Anyone who knows me can tell you that I am a passionate person. On the
Myers-Briggs T-F axis, I'm nearly off the scale. I am very emotional, and unapologetically so. Passion rules me.
I've fought this tendency for a long time, quite unsuccessfully. So I've decided it's just who I am, and I should embrace it.
I was riding in a friend's car not long ago and we heard the song "Need You Now" by Lady Antebellum on the radio. There's a line that goes, "Guess I'd rather hurt than feel nothing at all." My friend said she liked every line in the song but that one, but I said that was the one line that really spoke to me. Passion has many sides; I embrace them all. They might not all be fun at the time they're happening to me, but they all represent valuable experiences — far preferable to a life without any passion whatsoever.
In daily life, it's obvious how this attitude can get me into trouble. My heart is always on the front lines, and if I'm lucky my rational mind will come along later and pull my bacon out of the fire. I've offended people with my raw passion, with the way I react to things
in the moment. I may seem moody, illogical, or unreasonable. I try to apologize later.
In writing, passion can be invaluable. But I often fear giving in to passion entirely too much. I worry about getting too "close" to what I'm writing, about losing my objectivity. I'm concerned that being too passionate about a story may affect its quality.
This very thing happened to me today. I had an idea for a story in the shower this morning, really just a theme that's close to my heart, that I'm passionate about. I soon came up with an appropriate spec-fic setting and situation that would allow me to expound this theme. With virtually no effort, I dashed off 2,200 words of a short story that will end up at about 3,000 words when I'm done; I just have one scene left to write and the story will be complete. I was able to write the story so quickly because of my passion about the subject.
I'm not ashamed to say that the story brought tears to my eyes as I wrote it. Some of the scenes, the dialogue, the situations, just seemed so
real to me, so vivid, so relevant, that I became emotional as I wrote them. Reading back over the prose, my reaction was the same. "This is good stuff," I thought to myself, because it evokes such passion in me.
But maybe it sucks.
Am I too close? Time will tell; I'll submit this story to
Critters in a couple of weeks, after I've had a chance to edit it a few times (and also to get my participation ratio back up to snuff). We'll see what a bunch of other random writers-to-be have to say about my passion.
I'll try to keep my heart off the front lines as I wade into their critiques. That's never pretty.