No Couch Needed
**Playing the role of Heather today is Agatha nominated author and good buddy, Laura Bradford. Thanks for filling in for me, Laura, while I’m on the road in North Carolina! **
Time heals all wounds.
Whoever came up with that phrase, was, in my opinion, an idiot.
Time doesn’t heal the loss of a loved one. Time doesn’t heal childhood atrocities. Time doesn’t heal stolen innocence. And it certainly doesn’t heal a broken heart.
You do learn to go on, to incorporate those experiences into your life, but true hurt doesn’t ever heal completely.
What time does do is provide an opportunity to pick yourself up and forge ahead, to find things that make you laugh at a time when all you want to do is cry.
For some, that’s physical activity. For others, it’s eating. Still others, music.
For me, it’s writing.
I guess it’s the chance to escape into another world, to create the kind of people and moments that make me want to get out of bed and see what’ll happen next.
Sure, I used to worry about writing when life wasn’t picture-perfect. Afraid, I guess, that my emotions would come out on paper, ruin the intended mood of whatever piece I was working on at the moment. That people could see things I didn’t want them to see.
Fortunately, what I found was something quite different.
Instead of my emotions coming out in my work, they bring out my work. They bring depth to a scene that might have been lacking otherwise.
Does that mean my characters are moping around, if I’m moping around? Not at all. In fact, some of my funniest scenes have been born at a time laughter was the farthest thing from my mind. Some of my most poignant moments came at times I wanted to scream.
Why? Because the raw emotion I came to the computer with had me feeling my characters’ world. Feeling their problems. Feeling their joy. Feeling their fear.
And, for me, as a reader, it’s the characters that make a story unforgettable. Characters that pull me in and make me feel.
I gave the first draft of my most recently completed manuscript (humorous women’s fiction) to a friend a while back. You know, to see if I was on target, if I had what I thought I had.
What I found most interesting about his feedback was the spot in the book where he felt I’d hit my stride, where my story flowed—in his words—like “smooth jazz.”
The spot that he singled out as the turning point? You guessed it—written at a time I wanted to cry like I’d never cried before. Instead, I’d taken that raw emotion (after giving into it for about twenty minutes) and pumped it through my story, bringing a depth to my writing I’d never mastered before. A depth that connected with my reader and continued until the completion of the book.
So while some wounds never heal, there’s always a way to take them and grow. Or, in my case, create.
~Laura
*Currently reading: Goodnight Nobody by Jennifer Weiner.*
Laura Bradford is the author of the Jenkins & Burns mystery series. The first book, Jury of One, was a 2006 Agatha nominee for Best First Novel. The second title, Forecast of Evil, will release June 1st.
Laura has just signed on with BookEnds Literary Agency to represent her latest work—which, in its final draft, now runs like “smooth jazz” from start to finish. Thanks, anonymous reader!
