There are many fallacies at the base of American culture, but in my writing I focus on two of the most harmful: “Everything’s fine” and “Suck it up.”
People aren’t allowed to admit they’re struggling and, if they do admit they need help, are told either to get over it or to pull themselves up by their bootstraps. We’ve pathologized anyone who goes ahead and gets help anyway and marginalized them as weak, untrustworthy, and even frightening—when will they slip, and what will they be capable of?
The problem is, some of the strongest obstacles to being a truly authentic human being stem from these two fallacies. In fact, in order to find who we really are, we have to dive into those parts of ourselves denied by them, and that’s scary—those parts don’t have pretty faces.
There’s a reason we stuff them away the moment company shows up.
The only way to an authentic life, filled with meaningful connections, is through those dark, scary places. They include our wounds, our broken places…and the pieces of ourselves we created to survive what we’ve not been able to control. Those pieces were useful once—now they are our prison.
I put characters in positions where it becomes impossible not to face their inner landscapes. My stories point the way to new bedrock from which to create our own culture of authenticity. They move from “Everything’s fine” to “Not everything is fine, and that’s true for everyone you see around you”; from “Suck it up” to “You don’t have to go through this alone.”
Whether I’m putting characters at a point in their lives where they can no longer turn from the impacts of their trauma, or using the medium of erotic interaction, which I believe strips us down to our real psychology in a way few other human interactions do, I chart character recognition of and growth through their own psychological minefields to the hope of a better, deeper, and more intimate, in the true sense of that word, life.
In and through my stories, I hope to help people find their tribe.
A friend of mine tagged me on some kind of facebook thing where you’re supposed to list 25 things no one knows about you, or something like that. I’d forgotten all about doing this until a friend of mine posted a response to it today. I have no idea how he found it, but I’m glad he did.
1. I’ve been to Japan and all over western Europe. But it wasn’t until I traveled in India and cried in the arms of an eighty-year-old woman in a tiny village that I understood what it cost me to live in America. 2. I put on a disposable rubber glove the other day when my husband and I were cleaning out one of our cars. I looked at it on my hand and couldn’t believe he could wear them while working on cars – it was so oddly tight and uncomfortable I couldn’t hold my sponge. Then I realized I had it on backwards.
3. I once had sinusitis, strep throat, bronchitis, and scurvy at the same time. I’ve also had Epstien-Barr and dysentery (at different times). (Or I’d probably be dead.)
4. I read The Chalice and the Blade in my junior year in college because I thought it looked interesting. The idea that history is influenced most by the societal outlook from which it is studied dismantled everything I thought I knew about “objective fact.” Since then, I have been working through the bibliography of that book, and the bibliographies of those books, and so on. There is only one thing that has remained steadfast: every “fact” has more than one context. And the context can change the fact.
Calvin and Hobbes know all. From The Essential Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson
5. I can’t spell worth a danm.
6. I’d never lived longer than 2 1/2 years in any house until I moved to Crockett.
7. My sister was visiting us in Crockett a year ago. We were in the back yard and we kept smelling cat poop. The smell was coming and going and we were looking all over, in the yard, on the chairs, on the kids, over and over, and we couldn’t find it. Finally, mystified, we stood next to each other, our hands on our hips. I looked at her. “Hadley, it’s you.” “Gross! No it’s not!” “It is! Lift your shoe.” She lifted her shoe. There it was. It was a long time before we could draw breath.
8. I am actually quite shy. It’s hard for me to talk to people I don’t know and I sometimes get a stomachache before I go over to people’s houses.
9. I went into my boss’s office in Atlanta, Georgia, to tell her I had some news. She said she had some news, too. I told her to go first. She said she wanted to send me to Greece, with a free apartment and a car, for four years and possibly indefinitely to teach her staff English. My news was that I was moving back to California because I had gotten back together with my boyfriend. I sat in a cafe for a long time before I remembered that, in the movies, they always pick the career, and they’re always wrong.
