Writing Until it Hurts

Recently, I've had some trouble with my back. Seems like I got a bit anxious doing my Wii exercising one morning :)

This back pain affects everything in my day, from housecleaning to writing. And although I don't recommend having back pain to get yourself thinking about the often grim pains of writing, rewriting, editing and such, the pain sure makes me think of all the things that have to be done despite the nuisance of it.

I remember the pain I felt when I wrote my first novel. Not only was the experience new for me, I was often writing scenes that reflected my own life, dialogue that wasn't too far removed from the pain I'd experienced as a child when my parents divorced.

The good news is that once my mother remarried her 'match' the pain of separation from my father diminished somewhat, though the pain was still there. And because of this pain - did I cause the divorce? Was it my fault that my parents had been continually angry at one another all of the time?
I was able to write A River of Stones, a middle reader about a girl named
Samantha and how she got through her own parents divorce.


Other books have held various 'truths' about my own life, including Conquering Your Goliaths: A Parable of the Five Stones. The five stones - listening, trust, optimism, tenacity and constancy, are a part of my own life as I attempt to conquer my goliaths, and there were times when writing this book that it 'hurt' to record, though I know that recording it has ultimately helped others.

And I think that's why it's so important to write until it hurts. You are hopefully not only writing to share your talent, you're writing to assist someone else to 'see' in their own life. And that's when writing for me makes the biggest shift, the biggest difference.