogether.
To be clear, I always knew this was coming when I sat down and created the opening scene of the first chapter back in 2013. It was no small reason for why I came up with the whole idea in the first place, because as my protagonist will have to face his Yang, so was I going to have to as his creator, and hopefully, we'd both come out better on the other side.
But now that I'm here, I'm scared. Properly, genuinely, petrifyingly scared. I know what's on the other end of the leash and I know what's in the boxes. I put them there for good reason. They're dangerous and highly destructive and as much as I don't like to remember the fact that they're there, I try all the harder to keep them invisible to the people around me.
So what am I afraid of? I'm afraid of both how and what I'm going to feel between now and the end. I'm afraid I'm not going to be able to control it enough to get what I need out of the experience. And as weird as this is going to sound, I'm honestly afraid I'm really going to like it.
I have to take the plunge far enough to come back out with at least 4,000 words, and in the last three days alone, I've tried and bailed out three times. My fear is beginning to battle my growing frustration because I want it done. I want to get through this because I know I have to. Nobody else can do it for me. I have to do it for me.
I guess what I'm saying in all this is that for the next little while, things are going to get pretty rough over here. How much so, I really don't know. When it's over, though, don't be surprised if I start looking for people to talk to just to get me back to some semblance of reassuring normality and familiarity.
...and I'm probably going to need a good hug or two as well, if that's okay.
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