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Let's talk straight for a minute.
Is it a question of intention? Like, if I'm doing it to purge myself of the horror it's okay; but if I'm doing it to exploit a tragedy for profit, it's not? I'm not entirely sure if it's as black and white as all that.
I'd been trying to think of a tragedy so I could give one of my characters a back story. And then, as many of you know, I heard about something horrible that happened to someone I used to know. Is it disrespectful to make this tragic part of the story into fiction? Does it depend on the handling of the subject matter? Is it a question of how recognizable the real perosn is?
Frankly, I'm still really fucked up over this and need to work through it.
I know many of you write and almost all of you read regularly (books I mean, not street signs and menu's and shit). With that in mind, I would love to hear as many perspectives as possible.
In disappointing news, my computer will not be in a usable state until Monday. So I shall be resorting to the pre-analog system of writing things by moving a pen across notebook paper in loops and lines until it makes words. Yeah...I guess you can do that for other things besides a grocery list.
Did I mention that U of M has a 2-year MFA in creative writing (poetry or fiction concentration) and I wouldn't even need to take the GRE to apply??? I also learned recently that for educational purposes, bi-polar counts as a disability and I can get help paying for grad school. Not to mention, the program offers at least a 70% tuition waver and a stipend for teaching like, freshman comp and stuff. Could you imagine me teaching college freshman? High-Larious!
I daresay I'm almost ready for some hardcore schooling. I've wanted to go back to school for a while but didn't really feel ready. And of course it can be very expensive to start graduate studies and then fuck them up. In the last year or so, I think my overall craziness has lessened greatly. My ups and downs are less severe and actually working on writing projects has given me a lot of perspective and a greatly increased sense of self-worth. Being less manic and less depressed has been very, very nice.
And just so you all know, I went to Mworks for the pre-employment screen.
Let's hope that rumor about cranberry juice is true. ;-}
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Wrong or right, I've seen it happen before. This was ages ago, but I was reading the local paper and saw a small article talking about how a woman in her 30's/40's had suddenly lost her memory of everything that happened after she was 16. She was married at the time so naturally she freaked out.
The article went on to talk about how eventually she fell in love with her husband again, and the point of the article was her saying how lucky she was to get a chance to fall in love twice.
I remember reading it and thinking that I could turn it into a cool story, but I was lazy and didn't do anything about it.
6 months to a year later I was watching the TV show Neighbours, when one of the characters who was in her 30's/40's and married suddenly lost her memory of everything that happened after she was 16.
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I think what you're telling me to do is seize on the idea while it's still fresh. I should probably just work out the moralities on my own.
On the one hand, I'd kind of like to be validated that this isn't ghoulish and horrible. But the act is already disgusting, baffling and terrible, so it's not as if writing about it would make it any worse.
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Thanks!