Writers are soft these days. Cowards. Out here babying their characters rather than stuffing their nose to the pavement and making them see reality as it is.
Well, I think that's based on the writer.
I used to do suicide prevention. Moved onto working nights at a TLS where mental patients getting out of the psych ward would go as a halfway house. If you were haunted by demons at 3a, I was the guy you came to talk to.
I still, to this day, wake up screaming over the nightmare shit they put in my head.
The funny thing is, It never happened to me, but its all there. Stuff that makes you go, "How completely fucked up is humanity?" And the sad thing is, I think I know the answer down to the tenth decimal point. When you put pain like that in someone's head, you try to forget it, you try to accept it, or sometimes, when you are someone like me, the only way to get it out is to share it.
The irony being that's how I got all these horror stories in my head in the first place.
And... humanity isn't that bad. Because its easy to dwell on the horrible, I also know that for each monster there is a broken person because he cared TOO MUCH. You remember the terrible, because its terrible, so its hard to forget that there are people who get broken by this shit. They wouldn't break if they weren't good people. So... there are good people. Far more good than bad, I assure you.
Then you get
people who throw themselves into jet engines.
I can't help but think of the ones I almost helped. The ones you work so hard on to keep alive, only for them to finally give up. So another piece of your soul dies inside and you have a choice. Give up, or stand back up and save the next one. And trust me, sooner or later, you give up. Because you can save hundreds of lives, but those two you failed to save, you never forgive yourself. You never let it go. You can say you'll hold that pain tight until it burns and say, "Never Again", but you know what?
Nobody can do that forever.
Sooner or later, you give up, because you can't survive if you don't. Because oddly enough, the better you are at the job, the harder each loss hits, until you know you have to quit, or snap.
And we come back to, Forget it, Accept it, or share it.
If you can't write something dark, and all you write is happy things with sunshine and kittens, good for you. I can write about sunshine and kittens as well. Except they are dead desiccated kittens shriveling under an unforgiving sun. Does it make for a more compelling story, sure...
But the price?
The price...
Sorry. Wandered off-topic there.
My point is, you wanna be a writer? A good one? You're gonna have to take some risks. You're gonna have to do some crazy shit. You have to go out there and DO SOMETHING. Be a hedonist, then fix yourself. Be a hero, and then fail. Break and recover. Try and succeed, then feel the bitter taste of never quite reaching that same high as before. Read philosophical books, then find someone to listen to, instead of preaching. Climb a tree and scrape a knee. Fall in love and bet it all on black. lose everything, then start over and do it all over again, except this time notice you are far too old, and the days of youth are gone. Run around trying to capture lightning in a bottle as you regret the chance you didn't take, the life you didn't share, the joy you never gave.
All that makes a writer. A dark one? Sometimes. A realist? Sometimes. I like to think I'm one optimistic pessimist. Dropped so low I realized that it could only go up from here, and maybe the bottom ain't as bad as everyone says it is. If you do it right, you help someone else out of the hole they are in along the way.
