Have you ever needed to write something? I don't mean a desire but almost the exact opposite; like the story was trying to force its way out of you, however much you tried to hold it in.
During the fall of 2013, I finally broke down and committed the words to paper. That was the first draft and the least truthful, but in a way it was more true than the two others I've written since. Especially the last one. I stared at the seventeen pages of my essay and thought "what the f*** did I get myself into?"
In a sense, it's been good. Because I haven't been able to face the problem in person I've been forced to keep in the back of mind, or at least try to keep it there. But it won't stay in the past. It keeps coming up, causing me to blame myself for past mistakes, convincing me that it's put an end to any happy ending I might have had. Allowing these thoughts to be transferred to writing is like draining poison from my veins - it relieves the pain, it heals me.
But that doesn't mean that this bled-poison-memory-stuff is that great. Because (spoiler), it isn't. Reading through the first and second drafts, I realized they told the bare minimum - which in way I wanted it to, but not really. It merely scratched the surface of my experiences and I knew that I would have to reveal more if I wanted my readers to relate.
Except, the last draft wasn't much better. In fact, it may have been worse. My readers had already been introduced to the characters, they asked for more and I gave them more(ish): background, scenarios, conversations. But it was still just surface material. And I can't blame them for being disappointed. They wanted to know who the characters were, what made them tick, what attracted them to each other. And I didn't know how to answer those questions.
I slumped back and sighed. Maybe I shouldn't have tried writing this out. Maybe it was best to leave it in the back of my head, but there it would corrupt my memories, corrode on what was good and what I wanted to treasure. It would poison me.
Then two things happened, very close to each other. The first was a quote I read on Twitter from author Robert Frost: "No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise in the writer, no surprise in the reader." It reminded me of another quote I read a long time ago (and thus the paraphrasing is probably terrible): A writer must bleed if he wants the reader to understand his work.
The other was Actung Baby. It's my favorite U2 album and I began listening to it repeat, particularly "One", "Who's Gonna Ride Your Wild Horses" and "So Cruel". I began to recognize a theme of rejected love (similar to my own) linked through these three songs and it hurt; it hurt to listen to them. But I couldn't stop. I had to keep listening, even when my breath was choked by unshed tears or an actual ache would start in the area of my heart. And that's when it hit me: I had to bleed more. I had to bleed from a place I didn't want to show my readers. But until I did, the poison would still be deep within me. And my readers would remain unsatisfied.
Which brings me to the present: I'm still in the middle of revision and I have a lot to work on before I can call this essay "finished". I have to take each piece that fits into this essay as a whole, cut down to two or three layers beneath and pick apart what caused this scene. How it made me feel. How these feelings affected the outcome. It's not easy and sometimes it hurts more than listening to Bono's voice on Actung Baby. Cutting this deep below the surface means bleeding more than I wanted to, but it relieves the pain. Which was the catalyst behind writing this chapter of my life.
Sometimes you have to bleed what seems like a dangerous amount in order to heal.
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