A lot of space on this blog has been dedicated to writing the Great American Novel, to perfecting your poetry, or to making your writing as appealing as possible for your reading audience. I do this because, in my experience, a lot of people want to take their writing up a few notches, preferably to a level where they can get it published or at least read by a larger audience. They want to know all the tricks of the trade for bringing something out to the public; writing a story that plenty of people will want to read and will enjoy reading. This is an admirable goal and one worth pursuing. However, now and then I recognize that a lot of people want to develop their writing for more personal reasons. They are not as interested in the New York Times Bestseller List as they are in making their story real. This requires some special tools indeed.
Now, what actually is, "making their story real"? Well, I have seen plenty of people get into writing as a form of self-help. They write their stories as a therapeutic process, putting their stories onto the page as a way of interpreting past events, relationships, traumas, and any point in between. I have known more than a few recovering addicts who turned to writing as a way of identifying and dissecting the pathology of their own compulsions and internal drives to better understand themselves and what they must confront. And indeed, there are a number of prison programs that get inmates to write about their past to better understand why they ended up on the wrong side of the bars. This requires a different kind of writing than all the talk about narrative and subtext. While in these cases, grammar and such aren't very important, in some ways it is much more difficult.To "make a story real" requires a willingness to to write things down that you might not dare say out loud because hearing such things makes them real. Putting terrible experiences onto paper is a very effective way of purging pain from the system, but it's only the first step. Real creation requires more than just listing the events that occurred - that's the reporting side of writing. A story becomes real when we write about our feelings of the event. If we did something terrible, what drove us down that road? If we fell victim to someone else, what feelings swirled through us in that moment? After that moment? The next day? Events happen all the time, but they become real when we discuss how we, as humans, participated in them. Even if we existed in a state of shock, understanding that moment is just as important as any other.
Of late, I've done some writing about an accident I was in as a teenager. I've written about it before, but looking back on those earlier works, I defused the feelings by stepping around the trauma of it all. Just the fact that I wrote about it at all was a great first step, but the more I felt secure enough to let my mind swim deeper into the trauma of that moment, the more I discovered about my unresolved feelings from that moment nearly 40 years ago.
Now I write about it, and I can feel the numbness, the shock going through my mind as I tried to figure out whether I was alive. It's easier now to express what it felt like to go stumbling into the foggy night, bloody and sore, trying to find another person, a house, a phone. How my eyes transfixed on a porchlight and I staggered toward it like a beacon of sanctuary, all my pain subsiding as I placed my energy toward reaching that one porchlight. I buried all my feelings in the name of survival and forced myself to reach that porch and get help - there was no other way to do things. And having written that, I now recognize how I often bury my feelings during stressful times in order to survive, and all that trauma is something I can identify now.
Will it be a novel? A bestseller? An epic poem? Not a chance. But I dug into those feelings, piece by piece, writing about each one until I understood it. It required patience, a little bit of pain, and a good amount of faith, but writing about my feelings and asking myself constantly, "How did I feel about this?" got me somewhere special. Maybe someone will read the final product, maybe not. But It is, by far, the most important writing I ever did - so who cares if anyone reads it?