Distance: The knife in the writer's hands

Certain degree of detachment is beneficial at the time of incision, when it is necessary to kill your darling scenes or characters for the benefit of the story as a whole: that painful limb removal which will save the patient's life.

As a teacher my mom often draws from her psychiatric research and field work, direct experience with incapacitated and deeply disturbed patients.

Such experience is invaluable to her theoretical work the way life experience fuels the work of any writer. But just as important as it was to experience the ravages of these diseases first-hand and just as compassion was and remains at the core of what she does, it is essential to her effectiveness to help others to keep a degree of distance, to safeguard her own mental health and the balance that will enable her to make objective judgments. It occurred to me that just as surgeons must detach themselves emotionally during an operation, writers are more effective when they have gained some distance from the experience fueling their work.

While living said experiences we don't often have the understanding that time and the power of hindsight will grant us. Sometimes this understanding is achieved through the writing of the work itself, but this process and the time required to accomplish it is integral to digest things into some sort of perspective. (At least for long-from fiction. I find that while overcome by emotion, writing a song will offer me an immediate cathartic release).

It is not a mathematical certainty, not an absolute understanding we are after. But usually if we've dug deep enough, by the time we type "The End" we'll feel how much we've grown through this exploration.

The detachment is also perhaps that objective side of us which is aware of the form's limitations, aware of technique, page count and format, that part which allows our more subjective self to get lost in the story. Ariadne's thread if you will, so that at the end of the day we might find our way out of the maze and back into the routines of daily life.

Research might be essential and having lived the traumatic experience depicted in the story can enrich it. Reliving it might be necessary and fruitful, but more so if it is only relived in the mind and not re-enacted on the stage of life.

Exploring ourselves with honesty allows us to breathe reality into our characters. It's healthy to let the darker parts of psyche have a chance to come out and play. My work itself is oftentimes about the tight bond between the artist and his/her work and blurring the line between those different levels of reality, a blurring which can lead to madness or enlightenment. That's perhaps why I'm writing this. To remind myself to keep a foot on the ground while I write about insanity. To keep me from drifting too far into the abyss.