BROKEN BOARDS CHAPTER FOUR BREAKDOWN

Chapter 4, Difficult Conversations

This chapter was probably the embryonic thoughts and ideas that brought the entire novel to life.

And while the title is more a reference to the surf culture in the book, the overall use of the term “broken” applies heavily to main character’s most important relationships - all broken, just through different means.

When I started writing the novel, it was built around a character was very closely based on me and my teenage years. Recent years of therapy had brought some difficulties to life that uncovered some difficult feelings about my family. And using that allowed me to build the main character. I used my emotions, my sadness, my frustration, and my anger to create the characters, the relationships, and the over-arcing story.

The main character is struggling in his relationship with his father in the wake of losing his mother. His grief comes out in anger and blame - pointing the finger at his father as the one who was responsible. Those were real feelings that I held against my own dad in regard to my mother’s death.

Knowing the characters so well made it easy to write their conversations as well as the emotions that were processed in many of those conversations.

As I moved through the chapters, I wrote the main character’s relationships with best friends and the other characters from my personal point of view, having had these conversations or types of interactions during my teenage years.

This chapter was more me than the actual character.

In trying to find the emotions to write the difficult conversations, I used how I feel NOW to put into the words on the page. Because how I feel now is probably a more accurate portrayal than the things that were said by me during my teen years. When I was younger, I couldn’t put things into words the way I do now. Instead, I just unleashed my anger physically. So, I felt this was a more accurate look into who I was 35-40 years ago - a young man, who was emotionally deficient, struggling with the loss of his mom.

I hope that through the writing, people could sense the anguish, the grief, the struggle. It was definitely a challenge to capture the correct emotional sentiment.

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JB