Thanks for your responses. I just put the piece away and looked at it about a week ago. I saw a lot more of myself and my life in the story than I thought. The story is about a teenage girl who thinks she is pregnant and steals a pregnancy test from the grocery store while shopping with her mother. I was very careful to distance the character of the girl in the story from myself, but the mother in the story resembles my own mother much more than I thought. I'm in the slow, long process of working through issues with my mom, how she raised me, how she still tries to control my life and that made its way into the story. I think I'll leave it alone for a while longer until I get through some of this.

I write about these things all of the time in my journal and essays and it never affected me like that. I guess the stuff that creeps in when you write fiction is subconcious. It sneaks up on you.

It's great that the story flew so quickly onto the page for you. But still, I'd say listen very carefully to what your mind is telling you - this doesn't sound like safe territory to me.
good luck

What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us. -RW Emerson
http://www.mamagathering.org -it's for You, mama.

This sounds familiar. I was once working on a story about a girl who had been raped as a child, and was being forced to come to terms with it. I got to the point where she broke down and I just couldn't write anymore. A few years later I find myself suddenly face to face with a memory of being date-raped as a teenager--a memory I suppressed for ten years.

I think fiction brings up a lot for a writer. I have to consciously create characters who have traits that I do NOT have, ditto supporting characters--they need to be very different than people I know. But real life creeps into such writing and I have certainly done my share of personal processing through fiction. I have also, frankly, discarded the majority of the fiction I have written over the past 8 years since I began writing it (well, I was writing stories since I was a kid but I don't really count my tale of being lost in Strawberry Shortcake land as being a serious foray into the art of fiction writing).

One of my favorite writers is Edward Abbey, whose fictitious characters usually bear a striking resemblace to him. He made no apologies for that and he wrote some damn good stories (my fave--his self-titled "honest novel," Fool's Progress. I do believe he did a lot of personal processing in that book, and he passed away not long after).

So, when the writing gets deep and personal it's okay to step back and take a look at the feelings that you're experiencing. Sometimes you can also write "through" the hurt.
:)

It sounds like there is unresolved grief/pain for you in this topic. You may need to do some serious work to come to terms with it, both through the writing and through support on the side. You may need to save it for a time when you are feeling truly ready to dive in and get through to the other side. Also, the process of facing these demons and finding your way through it may also be important to the piece of writing itself, sort of leading the reader into it and giving them glimmers of how to live life anyway.

Just talking out of my butt--I don't know fiction processes at all. I wish you well as you proceed.