Writing: The Problem with Digging Deep

Eric Clapton’s autobiography recently came out and it’s been praised widely for, among other things, its frankness. Mr. Clapton’s colorful past manages to be honest without injecting drama that isn’t there. But the chapter dealing with the death of his four year old son has a different tone than the rest of the book. There is a distance to the narrative that alarmed his publishers to the point that they asked him to consider rewriting it. He declined and explained that his child’s tragic accident was not something he could write any other way. That time and those circumstances were not places he could go emotionally anymore. He could talk about them. Sing the song he wrote for his boy. But to write the event from the perspective of the grieving father wasn’t possible. He just couldn’t do it.

In writing my novel I have discovered that while I can fictionalize much of the events surrounding my first husband’s illness and death and that I can write about the year that followed in a fashion, I can’t dive in to those emotions anymore. I am too far removed and just don’t want to. I wondered for a while if this was the denial I have been accused of in the past and decided it wasn’t. I am normal and what I am experiencing is normal. Grief doesn’t go anywhere really but you do reach a point where it is someplace you don’t go much, if at all. And that’s more than okay. It’s a good thing.

So, I am mining my past and my pain for the time being as I go back over the latter half of last year and when the book is finished, I won’t be revisiting that in my fiction again. I have other projects. Two of which I have already started actually. Still, “going there” as Gary Paulson would say, isn’t entirely without its redeeming factors because I think I am writing a pretty darn good book.