This month’s blog hop asks: Have you ever wrote something you felt conflicted about? If so, did you let it stay how it was, take it out, or rewrite it?

In the past, I’ve had a WIP which I tried once to start, and it felt all wrong. I was wrought with anxiety over it, and for that one, ultimately, I started all over again and scrapped the page or so I had written before. It was more than a year before the story started coming together again for me.

Mostly though, this question brings to mind not small chunks of things I’ve written, but whole books. At this time I have two full stories I full conflicted about as a whole, one about 60k an the other about 30k (which I’d like to expand more to get it up to novel length).

I’m not actually sure what to do about this yet, as I don’t believe it to be anything I personally need to change. The reason I feel conflicted is because both of these stories portray toxic relationships. In a way, these were written as a way for me to work through my own trauma from toxic relationships.

Portraying a toxic relationship and acknowledging it as bad, or making it clear the toxic person is the villain, is something important to me, because I’ve been in a toxic relationship I’ve had to escape before.

So where does the conflict come in? In writing out stories which share similarities with my own trauma, at times I’m revisting that trauma, and that itself causes an inner conflict of sorts inside me. Anxiety resurfaces by drawing on those memories and reimagining them for the purposes of the stories, as well as depression at how dang sad a story like that turns out. Right now, I’ve had the shorter of those two stories sitting for a few years after the latest draft. It’s hard to work on because it’s the saddest story I’ve ever written, and it somehow keeps getting more sad with each version.

Conflict also arises inside me about telling these stories in general, because they feel so personal, and there simply aren’t enough stories which address toxic relationships as exactly what they are, instead romanticizing toxic behaviors. I know my stories are important, and I don’t have a desire to change them. They will simply always cause inner conflict in me, because that is the nature of writing something so raw and emotional. These stories make us realize things about ourselves, make us confront the beasts inside us head on. These stories are conflict itself, conflict embodied. So, I won’t change them. I’ll keep facing them, tackling them, and overcoming them.

The one light at the end of the tunnel: Despite what I put my characters through, I’ll give them a happy ending.

Drop a comment or come interact with me on social media, @AmaraJLynn.

Check out the rest of the participants in the blog hop here!