Mailbag: Choosing the Right Subject, Finding Words After Trauma

It’s that time again, readers — time for me to respond to some of your thoughtful comments. This week I’m responding to comments on my post about choosing the right subject for your stories, as well as my post reflecting on finding words after trauma. Let’s see some comments!

On choosing the right subject, Savanna said:

This was fun to read, I’ve had similar experiences in Creative Writing groups, or classes. I’ll admit that I’ve never taught one, but upon sharing work I find that I’m listening to a multitude of pleasant (boring) stories regarding the beach.

Personally, I’m a big fan of conflict. Without some form of conflict within my own stories, I get bored with my own writing and move on to something else. I think that it’s a key element in short fiction.

Thanks, Savanna! I don’t know why people seem to think that their vacations will be interesting fictional fodder for others to read — it’s like telling other people our dreams! But I’m just as guilty — for some reason, I often find myself shying away from that most essential story ingredient, conflict. It’s true that without conflict in my story, even I’m likely to get bored with it.

Margaret said:

I’m 65, and there are still experiences in my life I don’t want to write about for publication. Perhaps the students are suffering from “my God, I can’t write about that. People will know that…” Self-revelation, which is IMO what happens when we write about subjects that matter to us, is inevitable in such cases.

Good point, Margaret — I think many of us want to avoid writing about personally traumatic or disturbing events. The fun of fiction, however, is that we can make our characters suffer — though if the subject hits too close to home or we get too attached to our characters, we may feel like the events are happening to us anyway. As commenter mary brady points out, why would people want to read all the darkness and turmoil that made us miserable? What’s important to remember, however, is that fiction can be a way of taking control of a subject, of making sense and order out of it, or at least shutting it away, safe on the page. Students who are afraid to put fictional conflict in their stories should remember that we read to learn about conflict — and sometimes, we read to learn how to resolve conflicts of our own.

After the jump: responding to and writing after trauma.

On my post about finding words after trauma, Margaret said:

I found that writing in my journal was the most helpful to me. I was able to journal when I couldn’t write anything else. No matter if I wrote about trivia — cafeteria food, cold coffee, the sunny weather — it helped unstop the words (and the emotions). Everything else — poetry, fiction — had to wait until I had a certain amount of distance and have gained some perspective.

Thank you, Margaret, and thank you for the well wishes. I agree that focusing on small things and just keeping the old writing muscle limber can often be wonderfully soothing — and it’s a perfectly reasonable way of staying prepared for when real inspiration returns. Write small until the big urge comes!

mary said:

I second what Margaret says. To force any words too soon won’t help at all. And frankly, you ARE doing something when you space out watching TV or whatever–you are letting time pass. Deep, deep inside you are absorbing whatever is happening. You’re not conscious of it, but it’s going on.

Thanks for this wise observation, mary. Time does have a remarkable way of carrying us forward through grief and softening the edges of our emotions. The saying goes that comedy is tragedy plus time, and while not all tragedy turns into comedy, there are ways that we’ll be able to see warmth and kindness and normalcy again. We keep breathing, we keep thinking, we keep writing, we keep being ourselves.

Brooklynn said:

I understand. That feeling down in your fingers, the itching to write, but then sucking it inside by some mindless task till the desire goes away. Because it seems so much better to hush your way through life or maybe if you write it on paper it could suddenly make it true and you don’t want that. stop. Don’t write.

And later, Brooklynn added:

Even writing that small blog helped me. You should try writing small things even if they don’t make sense. try even just writing words so it helps get your mind working

Thanks, Brooklynn, for making such a compelling point — and proving that writing can help us, even if it’s just commenting on a blog! Now that the new year is here, I find myself newly committed to my writing goals — and every day that I write is a much better day than the ones when I don’t. Even a paragraph or two makes me feel like I’m creating something with meaning and purpose.

Phil South wrote:

Obviously it’s a personal choice. If one gets catharsis from writing about your life to make sense of it and it’s why you do it then one should write through grief or trauma. Of course.

For myself I have still not written about my own personal trauma, despite being a professional writer for 20 years before and 10 years after the events. I’m just not ready. Not in a horrible, ooky, “can’t think about it” kind of way, because at this stage I can think about it, the loss of a loved one to insanity, freely and honestly. It doesn’t make me feel great, but I can face it and imagine ways I could fictionalise it and potentially make something truly moving and transformative. It’s bound to be powerful because my feelings about it are powerful. But I’m not ready to commit something so personal to the page. Not yet.

Thanks for sharing your own writing struggle, Phil. The fact that you’re able to think about these events in terms of story and structure to me seems like what a writer needs for catharsis. Writers need to give their lives shape and order, and when we lose this sense of an internal structure we feel despair. But there’s always a way to turn something into a humanizing story — even if it’s not a story that ever ends up on the page. Good luck in your work.

Thanks for such kind, thoughtful, and thought-provoking comments, readers — keep writing in, and I’ll keep responding. See you next week!