How to Write as an Escape
by
R.F. Gammon
- January 25, 2021
And your words are an escape. Your words can be a safe place to run to--a place to release the darkness within you and light the light overcome it, or perhaps even a place to go and find a battle of a different nature.
I find it easiest, when you want to escape the dark, to run into a different genre. I've tried to write a contemporary a few times, but it never goes well. What does go well is writing fantasy, sci-fi, even dystopia. That's a world where I control all the rules. All the politics. All of everything. I can make the creative order. This is a trick that I find very helpful when the real world gets to be too much--you run to this place where you rule the world.
In Pentegreens, my own personal battles come across in the two main characters, Esma and Rishatta, in different ways. None of it is cut and dry, but it's still a way to fight my battles on the page. When Esma triumphs, I feel my own triumph. When Rishatta grapples with his very inconvenient and heavy emotions, it's my own feelings, normally, and my own thought process. I write my own feelings into battles not my own and I write them in a way that lets me win.
There's something pure in running to words, be it to get away from you or from the world. And there's a beauty in it. Your words will persist after the darkness.
So how do you do that?
1. Don't let the things that you need to escape take over your story.
This is something that happened to me and part of the reason why Pentegreens 4 took so long to edit. Personal darkness, personal struggles, and a figure of everything that had come out of the woodwork on me was all embodied in one person, my villain, and he was just...taking over everything. My story grew dark and twisted as I tried to amp up the struggle...but then I realized that I wasn't writing it anymore. I was simply fighting the dark, trying to keep my head afloat as this villain stepped on my heroes over and over and over.
And I had to run away from it and try to remember how to breathe.
Clare, one of my alpha readers, will attest that there was a six month gap between the midway point and the last part of the story. The final fifteen chapters came pouring out of me last month like a waterfall, interrupting my finals week to surge onto the page, unstoppable, triumphant. But it was the three chapters that came before that triumphant final fifteen that took six months.
I'm not kidding. It took six months to write three chapters, because I was drowning in them, unable to get past my own internal battles to write the story as it needed to be told.
And finally I understood, and I wrote it.
But it would have been so much easier to be able to release the darkness and write my story and not let the whole book be consumed. If I'd known that earlier, it would have been easier.
Instead, I struggled.
That's my biggest tip for this. Don't write a story where the evil is the main focus, and where you're constantly confronted by the darkness you want to run from.
2. Write a story you love, one that feels safe, one that feels like coming home when you open the document.
This is pretty self explanatory, but if writing is a safe haven in the midst of a struggle, don't write something heavy or hard to grapple with. Write a story that lets you run into a meadow and sink your hands into the grass and breathe in the stillness. It's okay to be selfish and to write purely for yourself. Especially if you're hurting.
3. Write characters full of light.
I know grimdark is what sells. I know how popular Game of Thrones is. I know. I know.
But Lord of the Rings and Narnia and other such things are enduring and age-old for a reason. The fight of good vs. evil, and more than that, the TRIUMPH of good over evil is what we want to read. Our souls thirst for it. Write more of it. Let the light show up.
That's what I've got for y'all on this topic, but please, tell me your thoughts on this topic. I'm very passionate about writing as therapy :)
