One of the many questions I am asked as a young writer and novelist is how did I come up with my story and characters. It’s a very good question and one I have answered before but feel the need to revisit.
Many of you know that I am not only a writer but also a high school English teacher. I have the extreme honor and privilege of teaching two creative writing focused American Literature classes next year so I’m already thinking about the kinds of things my students will want to know. What they will ask and what they will want to gain from my experiences in order to better their own writing and hopefully publish it.
My first novel, Forget Me Not, was published in 2012, but was written when I was fifteen years old in 2008. Earlier that same year, my father passed away from cancer. While I have always been a writer before my father was ill, as soon as he passed, I dove into it. Similar to how I think an alcoholic might drink their way through bottles upon bottles of liquor. My method was certainly healthier, but a similar effect and desire. I needed to escape.
I struggled to verbalize the pain of grief, the confusion of his absence – how I would sit in the living room, staring at the clock, waiting for it to turn 5:30pm and being severely disappointed when my father’s keys didn’t unlock the back door, signaling he was home from work. My brain knew he was gone, but my body reacted violently each time it remembered he was gone. He wasn’t coming home.
It is very difficult to explain grief to someone who has never experienced the loss of someone. The best way I can describe it or even compare it is to how amputees express the way they feel after they lose an arm or a leg. There is a phantom sensation, that there is something there. But when you look down, you are overwhelmed with the realization that no, your arm really is gone. And you can’t get it back.
So, grief, like a missing limb, never really goes away. It’s constantly there every single day even if other people move on and don’t understand. You learn to live with only one arm. You figure out how to do day to day things, that most able-bodied, or in my case, people who have never experienced loss, do without thinking about it.
But I digress.
I wrote Forget Me Not and the entire trilogy, to try to put into words or at least through the actions of my characters, that feeling of intense loss in a way other people could sort of relate to. That is why I write. That is why I put pen to paper, fingers to keyboard and spend hours in a different world with characters who know exactly what I am going through on any given day. It’s absolutely a blessing to be a published writer and be able to share my stories and characters with others. Hopefully, it helps another young girl who is dealing with the loss of a limb. Or a father.
