Breaking My Heart

Having your heart broken provides such great fodder for writing.  Just ask Taylor Swift!

I bought Taylor’s album “Red” this week, having loved the singles I’d heard off it.  If Wikipedia is to be believed then she’s had at least 6 relationships in the last 4 years, none of which have lasted longer than about 4 months!  That relationship rollercoaster seems to have given her a lot of material to write about – the song lyrics are chockfull of love and heartache.

Perhaps she should be grateful to be able to exorcise these feelings in this way?  Will she still write such great lyrics when she finds someone to settle down quietly with and live happily ever after?  Without love and heartbreak there’d be significantly less literature, music and art in the world.  Sad, but true.

Hopefully that that isn’t because there’s more bad stuff going on in the world than good :-(  I’d like to think that it’s mainly because when we’re happy we just get on and enjoy it, but when things are bad we want to either share it to get some sympathy/support/encouragement, or we want to express it in order to get it out of our systems and find some relief.

The last couple of years have been pants - especially as I’m usually very happy-go-lucky - but I intend to find the silver lining by turning it into stimulus for my writing.  In my Young Adult stuff, that is - it wouldn’t quite work in my current kids’ book as 7-10 year old boys aren’t overly fussed by anything particularly deep in my experience, lol :-)   It’s the perfect way to make sure that none of it wins by stealing stuff from me (especially my mental health and creativity), but actually leaves something positive behind.

Finding a creative outlet when you’re upset/stressed/angry (delete and add to as appropriate) is a great idea and can be done in lots of ways.  Why not give it a try sometime?  You could write, paint, play music, pray, build, dance, act, etc.  Last year I was really cross about something and wrote the following very basic but pretty pithy poem.  It’s not about to win any prizes (understatement!) and I can lol at it now, but it was cathartic to get it down on paper and then move on.  I give it to you as an example of how what you do doesn’t have to be any good, as long as it makes you feel better :-)

Why Bother?

The world would be a better place

If everyone looked out for everyone else

They say.

Do they?

LOL, it’s not even vaguely close to Taylor Swift’s level (not that it was meant to be)!  Her lyrics are really fresh despite the well-worn topics.  It’s so easy as a writer to slip into cliché or standard descriptions, as my writing partner’s recent edit of my manuscript demonstrated, oops :-)  Taylor, however, thinks outside the box (is that a cliché, lol?!) for new ways to describe old feelings:

“Loving him is like driving a new Maserati down a dead end street”

“Forgetting him is like trying to know somebody you’ve never met” (It hurts my head to try and work out the logic of that one – I’m probably not supposed to!)

I can’t imagine any of us would ever ask for tough times, but we can choose to turn them into great source material for creative purposes, or general motivation for numerous things.  Then we might even produce much better work thanks to those experiences, making sure that they advance, rather than cripple, us!