The worst thing about being a WRITER… and a MERCY

Well, maybe it’s just the hardest…

I know not every writer is a mercy… not even every great writer is a mercy – but every writer MUST have at least some of the characteristics that make someone a mercy.

Mercy / Giver:

A mercy / giver’s basic motivational drive is to sense and respond to the emotional and spiritual needs of others. Those with the mercy motivational gift have a divine ability to sense hurt and respond to it with love and understanding.

to read more about this subject, click HERE

As a mercy, I FEEL the emotions of my characters – and I feel them deeply. When they’re sad, I’m sad… when they’re angry, I’m angry… when they’re happy, I’m happy. Writers – especially writers who are also a mercy – have a particular gift for becoming their characters.

So… this should be a good thing, right?

WRONG!

Even a full-time author isn’t writing twenty-four hours a day.

When we’re not writing, our emotions can spill out over everyone around us. It can be hazardous to our love… to our friendships… to our lives.

Not to mention how deeply we bury ourselves in our writing. We LIVE our characters’ lives while we’re writing them… and we don’t always have absolute control over where that world goes. It can be frightening. It can be heartbreaking. It can be devastating.

And then there’s the flip-side of it… you have to dig so deep to find those emotions. You’re constantly soaking up the emotions of those around you, from books, from movies, from television shows. You take those emotions and you feed them into your writing.

That can be pretty devastating as well. The stronger the emotion, the easier it is to hold onto – so you find yourself becoming a sort of emotional sponge. You seek out books and movies that are intense, terribly sad, extremely suspenseful, horrifyingly frightening.

Of course, then you’re swamped with those heavy emotions and they weigh you down, they stay with you… forever.

The next question is; why do we choose to do this to ourselves?

The answer is, of course, most of us don’t CHOOSE it – it chooses us!

We don’t write because we want to. We write because we have to! We write because we HAVE to get the words out, the characters out… the worlds out!