Artists suffer. Hell, all of us suffer. Isn’t it Plato who said, “Be kind for everyone you meet is fighting a hard battle”?
Recently, I experienced a tough hurt, the kind that aches and gathers in a dull pool of trapped tears, weighing me down. The kind only a loved one can inflict. And in my desire to free those tears, to pierce the pain, I thought of writing about what happened.
But the problem is a living hurt where loved ones are involved doesn’t generally benefit from public airing. (Seems an inflamed wound would be that much worse.) I could write for myself, but that’s never how I write. It’s analogous to unshed tears. Or I could write now, save the product until everyone involved but me was dead, and then air it. But that’s a roll of the dice.
So I thought about writing over the wound instead of mucking about in it. Each sentence of something productive, in some work that matters to me might be a stitch, a tiny closure , which in multitudes would cover the wound. It’s not going away. But it might just close and form one of those really cool scars that make people ask if I climbed Mt. Everest and slipped, rather than just lived the mundane life of humans who hurt one another.

Books now fall into three categories for me:

1. Books I Internally Edit
As a daily fiction writer, I am in constant write or rewrite mode on my own work. I find this transfers to all written text. Phrases that I perceive as cliched or repetitive jump out at me in books that, in the past, I would have found entertaining or interesting.
Reading these books now tires me.

2. Books I Would Emulate, If Only I could
Then there are the books that are in a style that I admire, but could never employ. For example, I love hard-boiled noir. It is among my favorite styles of writing, but it is not my voice and never will be.
Reading these books now makes me feel inadequate.

3. Books I Aspire To
Then there are the books by accomplished writers, beautifully written, in a style similar enough to mine that I can hope to get there someday. These include Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie series (www.kateatkinson.co.uk) and Cynthia Harrod-Eagles’ Bill Slider mysteries (www.cynthiaharrodeagles.com).
Reading these books inspires me, but leads me towards my work, not away from it.

In short, the conversion from reader to writer, and back to reader again, has not been an easy one for me. Perhaps I need to accept that reading has become part of my creative process, and that I now need new, totally separate escapes.
Hang-gliding, anyone?