I'm in a toxic relationship. It's
not easy to admit or to talk about, but there it is. I have such a bad
relationship that it seeps into everything I do...and almost everything I
write. And as a writer who's having this toxic relationship, it's
impossible for me to write about this relationship without giving
readers a skewed, distorted viewpoint. But I know that I can't fix this
toxic relationship...so I've found a way to make it work with my
writing. If you have a personal issue or some strange quirk, you can't
ignore it. You can't write around it. All you can do is embrace
it...just like I have.
The Girl with the Most Cake
Those of you who follow my colleague Annalisa Crawford
may be aware that I've been engaged in a battle with my toxic
relationship for years. I am winning, but not without casualties. My
toxic relationship is with food. We've been having a torrid love-hate
relationship since...well, perhaps since I was born. Me and food just
can't love each other the way we want to, and so we find ourselves
constantly at odds instead.
This
all makes it very difficult for me to write about food in a way that
seems reasonable to people who don't have my hang-ups. You see, I'm
deeply in love with food. I want to do nothing but eat it all day. And
I'm not talking about lettuce. I want fried things, and battered things,
and sweet baked things...and frankly, I want it all to be
chocolate-dipped and covered with sugar, too.
But,
I've been on a decently strict diet (some would say insanely strict)
for about three years now. Iron-handed control is the only way I've been
able to successfully manage my weight. But all this food obsession has
given me a very off-kilter perception of food and eating and what normal
people eat. Lucky for me, I know that I've got this issue.
And I know that I can't write about food
normally. My characters can't go out to eat dinner as average people
would, nor can they eat regular meals and snacks that other everyday
people eat. They can't do this because I don't do this, and I don't know
how to write about people who do because all my experiences with food
border on the psychotic. So when I write about food in my books, it's
always in the extreme.
In the Deck of Lies
series, there is a character who's constantly eating diet foods and
terrible-sounding, low-calorie stuff. This is me. There's another
character in the series who's always craving "real" food. This is also
me. In Hope's Rebellion, one character completely devours all bread she can find. This is who I want to be. See how it works?
If
you're weird about something, write weird about it because that's what
you know and that's where you'll shine. I don't try to write about
people with normal food habits, because I'm not at all familiar with
that. So I write about people with weird food habits, because that's me.
If you have an unhealthy relationship or an obsession or a hang-up or
even an unreasonable fear, use it. Don't try to avoid it or write around
it or ignore it. It's yours, so find a way to put it on the page. These
are the kinds of quirks that give your writing its unique voice, and
make your work unlike anyone else's.
Posts
0 comments:
Post a Comment