Some Writing Has Gravity
I’m not usually deeply affected by my own writing. I experience the emotions of the characters sometimes as I’m imagining what they are going through in order to write it better. If I’m writing nonfiction about a cause or idea that is important to me, I can get emotional too. Once I step away from it though, I usually don’t carry it with me.
There are exceptions. I wrote the short story “The End of Time on Rosewyld Lane” for the Blood Bank charity anthology. That story tapped into one of my deepest fears and unlike most stories I write, it actually disturbed me. I wrote a fundraising speech for a charity that helps malnourished children overseas. There was a story about an abandoned baby with heart issues they picked up off the side of road and nursed back to health, providing medical care. Between the writing of the speech and the actual event, the baby died. The charity decided they still wanted to include the story to honor the child’s life. I had to write about his death in a way that honored the effort to save him. That writing had gravity to it. I felt the weight it carried.
This week I wrote an article on the life and legacy of author J.F. Gonzalez and Brian Keene’s work with Gonzalez’s literary estate. On the surface, it was pretty straight forward. Almost every word of the article was pulled from the answers I was given in interviews. The article still had gravity though. The act of plugging in quotes about what Gonzalez meant to so many different people and dividing Keene’s heartfelt answers into a narrative through the article was heavy. It left me feeling drained and hollowed out after I was finished.
I hope the end result does Gonzalez’s legacy justice. I’ll be sure to share that when it come out later next month.
Here are some things you might be interested in:
Dead Sea #BrianKeeneRevisited
by Jay Wilburn
If The Rising had never been written, then Dead Sea by Brian Keene could have easily been his seminal work. There might be an argument for Dead Sea being …
“No Life on Mars”
by Jay Wilburn
Nelson discovered early that the box had no air. His lungs heaved and contracted over and over still trying to draw breath from the pitch black vacuum. In some part of his mind, he still realized it was pointless to try to keep breathing in the box, but his respiratory system kept fighting for the entire length of time which he could not measure …
High Fantasy Meets a Zombie Apocalypse in Maidens of Zombie Kingdom
A young adult fantasy trilogy with swords, sorcery, and zombies. Start reading it now. Or buy it now and read it whenever you get around to it. I understand.
Thanks, Everybody
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