The Hardest Scene I’ve Ever Written (Spoiler Free)

I’ve been asked this many times, and it’s always the same answer.

Summer Love Autumn Goodbye.

Chapter 19.

If you’ve read the book, you probably already understand why that chapter would be difficult to write. If you haven’t, don’t worry. I’m not going to tell you what happens. This is completely spoiler free, because I think Chapter 19 is something you need to experience with Marissa when you get there.

But strangely enough, the content of the chapter isn’t what made it the hardest scene I’ve ever written.

It’s the feeling it brings back.

One of the things I’ve always done with my writing is pull pieces from real emotions. My characters aren’t me. Their stories aren’t secretly autobiographies with different names slapped onto them. But the emotions behind them? Those are often very real. I know what it feels like to be heartbroken. I know what it feels like to be scared, lonely, angry, lost, or convinced that the life you thought you were going to have suddenly isn’t there anymore. I take those feelings and give pieces of them to my characters.

And when I wrote Marissa, I gave her some of mine.

At one point in my life, I was standing in shoes that looked a lot like hers. I was leaving a school I’d finally gotten used to and preparing to start high school somewhere I didn’t know anyone. I was losing friendships and trying to figure out where I belonged when everything familiar seemed to be changing at once. And, of course, there was a first relationship tangled up in all of it.

The end of your first relationship is hard no matter how it ends.

When you’re young, people sometimes have a tendency to dismiss those relationships. It’s puppy love. You’ll get over it. You’re young. You’ll meet someone else. Maybe all of those things are true, but knowing you’ll eventually be okay doesn’t make what you’re feeling in that moment any less real. Your first heartbreak is still heartbreak. Sometimes it’s the first time you learn that loving someone doesn’t guarantee they’ll always be part of your life.

And when everything else is changing at the same time, it can feel like you’ve lost the ground underneath you.

That’s what made Chapter 19 so difficult.

I wasn’t just sitting at a desk trying to decide what Marissa should feel. I knew.

I knew what it was like to look ahead and realize the future wasn’t going to look anything like you’d expected it to. I knew what it was like to lose people you thought would always be there. I knew what it was like to walk into a new school where everyone seemed to already have their people while you were trying to figure out where—or if—you fit.

It’s been a long time since I was that girl.

But apparently, some feelings don’t care how many years have passed.

Writing has a strange way of doing that. You can think something is safely tucked away in the past until you put a pen to paper and suddenly you’re right back there. You remember things you haven’t thought about in years. Not necessarily the exact conversations or every tiny detail, but the feelings. Those have a way of sticking around.

Chapter 19 brought those feelings back.

Maybe that’s part of why Summer Love, Autumn Goodbye has always meant so much to me. There are pieces of me buried inside that story in a way readers probably wouldn’t recognize unless I told them. Marissa isn’t me, and her journey isn’t mine, but I understand her in that chapter more than I wish I did.

I understood what it meant for her world to change.

I understood the fear of what came next.

And I understood how badly you can want to hold onto something simply because you’re already losing so much else.

There have been scenes I’ve written since that were darker. I’ve written about self-harm, abuse, grief, mental health, and characters reaching some of the lowest moments of their lives. There have been chapters that made me cry while I wrote them and others where I’ve had to put the notebook down for a while before I could continue.

But Chapter 19 is still the answer.

Because there’s a difference between imagining what something might feel like and remembering.

Maybe that’s one of the reasons I continue to write the kinds of stories I do. Fiction gives us a safe place to revisit emotions we might not otherwise know what to do with. We can hand them to a character and let them carry them for a while. We can change the circumstances, change the names, change the ending, and somehow still tell the truth about how something felt.

Sometimes those are the easiest words to write because you’ve already lived the emotion.

And sometimes they’re the hardest for exactly the same reason.

For me, Chapter 19 will probably always be both.