Instead of dwelling on all the things going wrong, I can immerse myself into a hero who satisfies all the vitality and excitement that frankly I wouldn't have energy for if he showed up anywhere but on the page. I don't have to do a thing to get all that flowing into me. Just write about him and his heroine, about the joys they are discovering and for a few hours, I am into their life, not my own.
With writing I can go someplace warm if I want and bask in a climate change created by my imagination and laid out by words. I can revisit places I have loved being but where I may never return.
When I want to dwell on some problem in my characters' lives, it's just plain different than when it's my own. For one thing I know it's going to work out for them. I am going to make it work out.
When I read the newspaper, I get all my need for misery like with a story that really disturbed me and happened last week. A young man drove up to a boat ramp and saw the car of the woman he loved had been accidentally driven into the river and was slowly sinking. Heroically he dove in to try and save her. He drowned. Not only that but she had already been saved and was down the river a ways. Now that's a real life story which still disturbs me days later because it's how life often works out but we wish it would not.
In any book I write, my hero might struggle and nearly lose his life, but I have the power and will make sure he and his heroine survive. That's the wonder of fiction, and why writing is so rewarding when days are tough. For a few hours every day you can get away and be someone else as you create dialogue and actions that are equally believable to how life works, but when it ends the 'right' way instead of the tragic.
I love writing about the heroes I have created who are often a mix of men I have known and yet also someone uniquely different. I thought about these fictional fellows recently about how they react when something bad happens. Several of them are some kind of law enforcement officer which means they walk in when others run out. Several of them though are just nice guys who find they are forced into the hero role by circumstances. I love to write about both types. I gotta admit. I LOVE men!
And then the women. Sometimes they start out with attitudes that aren't fully developed for maturity even if they should be mature. Heck, always they start out that way. But the relationship, the situation into which they are thrust, it all comes together to bring out their strengths. When the book is finished, I know they will be stronger women than when it began.
My heroines will be worthy of the hero and not because they have some cute, sexy figure, but because they have strength of character. They become women I'd like to have for friends. Women I'd like to be if I was reliving my own life in a different way. They take more risks than I do. I can take those risks through them where in reality, probably I still wouldn't because I'd be counting the cost-- and I wouldn't know it will work out happily in the end.
To 'grow' characters is sooooo satisfying. You know life isn't always that way. We've all known people who just wallow in the same mistakes year after year after year. That might be 'reality', but what fun is it to read about it or spend months writing about a character like that.
To me, writing should be fun. Save the angst for memoirs. They are where you can't keep control because you are telling a true life story. In fiction why wallow in angst? I can't think of a reason; so when I do have my characters go through tough times, which, of course, has to happen to have a story be interesting, I know it'll be worthwhile. Sorry but in real life, not always so.
And the best part of writing is you know there are all those ideas for the next book floating around in your head. This one was good but that one, that one will be even better. Writing is a way of both being in the world and out of it. Sometimes that is a very good way to be.
