What Stories Destroyed You To Be Written?

Honestly, I think the Angels and Poets series is the hardest thing I've ever written. It's so strange, but it's like I have no control over Ryan's character or his emotions or how hard he's falling for Gabriel. I'm in tears and have been for the last fifteen minutes or so. We only started the story this week and we're over 20k.

And We'll Always Have Barcelona is the hardest one-shot I've written in a long time. Usually, it takes me two hours or so to finish a one-shot, but this one took me two weeks and consumed every moment, even when I wasn't writing it. It made me cry to get the dialogue just right.

I wrote a story that used to be on here, it was kind of a fantasy of mine. I had intended for it to be sexual/forbiden romance, but as I wrote it it just became really sad because I knew that it would just fuck things up for a lot of people who don't deserve their lives fucked up. At this point I realize that wasn't what I wanted and I'm really glad I didn't go for it, but I've taken the story down. I want that part of my life behind me, I'm really ashamed of it...It was really hard to write, it was incredably short but I had to take breaks because I hated thinking about it.

I'm writing two stories that I'm sure are going to break me down. One, Harlequin Kids (unposted) is about a school shooting and, with the different ideas I have, I'm pretty sure it's going to break me down. The second, uneverything, is so personal it's going to hurt. I'm writing about a FtM transsexual going through high school - this is going to hit nerves and it's going to hurt.

Yes, my one-shot Grief was extremely exhausting, and had me in tears a couple of times...

And doing the documentation for my latest story 747 was really painful. I had to hear all these cockpit recordings of air crashes... downright heartbreaking.

My short fic Bullets & Rope & Razorblades made my heart ache and really wore me down emotionally, mostly because it has a lot of my repressed feelings in it, and because I have had some really personal experiences concerning suicide.

There are also parts in a story that I'm co-writing (How To Kill All Your Friends) that wore me down physically and mentally because, more or less, I have to think like a serial killer who hears these voices in his head that are telling him to kill all these people, and they won't go away until he does it.

Stained is easily the hardest thing I have ever had to write, especially the rape scene at the start. It wasn't hard to write necessarily, it just took me so long to get right that I had to keep going over it and by the time I decided I'd had enough, I couldn't stand to look at it any more, I was shaking all over and felt like crying. It's not even particularly graphic, it's just... draining. The whole thing is emotionally draining, really, but I'm stupidly proud of it.

Currently, I'm trying to write the epilogue of Concordi Discordia, and it's just so emotionally draining. I like this in a way - it helps me to release my anger and frustration and all the emotions I keep inside and hidden in a constructive, creative way. But it's also difficult. Not only is this the story that has been my baby for a good few months now, but because, when writing it, I feel like I have to get inside each and every personality I write about to make it as realistic as possible, and I feel very attached to each and every one of them. Not only do I want the ending to be fitting, but I want to do them all justice as well.

I tend to write drabbles of how I'm feeling on touchy subjects, and generally they're hard to write but once they're done and my feelings are out then it's a relief. But there's some about an ex of mine which were very difficult to write.

Almost Lover. was difficult because I was trying to say goodbye and tell myself to stop but he'd just drag me back.

Although, Infection. was hard as that was my real goodbye, and a way of asserting my feelings. A lot of stuff I've written I'd want to delete (like the two just posted) but they remind me of how much I've gone through.

My 'Velvet Darkness' series was hard to write, partly just because I got so much writer's block (I'm on the fourth book in the series right now) and partly because I put such good characters through such dark times. I was almost in tears when I was re-reading parts of book two and book three, particularly when I had to kill off one character who I really liked, and really deserved to stay alive.

Lion Girl After The Storm was awful. I had to revisit pain from like six months ago and it was just...not pleasant. It's probably the most personal thing I've written, other than A Skeleton's Prisoner. Both of those were more difficult than what I usually write because I don't really like being so open, but I knew I needed to write them and I'm happy with how they turned out.

I had a story called Ivory that I wrote that actually won a place in the contest it was in, but I absolutely hated it. It just wasn't really me, none of it. And it didn't seem to have a point which I really hated.

For me, it was my five-shot I Only Wanted You. It was a Rev fanfic, and it kills me to write about him ever since he died

We Burst at the Seams. It's a Harry Potter one shot, set the night that James and Lily are killed.

At one point, Sirius and Hagrid are at the wreckage and Sirius holds baby Harry. It broke my heart. It's the only time I've cried whilst writing. I mean I've had a few tears, but this was a different kind of crying and it was just awful. Whenever I was writing scenes focusing on Remus's perspective, my chest ached.

