Writing About Pain

Last week I wrote that I wasn’t sure if I had put off writing because I was ill or because I had to write a difficult scene. I now know it was a little of both.

In the scene I was writing, my protagonist, Fannie, goes into premature labor at the beginning of her eighth month; the baby is stillborn. She is shattered. Her husband, who had blamed her for not getting pregnant until two years after their marriage, now blames her for losing the baby.

 I have never experienced this kind of loss myself, or known anyone who has, or at least who has talked about it. I did find out as an adult that my mother had two miscarriages. She once told me that she was envious of my close friendships with women, so I doubt she had friends to talk to or mourn with her, but my father was a loving husband who would have comforted her.

Finding ways to express Fannie’s fear and pain was difficult. Even when I found the right words, I hated putting them on the page. It was emotionally exhausting.

We are nothing alike, Fannie and I. We are separated by over a century, and by different cultures and customs. I have had opportunities as a woman she never even dreamed of. Yet I have known since I started writing her story that it is my story too. When she suffers, so do I.