As a writer, I’m supposed to love writing, but there are parts of the process I really dislike. Take proofreading, for instance. No matter how long I stare at a page, my brain refuses to see the typos until I hit send or submit. The very next moment, the illusion of good spelling vanishes, and the mistakes reveal themselves in all their embarrassing glory.
Though I have a hard time catching typos in my own writing, I’m pretty good at spotting them in other people’s prose. That’s a skill that serves me well in my other line of work as an editor at a nonfiction magazine. But proofreading is just a surface-level frustration. What truly unsettles me as a writer runs far deeper.
What I hate about writing
I’m a fiction writer who aims for realism, so I can’t always shield my characters from harm and pain. Some scenes demand physical—even brutal—suffering, and for me, as someone with PTSD, writing them can be quite difficult.
Some years ago, I talked to a mentor about how hard it was for me to write violent scenes. I was referring to a couple of gory episodes in my legal thriller, Extreme Vetting. To get through writing them, I had to take breaks and breathe in and out, trying to push the dread away. Then I’d return to the text and focus on the words, not the images they conjured in my mind. Once I moved past the first draft, every time I worked on a revision, I’d curse (sometimes under my breath, sometimes out loud) whenever I had to edit one of those scenes.
My mentor’s take was: Why put myself through that? Why write violence if it causes me mental and physical discomfort? “I would never do that to myself,” he said. But I was baffled. How could I not give my story what it needs? If violence is part of the world I’m depicting, how could I leave it out? That wouldn’t be true to the story, and then what would be the point of telling it at all?
In the case of Extreme Vetting, how could I write about the plight of immigrants fleeing violence in their native countries without showing that violence? Without standing beside them in the story as they endure it, and I bear witness? How else could I convey to my American readers that the violence these migrants try to escape is so severe that their only hope is to leave everything behind in search of safety elsewhere?
So I’ll keep writing violence whenever the story demands it, no question about it. Like in this fragment I wrote years ago, drawn from my childhood in Galați, Romania.
The Rose Garden (content warning: violence)
One summer day, when I was thirteen, I ventured into the green nursery on the outskirts of my hometown. The nursery was just outside my apartment building and felt safe and familiar, with its rectangular patches planted with shrubs and flowers, and farther away, its young poplar trees that would one day line the streets of my city. On warm summer evenings, I would turn off the lights in my room on the third floor, open the windows, and take in the perfume of roses and the songs of nightingales drifting from the nursery.
I was wearing a T-shirt and a knee-length skirt that day. The sun was overhead. The sky was clear. It took maybe ten minutes to walk the few hundred meters from my home to the wire fence enclosing the rose patch. The flowers were in full bloom—every color, every size. The sweet, layered fragrance hung low in the air, and I was still breathing it in when something stirred in the corner of my left eye.
A big stray dog, the color of dirt, had rounded the fence and was trotting toward me. I felt a jolt of fear. I had been bitten by dogs before, and I had the scars to prove it. I knew running would only provoke a chase, so I inched away from the fence, away from the roses, toward the buildings, toward my apartment. Then I saw another dog coming from the right. And behind it, another. And another. Closing in.
A cold shiver ran up my back and stiffened my neck. My heart was racing before my legs could move. I had heard stories about dogs smelling fear from afar, but I couldn’t help feeling terrified. I took small, hesitant steps backward—until I realized I was now surrounded. The dogs had formed a circle. They growled and bared their fangs. Their pace slowed, cautious now, as they glanced at each other over bristled shoulders. They were a pack, and the dirt-colored dog was their alpha. He kept coming, head lowered, lips peeled back from his teeth. I called to them, “Good doggies,” but that only made them advance faster.
I glanced behind me at the weathered building where my family was, one window among many. I called out, “Help!” but my voice didn’t carry. When I turned back, the dogs were closer. My hands were slick with sweat, and the pack leader was now just a step away from me. Their growling was loud, but the ringing in my ears was louder. I knew I wasn’t supposed to run, but I turned on my heels and bolted. As fast as I could.
It felt like flying, as if nothing could hold me back. I was fast and weightless. The dogs were at my sides, dashing alongside me, and then the alpha sprang forward and flung himself at me. His muzzle struck my right thigh, his teeth pierced my flesh through the skirt. It didn’t hurt. I pushed through and kept running, and running, and running—until I reached the entrance of the nursery. The dogs halted and turned away, their job done now that I was off their turf.
I lifted my skirt. Two rows of tooth marks lined my right thigh, with a bruise forming around them. There was blood. The throbbing set in.
I knew what I would come next. I needed an anti-tetanus shot and the rabies vaccine series. Those would hurt like hell. Back then, the rabies vaccine was injected directly into the abdominal muscle for eight to ten consecutive days, and my belly would ache for hours afterward.
Afterword: My father was up on the roof of our apartment building, adjusting the TV antenna, when he saw me and the dogs in the nursery. He watched from a distance, in horror, unable to help his child. Afterward, he took me to the doctor for my treatment. But two days later, he came home from work with a dog bite of his own. For the next week, we went to get our vaccines together, and we invented a grim little game: whoever moaned first from the belly pain would lose. I won a couple of times.
Writing a Roman-era historical fantasy
As an adult, I live a safer life. But as a fiction writer, I can’t keep my characters safe all the time, nor should I. That’s another part of the writing process I hate: researching violence. I watch gory movies and keep my eyes open, even when my gut is churning. I read history books and historical novels, imagining what it’s like when fear wipes out pain, and pain piles up on fear. I stare at the worst humankind has to offer, and then I write down what I see, as vividly as I can.
The novel I’m working on now is a sequel to The Exiled Queen, inspired by the Dacian Wars of the first and second centuries CE. Yes, I’m writing battle scenes, so there’s no avoiding violence. But if I’m going to stay true to the history I’m working with, I can’t ignore one glaring fact: the Romans had a taste for torture. And one of the worst methods they perfected was crucifixion.
I’ll spare you the details, but I will say this: despite my PTSD, I’ve studied what first-century historian Josephus called “the most wretched of deaths” in his book, The Jewish War. The mechanics of crucifixion shocked me because, like most people, I was so familiar with its religious imagery that I had become desensitized.
In The Jesus Dynasty: The Hidden History of Jesus, His Royal Family, and the Birth of Christianity, biblical scholar James Tabor explains:
Anyone growing up in 1st-century Roman Palestine knew the horror of this form of terror by direct experience and observation. The hapless victims of crucifixion, left on the crosses for days, were a common sight to the Jewish population. Josephus reported that during the Roman siege of Jerusalem in the summer of A.D. 70 the number of captives crucified reached five hundred a day—so many that there was no wood left in the area as all the trees had been cut down.
We know quite a bit about the methods the Romans used in crucifying their victims. Not only do we have literary sources, but in 1968 the skeletal remains of a Jewish male victim were discovered in a tomb just north of Jerusalem off the Nablus Road. He was in his twenties, and his name, Jehohanan, was inscribed on his ossuary. His remains have given us an amazing glimpse into the details involved in Roman crucifixion as it was practiced in 1st-century Roman Jerusalem. (p. 218)
Professor Tabor then explains, in harrowing detail, how crucifixion was performed and how it was designed to inflict maximum suffering.
I’ll be careful not to dwell too much on those specifics in my historical fantasy, but I also can’t just write, “Oh, and then that character was crucified, and life went on.” I’ll have to pause on the word crucified and try, at the very least, to leave my reader with a shiver of dread at what such a death entailed. Otherwise, I wouldn’t be doing justice to the story. To omit violence from stories that demand it would be to erase the truth of those who lived it. So I won’t—even though I hate writing violence.
