*Written with Veridion Smart
There are the stories we write…and the stories we almost didn’t.
You know the stories I’m talking about. The ones we hesitate over, the ones that feel too close, too real, too revealing. The ones that don’t feel like fiction at all. Every writer knows that moment where the truth begins to press a little too hard against the surface, where the story starts asking something back from you. It doesn’t want skill, or structure. It wants honesty.
And that’s where many stories stop.
They don’t stop because they weren’t good…but because they were too true. It’s easier to soften the edges, to shift the narrative just enough to make it comfortable, to protect ourselves from being seen too clearly.
After all, writing is supposed to be creative… not an exhibition of one’s soul.
I’ve always written about experiences I’ve had in my own life – I’m not comfortable if I can’t write what I know. The first time I ever tried to write a contemporary novel about a young married couple having adjustment difficulties, I had to put it aside because I found I was taking too much from my own life and it was making mincemeat of my own marriage. Not a good thing. Life imitating art…or the other way around?
However, when a young child in our family went through a terrible trauma for a number of years without our knowledge, I had no choice but to write about it. It was the only way I could deal with the guilt, the self-recrimination, the outrage. It was the only way I felt I could help other families in hopes that our experience might make a positive difference in their lives.
My suspense/mystery novel, TIP THE PIANO MAN, was the result of that effort – forty years later. I don’t know how many times I shelved a draft, put it in a dark closet to hide it away as if that would ease the pain, even tore up the most offensive pages and started all over again.
It took forty years for me to be able to sit down at my computer, stare at that blank screen, and plow through the truth. I didn’t give myself a break. I didn’t coddle myself. It was a story that demanded realism, and honesty, and I refused to give it any less than that.
The stories that stay with us, the ones that linger long after the last page, are rarely the safe ones. They’re the ones that dare to say something real, the ones that don’t look away. They’re the ones that trust the reader enough to tell the truth.
There is a quiet courage in that kind of writing. It asks you to step beyond craft and into something far more personal. To write not just what works…but what matters. And while not every story needs to carry that much weight, the ones that do will never let you ignore them for long.
Those stories wait. Patiently. Until you’re ready to tell them the way they were meant to be told. Even if it’s forty years later. Because some stories aren’t meant to be written from a cushy position of comfort.
They’re meant to be written from a diamond-hard position of truth.
*If you haven’t read TIP THE PIANO MAN yet, you can buy it at any reputable online bookstore in either print or e-book form. Here’s the Amazon address for your added convenience: https://www.amazon.com/Tip-Piano-Rosetta-Diane-Hoessli/dp/1509254412/