the darker side 27 February 2008
I was asked recently through this site how I write about painful subjects such honesty and I thank that person for thinking that I do – it is what I hope for. I think that any writer (and those in other creative arts) who has felt hurt or sadness files it away to nurture it at a later date for whatever reasons might present themselves. I have often put it forward, probably a little too flippantly, that every actor I know (and me among them) sits back a little when sad or devastated or crying and thinks in some devious piece of brain ‘I must remember this’ for future use. It’s not easy to fake, I find, but you do remember how you looked or felt or sobbed or shook and try to use it to illuminate a script or action. As a writer it’s a lot more personal and that’s probably because you must put the feeling into words and not in a self indulgent way, but visceral and true. To be human is to experience loss, of course, but also a great happiness can be just such an ecstasy and they are really flip sides of life’s coin. And you cannot have one without the other. As a person gets older, there are more variations on the experience, from death, be it a beloved other or a cherished pet, to loss of love, or a careless hurt either inflicted or endured. But these are what we keep locked in our hearts, our treasure, and they all add up to what we are for our duration here. As a writer I let some of mine out in the guise of other people’s/character’s experiences and the feelings are all quite malleable in as much as a feeling of loss for one subject, and all it entailed, might just be how you imagine it would be for one of your creations even in another circumstance. And if you can imagine it, I believe it can happen.
I saw a quote recently from the late, great Irish writer John McGahern that explains a lot, especially on the part of the writer: ‘I think that each of us inhabits a private world that others cannot see. The only difference between the writer and the reader is that the writer is able to dramatise that private world. But that private world, once dramatised, doesn’t live again until it finds a reader.’
