Of Friendships and Feelings and Being a Novelist (Mary Strand)

This month at YA Outside the Lines, we're talking about friends who've disappeared from our lives, and why they were important ... and how this relates to how we write about emotional stakes in our novels.

Writing is easy.

ha ha ha ha ha.

There's a famous quote, often apparently misattributed to Hemingway, but the more likely historical source for it was a sportswriter named Red Smith. When asked whether writing was hard, he replied, "No. You simply sit down at the typewriter, open your veins, and bleed."

The thing is, as a writer, how do you open your veins and bleed words all over the page?

Well, you live your life, and any number of aspects of it will suck, and you remember every pain and every hurt, and it all becomes a novel. And then another.

It's not that novels are literally the stories we've lived by living our lives, but a novel captures all the FEELINGS we've had in our lives. Pain, trauma, thrills, you name it.

So let's talk about friends who've disappeared from our lives ... but without naming names or giving other juicy details, because this blog isn't a novel.

But there was the really close friend who asked me to break a critical parliamentary rule in a group to which we belonged, and I was the parliamentarian, and I absolutely understood why she wanted me to ... but I couldn't. It was wrong. There's a reason why they chose me to be parliamentarian. (Aside from the fact that I'm a geek.) I explained why I couldn't, but she immediately ended our friendship, utterly and completely, because she thought I should've done it for a friend. I'd absolutely done the right thing, but it was a painful loss. (I then resigned as parliamentarian. Life is too short.)

Another SUPER close friendship ended over Covid and masking and Faux News. And when the husband of a close friend died, she cut off almost all of her friends as a result and changed 180 degrees, and there was nothing any of us could do about it. And yet another friendship ... God knows what happened, but I think it had to do with her wanting to pretend a life she didn't necessarily have, and I knew too much.

Social media brings, and ends, friendships. Politics, definitely. Jealousies, yep. For many people, social media in particular has created a revolving door of friendship. And even when you know that the end of a friendship has everything to do with the other person, it stings. Loss sucks, and not just when death is involved.

And the goal of a writer is not (unfortunately) to ignore or forget the painful parts of life. No, we're expected to CAPTURE all those feelings, and remember EXACTLY how the absolute worst things feel, and find a way to make them universal so the reader is right there with you.

I just reread my YA (young adult) novel Livin' La Vida Bennet while getting it into audiobook, and my modern-day Lydia Bennet went through such tough stuff that I was crying as I was reading (and listening). Even though the novel came out in 2017. Even though it's fiction: I made it up! Because in that moment I felt ALL of Lydia's feelings, and they hurt as much as if I were indeed Lydia. So I guess I did my job.

But sometimes that job — being a writer — hurts like holy hell.

Mary Strand is the author of Pride, Prejudice, and Push-Up Bras and three other novels in the Bennet Sisters YA series. You can find out more about her books and music at marystrand.com.