I am much too emotionally invested in these characters.

Oh my god, I have two that are going to break me. Demons, a posted story, is about how Oliver struggles with this evil force inside of him. He's killed once before and he ends up killing Eyrn because of the vileness inside of him. Eyrn was the only good that still broke through to Oliver. With her gone, he totally loses his mind. I get so involved in Oliver's character that I feel myself going insane and when I wrote the chapter of Eyrn's death, I sobbed.

And my latest project which is not yet posted, Letters from Kendrick. It's about a guy who goes into the army right after his 18th birthday. Before he leaves, he asks a girl he barely knows if he can send letters to her, since he doesn't have anyone to write to. They end up falling in love and what-not. Then at a football game they read off a list of boys who had died that week and Kendrick is one of them. But I'm so in love with the idea of Georgia and Kendrick that I can't bring myself to make him die. It already tears my soul apart at the thought of Kendrick dying. So I'm going to have to find a way to make him live.

Degausser and Semi-Charmed Life are both emotionally exhausting for me to work on, which is one of the reasons I don't update them frequently. I have to be in a certain state of mind to work on those stories, a state of mind that I don't divulge into frequently, so it's definitely tough.

With Semi-Charmed, because it deals a lot with drug use and family drama, it sort of brings me back to parts of my childhood that I'd rather not think about. It's difficult to let myself get into that place and be able to bring myself back out again.

Degausser deals more with loss, growing up, and the underlying ugliness of the world, and it's difficult for me to work on it without getting depressed. James is a bit easier to write because I see his character as being more optimistic like myself, but Logan is completely exhausting for me to wrap my mind around because in this story, I write him as being such a pessimist, which I'm not, and he's just lost all of his hope and is so empty that it takes it out of me to write him. Plus, I know how I want the plot of this story to progress, so I know that I'm going to be putting them both through so much suffering that it kills me.

youth and whiskey.:

And my latest project which is not yet posted, Letters from Kendrick. It's about a guy who goes into the army right after his 18th birthday. Before he leaves, he asks a girl he barely knows if he can send letters to her, since he doesn't have anyone to write to. They end up falling in love and what-not. Then at a football game they read off a list of boys who had died that week and Kendrick is one of them. But I'm so in love with the idea of Georgia and Kendrick that I can't bring myself to make him die. It already tears my soul apart at the thought of Kendrick dying. So I'm going to have to find a way to make him live.

Oh God, I had a heart attack reading that about how he was gonna die. That'd kill me too.

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I'm currently revising my entire Renny Boy series and adding stuff, and it's really starting to dawn on me just how similar Soria and her dad Zachary are to me and my dad. We have the same relationship and we act so much alike - I never realized it until now. It's scary in a way, looking at them and realizing how simliar they are to us. And putting them through all of the crap they have to go through as father and daughter makes me look at me and my dad's relationship in a different light.

In the same series, I just wrote a Brendan Dude chapter that made me want to bawl my eyes out. Some of the things about that story kill me. It's such a detour from the lighthearted-ness (is that word?) of the other ones that it hurts like hell to create so much pain and tension between the characters. The overall theme of that story is loss of a family member and since I've been in Brendan's shoes with my mom, a lot of the jumbled emotions he goes through have been pulled straight from my own experience. And like I said, the chapter I just wrote (that will be posted when I get around to reposting the entire series...) concerns him as a child in a dream, slipping away from his brother and oh my god I'm tearing up just thinking about it.

I put myself so far into my writing that I drive myself as insane as the character I'm writing. It's disturbing, sometimes.

I deleted all of the things that I wrote that got to me really badly, but I still have the notebooks. I would be sobbing, livid, and back again with my old story Demons. It destroyed me from the inside out - I finally just had to stop writing it.

On My Own is so mentally draining for me to write now. It's probably because I intended it on being a one-shot, or something like that, and now it's... I just can't do it anymore.

Gaunt really killed me to write, which is why updates were so few and far between. Emotionally and mentally it's almost an autobiography of a part of myself that is very, very difficult and painful to confront, and the ending in particular destroyed me to the point where I'm still having trouble writing anything that heavily draws on my conscious or life.

Until the Execution's Over is another (currently unposted) piece I'm working on and it is very difficult. It tears me apart every time I write a scene because it is not only so heartbreakingly sad, but the characters are also incredibly frustrating in their personalities. It also, like Gaunt, hits very, very close to home. With UTEO, if I'm not crying or feeling somehow empty/depressed/hopeless after writing, I know it wasn't a good chapter.