Creative Self-Care

From the same Design and Doodle book I showed a couple of posts back, I messed around with this one using words in the current chapter inspired by one of the characters.

I’m still having trouble writing this chapter.

The character’s words made me think of how writers filter life through fiction. In some of my books, I have lifted dialogue verbatim from real-life conversations and applied it to characters who are completely different from the actual people. Those actual people who’ve read the conversations thought they were a good way to immortalize funny moments from our lives.

But in one book I wrote, I took something bad that actually happened to me and gave it to a supporting character. I didn’t make the people in her situation behave worse than their real-life counterparts. They were mostly accurate. But I did let my character behave with the kind of dignity and self-respect I wish I’d shown in real life. I couldn’t change history, but I could create a different ending for the fictional character.

That resulted in a somewhat healing resolution for me.

I’ve said on here before, if you think you find yourself in anything I write–novel, poem, blog post, letter to the editor–and you don’t like it, write your own damn novel, poem, blog post, letter to the editor.