Writing has to hurt…

At least if you want it to be any good.

The hurt doesn't come from writing itself; that's a symptom as much as anything else. It's the memories of a life lived honest that hurt. Scraped knuckles and wounded pride, lost love and the sickening need for vengeance — those hurts are the seeds of good writing. Planted deep, they'll sprout into something great and terrible, something that grows by its own will.

Tyler Bell was born in Cincinnati, Ohio, where his childhood was a lot of hand-me-downs and hard work, of doing whether or not you wanted to and going back out to fight even if you were scared.

And he read. A lot. And thought about writing his own books.

The towers falling on 9/11 changed his plans for the future and, five years later, Tyler was clapped up in body armor with Second Battalion, Eighth Marines outside Fallujah. He did three combat deployments as an infantry machine gunner and rejoined society pissed off about being alive when other people weren't.

Writing saved his life.

He started with journalism in college and found himself going out more, wanting to know about people. He could feel the world through their stories, through the scrawls they left on the inside of his skull, more than he could feel using his own skin. He found the shards of the person he could become inside others, and slowly, painstakingly put himself back together.

He moved to Charleston, West Virginia, where he fell in love with the state and started writing for himself, committing to paper the stories he couldn't write for the news. The true lives of folks the world always seemed ready to write off and forget — he wrote about them.

He now lives in Louisville, Kentucky. He's still writing, and the writing still hurts.

But it has to, if it's going to be any good.