Hello everyone, and welcome to my first “Soulful Saturday” post, where I’ll be getting into the nitty gritty of my life, my writing, and how they often mesh together to create music no one necessarily wanted to hear, but I feel is needed to be heard. It generally won’t be specific to the part of my life I’m in- but right now, it will be… Because today, I’m going to share one of the things I love most about writing: treating my characters like absolute crap.
If you’re a writer, you probably know as well as I do the satisfaction that can come from making a character go through torment of some kind and even more so when they figure out a way through it. But, whether you’re a reader or not, that feeling can be caused by more than just the fun of literature itself- it can be quite personal. After all, the best way to make a story relatable is, well… Relate to it.
I’ve gone through plenty of pain in my life. Most of us have at least some pain, whether physically or mentally, don’t we? I started writing as soon as I learned to read, pretty much, and many times it was to fight the pain that came from early life’s difficulties.
By the age of eight my parents were separating- not that it changed my life that much, since my mother wasn’t a very motherly person. Still, it was her neglect I’d grown up with, and she was my mother. As a little girl, I thought it was normal for her to be that way… Then she just up and disappeared. Two years later, I was in a car crash with my dad. Dad needed surgery for his spinal damage (we’d been hit a few times in my life by then)… So we moved in with his parents, where there was constant turmoil and fighting.
By the age of ten, I basically lived on the computer to survive emotionally. Sure, I was in therapy, but that only did so much for a prepubescent who had trust issues as it was. Online, I felt safer than I did at home with all the noise and drama. But just chatting wasn’t enough. I needed something more substantial to deal with the stress.
And that, friends, is when I started writing. I wrote stories about children leaving their mothers to deal with losing my own mother to distance. I wrote a poem about how my house was like a war zone to me, and the way each family member made me think of the world as violent.
That’s also what lead to my first comic, I think- because honestly, I’d had the idea for it long before I could make it. I’d written it probably a dozen times in novel form, only to restart it and dare myself to go darker. With every story I write, every character I make, I’m making a part of me that I otherwise struggle to accept on its own. Of course, the stories aren’t solely based on me- but there are moments, just moments, where the things I struggle with come to light… And get dealt with in a way I wouldn’t imagine without my character’s aid.
To this day I continue to write with that as a reason in the back of my mind. I’ve also just grown to love my characters and words as a whole- and that’s why, right now, I’m writing this. Because this is a case of ‘a means to an end’. I was lead to writing by the strife in my life- and thanks to that, I’m here now, hopefully showing someone out there a new way to deal with their own pain… By writing through it as well.
