Present Tense, Torture and Bicycles Wheels

I am digging back into writing my book about my brother's battle with schizophrenia.  Hooray!  Not.  The story is actually tragic and hard to write about.  It got me pondering about the idea of a tortured writer.  Are writers tortured to start, or is the process of writing torture, causing anguish and angst?  I am voting for the latter.  Would I be happier if I didn't write?  That I cannot say, but I know I might be  better off floating in the cloud of denial instead of looking into the belly of grief and despair.

One nice thing about this blog is that I get to write in the present tense.  In the memoir, it is mostly about digging up the past.  I feel more alive writing about the immediate yesterday, today and tomorrow.

One nice thing about the blog is that I get to keep my bicycle wheels.  A writer friend asked me to review something she had written for her book.  It was a lovely piece, but it didn't fit in the scope of her story.  It was a bicycle wheel -- it was perfectly functional for a bike, but she was building a car.  They bike wheel wouldn't work, so she had to get rid of it.  I think one of the hard thing for writers is ironically to get positive feedback.  Sometimes, something can be well written and compelling, but it might not fit as part of a larger work, so it needs to go.*  They need to get rid of the bicycle wheels.


*  Unless you are Victor Hugo, which no modern writer is.  He could fit anything into the scope of Les Miserables, and he did.  The scope of the story is about the miserable ones: the orphan, the slave and the prostitute.  I just finished reading twenty pages of an essay on slang in the middle of his masterpiece.  He discusses slang as to how it unifies subgroups of society.  And yes, bizarrely, it fit.