Broken Heart Writing

You've been decimated by someone, emotionally. When should you actually start writing about it?

From the piece, in Lit Drift...

The question then becomes, when is it okay to write about heartbreak? When is it okay to turn our deepest tragedy (or even a minor one) into our greatest work?

Is it time to write about the story when, as one writer puts it, “you don’t need to tell it anymore“? When the emotional pull of the events no longer control you or compel you to blurt them out to complete strangers at a party? Tackling something so large and trying to wrestle it onto the page is hard enough, imagine doing it while you’re still undecided about how you feel?

Even Joan Didion, who wrote one of the most beautiful books (in my small opinion) about one of the biggest life tragedies one can ever face, had to take time between the sadness and the writing. Didion’s tragedy may be the kind that never truly leaves the nervous system, but even she knew that waiting until it settled, just a little, was the right thing to do.