The Dangers of Honest Writing

In a previous post, I submitted to you that it is impossible to create a truly unique work of art unless you are honest with yourself. While I still hold fast to that ideal, this presents a great many problems for writers, including myself. Honesty is more than simply stating your given emotion at that time, it quite often requres a deep look within yourself until you not only find your shortcomings, but the root of those shortcomings. And therein lies the treacherous yet rewarding ground.

Crafting character

Let's take writing a convincing character, for example. You want to give them believable qualities, which would include strengths and flaws. Having both of these work in concert can give you a very well-rounded character, as most if not all of our traits tend to stem from these two areas of our lives. Strengths are easy, as we sometimes use what we see as the best of ourselves and place that into the character. We also tend to look at others enviously and make a grab for their strengths that we secretly wish were ours to put in our main characters (more on that later). But how do you give them believable flaws? It's easy to see the flaws in others, but if we aren't honest enough with ourselves, we may only see their externalflaws. What we need to know about a character, whether that's in film, a novel, or any other form of art, are their internalflaws. How do we know others' internal flaws? I'm so glad you asked. We can't. Not unless they're completely honest with themselves and us and divulge those flaws to us. Either that, or we're incredibly astute, though that astuteness (is that a word?) usually comes from insight into our own flaws. See how this is starting to work? In order to be completely honest in our writings, we have to be completely honest with ourselves, knowing our deeply personal internal flaws.

For Instance...

I'll put myself on the chopping block here and show you how this can work to your benefit. I've had an anger problem for years now, constantly lashing out at people around me who either did no wrong or did something so incredibly minute that I shouldn't have given the issue the time of day. Yet I did. Time and time again, I'd talk to myself in the mirror after an irrational outburst, berating myself and longing deeply to stop the insanity. It wasn't until I realized that all of my anger was built on underlying fear that I began to understand my true nature. As I began to realize that fear controlled every aspect of my life, I noticed that when I lashed out in anger, I was really afraid and attempting to cover that up with an outburst, blaming someone else for my issues and passionately fleeing the fear. Knowing this has brought incredible peace to my life, believe it or not, as the awareness has brought me to a level of understanding I couldn't hope to achieve normally. And knowing the key issue in my life allowed that issue to bleed onto the pages of my writings. Suddenly, my characters had real fears, real emotions covering those fears, and real reactions from the characters surrounding them. Knowing is one thing, but deeply understanding the root of an emotion provides such incredible insight into a character that it's difficult to put into words.

Digging Deep

This is why it's inherently dangerous to write honestly. The more honest we are with ourselves, the more danger there is that we will pick a long-forgotten scab that covers a deep, festering wound. But the more you learn of that deep wound, the more understanding you will gain from it, and thus the more insight you will have to build a believable and relatable character.

Disclaimer notice!

I am going to add a disclaimer here that you do need to be sure to treat yourself with self-care and know your limits, you can dive too deep. Go searching for the wound, pick it if you have to, but know when to stop or how to heal. It helps to have supporters around you such as siblings, friends, counselors, pastors, even therapists to help guide you through the process in a healthy manner, if necessary.

Okay, now back to the main point. You see, the more we can break these emotions down to their core, the more relatable they are to the general public. People don't always understand every action that a person takes, especially when it comes to fantasy or science-fiction films, as the situations that occur in those films would never ever happen in real life (well, almost never). But core emotions are something that every human being experiences at some point in their life. The more you can relate to people, the greater impact your film, novel, whatever will have on your audience. And that's the goal, isn't it? Artists rarely care about the money alone (though money does help!), but they do care about impacting their audience one way or another. That's why we do what we do, it's the lifeblood of art. I long for the day that my work can impact someone the same way that certain films, music, and novels have impacted me. But it all starts with honesty, true, nasty, gritty, bloody honesty. It's dangerous, few come out unscathed, but we're all the better for it, for the scars prove the healing.

So keep writing with honesty, keep digging deeper, and make an impact.