Writing : Writing about things that bother you

Your lack of faith is my favorite theme to explore.

I think it's great to write about stuff that bothers you.  You're going to have a better perspective than many others because you have a base fear/aversion to it.  You will be able to describe the "thing" in a way other may not be able to because you have strong feelings inside yourself regarding it.  You will have a great opportunity to describe EXACTLY how it feels to be afraid/nervous/hateful toward whatever it is, because you really know, it is a genuine reaction that you have.

Plus, isn't writing (often) about getting the demons out?  What better way than have a character confront this thing head on?  Even if they lose in your story, you have lived vicariously through them and maybe written your way into a different perspective of said thing that bothers you.

Unless you're just writing for money, then fuck it, don't take any risks, play it safe.  If you keep avoiding the things that bother you, they'll go away, right?

Writing is like acting; but acting is not like writing.

It's true.

What the hell else is there to write about?

 I  ONLY write about the things that bother me. Helps to put my world in context. Writing about things that are joyful would bore the shit out of me and take the joy out of it. 

Maybe for Shakespeare writing was like acting.

Like. 

FLAG AS OFFENSIVE

Well, which is it?

I like tons of offensive things. JY, why you gotta make everything mutually exclusive, maaan? It used to be about the music!

I've never really written anything specifically because it disturbed me but I understand doing it. I probably should. But who wants to read a story about clowns with strap-ons?

@J.Y.: So was I (being facetious). I got your intent; I'm just trying to avoid having to add "happy-face" icons to the end of comments--like this one!

dino -- So you weren't taking measurements? The warehouse wasn't moldy? You don't have an iphone? The catwalk was not so thin? It was only like ten feet off the ground? I'm lost.

If I am writing about something particularly disturbing, I make a point of slowing down and detailing it as much as possible. It takes a lot to disturb me. I'm not shaken very easily, but if my writing goes there, I just follow it and let it run its course.

I've been told that the best stuff I write is what's least personal, so I try to avoid writing about personal things that get to me that way. Otherwise... I make no real allowance for or restriction on things that bug me or things that don't. I just write about whatever it strikes me to write about. There's nothing that's off limits, nor anything that demands I write it simply by virtue of its subject matter.

Some good advice I once received?

Write scared. 

If you've never experienced that sensation, you ought to. Subject, audience irrelevant. Try it. Another author I really love told me she hit send and then puked after writing a deeply personal essay. 

I've got two young and restless girl sister cats named J.J. and Lily running around my kitchen like catnipped maniacs batting a piece of paper all over the place.  It's bothering the hell out of me that I can't glue one thought on to another about the relation of the spectrum between bothersome and horrifying, to writing.  So I thought I'd start out with how my cats are really bothering, me and it's a good thing they're pretty cute little hyperactives or I'd chase them down and beat them to death with a frying pan. 

Somewhat seriously, and a little briefly (?), I think all good writing is relative to the big sky bother which is croaking.  So you take your Hallmarky writer, and then usually a Valhalla-world of some kind or another full of sensitive, kind, courageous, loving, crazily polite people constantly on the lookout for each other, is kind enough from his or her efforts to come into existence.  But this seems a hyperbolic reaction, like a sunshiny umbrella to hide from darkness under.  So the noble protagonist or ists, and his or her or their whole merry godammned group, win whatever day by the use of their stellar characteristics, and the whole sweet soup bears at best a partial relation twice removed from the real world.  Anyone from brilliant to imbecilic reading or watching a real sapfest, with the possible exception of its writer, knows its pure escapism. And the music is playing and the tears are spilling, and isn't this wonderful, that in fucking Missisippi (sp?) around three years ago something remotely similar, but with different motivations, and with much seamier sides abounding, actually did happen.

But the whole dark-side-writer too seems a reaction.  A rampaging idealist often knows the light very well, or better yet passionately, and can also be rampagingly disappointed by lightlessness, likely drives the really good darker than dark writers too.  I think of Poe and Kierkegaard who wrote their long, endlessly dark and beautifully complex sentences in and around the same time.  They were both haunted by one death after the next before they were too far through their twenties, but they lived and reacted very differently to their deathcentric focus.

So the cold-and- dark-and-essentially-alone-and-always-headed-tick-to-tock-in-the-direction-of-disaster-and-ain't-this-a-stark-and-heartless place-that-sucks-in-thousands-of-ways-and-is-anathema-24-7-to-human-health, is kind of a more realistic thing.  But I think I most love those writer's who land these great, perfectly real people in the middle of a great darkness, like Clarice Starling/Jack Crawford and Chris McNeil/Father Karras/Father Merrin in the middle of The Silence of the Lambs and The Exorcist.

Then you're so emotionally pummeled between the good, the bad and the ugly in a totally fantastic but completely real seeming world, you forgot that you're you for a while. Which is nice.

I think that Aurora movie theater shooting had a lot to do with my initial paranoia that made me write the War Round 1 story. It was unsettling, think it snuck in there without my noticing until I looked at it a couple weeks later.