The Common Wages by Helen Winslow Black

By Helen Winslow Black

I’m often asked how I go about writing the scenes in my books that are super tough. The ones that depict domestic violence, or navigate the emotional impact of discovering lies or secrets in a marriage. The answer is: With great delicacy.

No matter what kind of situations I create, there are going to be lots of folks out there in the real world who have actually undergone those painful experiences. That’s why the writing will resonate, but it’s also why sensitivity and respect are so important. And if I can successfully capture on paper those moments when the bottom falls out of the world—there’s nothing more rewarding. That’s when I really feel I’m writing to earn what Dylan Thomas called the “common wages” of the human heart.

It’s rewarding, but also humbling. Because it’s a privilege. I don’t know why, but strangers talk to me all the time. People tell me their life stories as we stand in the rental car line at the airport, or at the coffee shop. They simmer away in the back of my mind. But the ones that really weigh on my heart are the sad ones, the “oh no!” ones, the “I can’t believe that could happen” ones. I’m driven to work through the sadness and create healing.

Every time someone opens my book and reads a few pages, I’m being given the privilege of sharing my attempt to unravel those knots we all experience. Resolution isn’t always objectively possible, but sometimes progress can be made, enough to lighten hearts and give hope. Writers write out of love.

And that mindset is the most important part of the process when writing about difficult, negative stuff. It’s the sine qua non. All else flows from that. Because it’s an attitude that precludes stereotype. Stereotype will drop a book dead in its tracks. One-sided characters aren’t real. Readers will discard a book that’s like a big billboard directing them to a certain thought destination. That’s boring and that’s not what they’re looking for in fiction.

I want to present the whole 360 degrees so you can think about it and make your own decisions. I’m not telling you what to think; I’m sharing the question. I’ve had readers say to me, “I’m so mad at Kim for doing this or that or the other,” and to me that’s success! For them, she’s real. Even the distasteful characters are real when you write from that wider spiritual perspective. Compassion allows you to get into their shoes and try to make sense of them. 

That’s the “art” in the art and craft of writing those intense scenes of sexual assault, mental breakdown, or anguished bereavement.

What about the “craft” part? 

When I buckle down to a difficult scene, I see it playing in my mind, but I’m not transcribing it. When you’re writing a scene that is fraught, what you’re really out to convey is an emotional event. Readers are smart, they get it, they can fill in the physical details. What they want from you as the author is how the person feels. 

How do I do that? By treading that really fine line between immersion in the subject matter and the detachment necessary to delineate that for the reader. There’s a world of difference between undergoing an emotion yourself, which is a closed loop, and portraying it in such a way as to evoke it in someone else. That’s a different matter entirely.

Think of acting. An actor doesn’t just stand on the stage and feel an emotion while holding a sign that says “Look at me!” No. He holds the audience in pin-drop silence all the way to the back of the house not by pushing outward, but by going inward and very deep, and portraying the emotion in such a way that the audience experiences it. This takes not just artistry but control. It’s the same with singing. An opera singer doesn’t sing from the shoulders up. She gets really, really grounded and pulls it up from deep within. Nobody’s shouting or screaming here, nobody’s jumping up and down and flailing about.

It’s the same for words on paper. When I’m writing intense scenes, I try for “less is more.” No need for bells and whistles. I do a lot of physical choreography and then strip most of it out. The physical elements that remain are the necessary scaffolding.

I have to ground the characters in time and place, but balance with details that convey psychological reality. Both are necessary for a scene to be authentic. For example, there’s a scene in my first book where the husband hits his wife in the face near a first-floor window, and the first thing she thinks is “Thank God the blinds are down.” This is a reaction to shock. We’ve all seen this; our inner and outer lives are all mixed up together and happening in real time and we’re pedaling really fast to keep up with it all. That’s what makes this incident believable enough that the reader can enter into it.

When the reader can step into that particular world of your creation and really cloak herself in it, then you’ve moved into the universality of art, and then, only then, are you writing for the common wages. That’s how I try to do it.

Find out more about Hellen on her website https://helenwinslowblack.com/

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SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME

Young lawyer Kim MacLean is determined to believe in second chances, so when a sea of butterflies descends, flowing around her as she leaves Tulsa and an abusive marriage behind, she takes it as a sign that her new path is off to a good start. And not only for herself, but for her young son, happily kicking his heels in the back seat. She and her new husband, John, ultimately settle in Seattle, buying a century-old farmhouse behind her sister Karen’s modern subdivision.

The two women raise their growing families and support each other in their respective careers. When tragedy strikes Kim’s life a second time, upending all she thought to be true, she draws on the wisdom of the women in her family-her mother, her sister, and even her own young teenage daughter-as she struggles to make peace with the universe of lost answers and choose the right path forward.

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