Emotions are a school bus with a drunkard at the wheel...

I came to a startling realization the other day. I avoid writing because it hurts. Let me explain. . .

I'm one of those people who feels things.  A lot.  I'll tear up at sappy TV commercials, great radio pieces, a nostalgic piece of music.  My feelings get hurt pretty easily, and I'm known to get so high off happy that people wonder if I'm maybe high off some other substance.  

This is kind of cool - it makes me a good empathizer and an incredibly loyal friend.  It's also embarrassing, frustrating, and downright exhausting.  So much so that for the past several years, I've avoided feeling any emotion at all.  

This has a lot of negative effects.  I rarely have moments of pure joy, I keep my friends at a distance, and I never get mad enough to do anything about a bad situation.  Turns out, our emotions feed into a lot of things from just feeling good about life to our desires, drive, & ambition.  An emotion-controlled life is also a very flat and boring one.

You can see where I'm going with this, right?  Flat life = flat writing.  

What's interesting is that I noticed it about my writing first.  For the first draft of my WIP, it was easy.  This was a NaNoWriMo novel - 50,000 words in 30 days.  No one would see it, and I didn't have time to think, let alone control the emotions I was feeling as I wrote.  And there are a lot of emotions on those pages, but not enough that I really had to think about it.  

As I'm working on Draft 2, it's different.  The emotions have to be right at the surface, spilled across the pages in bold black ink so that the reader can feel what my characters feel.  This means, for me, that I have to feel them too.  I feel them all - so much so that if I'm doing it right, I'm crying and laughing and screaming at the keyboard (Well, not the screaming part. Wouldn't the neighbors love that?).

So the other day, I was avoiding writing.  And I asked myself why (a very dangerous thing, asking oneself questions!).  My answer?  Because it hurts.  

It hurts because I'm out of practice.  It hurts because my characters are hurting.  It hurts because the raw emotions on the page are just a reminder of how flat I've allowed the rest of my life to become.  

I will always be a person who feels things deeply.  There is nothing I can do about that.  I can choose to become someone who hops on her emotional roller coaster and enjoys the ride, or someone who avoids it out of fear and never knows what fun she's missing.  I can choose to be an OK, kind of flat writer, or I can choose to take my writing to the next level, feel deeply, and make magic on the page.

I'm hopping on the roller coaster, and exchanging the security of a flat life for the hope of beautiful highs and guarantee of horrid lows.  Let's hope it's an amazing ride.  

Oh, and if you're in my neighborhood and hear shouting and crying, just send chocolate.  :)