10. I like to drive fast. Really fast. But I don’t anymore, unless . . . I’m in the right context.
11. I subbed at a high school in a tiny Southern town for a semester. On the first day, in my first class, all my African American students sat on the right, there were two empty rows, and all my white students sat on the left. This happened in the second and third classes as well. In the fourth class, I asked them, “Does anyone see anything weird about how you’re sitting?” They had no idea what I was talking about. They also had an African American prom court and a white prom court. They didn’t see anything weird about that, either. It was then I realized “weird” carries no inherent moral judgment – it means “not what I do.”
12. I toured the Anne Frank house in Amsterdam. Afterwards, I sat in a small cafe, staring at my lunch. I looked up and realized I was on the same street I had seen in a picture in her house, where a Nazi parade had passed through, filling the street with tanks and infantry. I looked from building to building, seeing where the Nazi flags had fluttered in the breeze. I started crying. The cafe owner came and put his arm around me and gave me my lunch for free.
13. I really love playing jacks.
14. I felt lonely throughout high school. I knew a lot of people but I wasn’t really close to anyone, except a few boyfriends. One of my ex-boyfriends, one I would have expected to understand me the least, wrote in my yearbook – “Courtney, Courtney, Courtney . . . we all call you friend and yet, I feel like none of us ever really knew you.” It blew me away. So much so that, even though I lost that yearbook long ago, I can still remember what he wrote.
15. I’ve always wanted to learn how to play the guitar. Now I am. Tonight I was playing “Sympathy for the Devil” and it felt great.
16. When the sky and earth, gods and mortals, come together, when all the people that should be there are, something else arises, and that is a thing thinging. Heidegger got that right.
17. Socrates’s words “Anyone can be angry. The trick is to be angry at the right time, in the right way, in the right amount, for the right reason, and at the right person” are the work of a lifetime. Or more.
18. I still remember where I was when I heard Kurt Cobain had killed himself.
by urban watercolor artist Michael Tompsett
19. On our first date, my husband raced a Camero over the Richmond/San Rafael bridge. When I peeked over his shoulder, the bike’s speedometer was pegged out at 120 miles an hour. Two years later, riding through the desert on our way to Colorado, he did the same thing. A fighter jet, headed in for a landing at Fallon, wagged its wings at us.
20. On that same trip, we stopped in Green River, Utah, for dinner. We were in black leather and my hair was burgundy. The server came up and asked us what we’d like. He said, “I’d like a beer.” Silence descended on the tables around us. “We don’t serve alcohol,” the server said. He stared at her for a moment, then looked back down at his menu. “Allllllrighty then!” We laughed so hard we cried.
21. Just about everything I thought was true about myself I’ve found to be wrong.
22. I majored in Philosophy at Berkeley because I wanted to learn wisdom. I didn’t find wisdom. I found knowledge. But over time, I’m learning how to turn that knowledge back into wisdom. One of the first steps was understanding the difference between these two things.
Note what comes between knowledge and wisdom. I would add “empathy” to understanding.
23. I have a small stone carving that is over one thousand five hundred years old. I hold it in my hand and feel it weigh me down.
24. One time, while looking at pictures taken on Mars, I was thinking that it looked like the desert here. I stared at the horizon – at the endless expanse of sand and rock – and I realized I was filling it with human things just out of sight. Over the next hill there was a gas station, a highway, a sage bush. I realized that beyond that hill was another hill, and another one, and another one, and there was never going to be a road, or a gas station, or sage. I saw the miles and miles of nothing and something in me cracked, and for a moment, I touched the infinite existence of a world which does not mark the passage of “time”. I was swallowed by the endless silence in which no voice, human or otherwise, exists. The land in the picture expanded in every direction and everything – every known thing – in my life disappeared.
There is a vastness that exists independent of us and is almost beyond our comprehension to imagine without going insane. Such sacred ferocity is not a thing to be trespassed upon lightly.
Your character’s relationship to shame is the most important psychological relationship to understand. Shame dictates more of our actions than any other emotion—more than rage, more than grief. As Dr. Brené Brown, who’s been researching shame and vulnerability for over a decade, found, “[w]hat makes shame so powerful is its ability to make us feel trapped, powerless and isolated. What makes it so dangerous is its ability to make us feel like we are the only one— different—on the outside of the group. Shame demands that we hide our ‘shamed selves’ from others in order to avoid additional shame.”[1] It explains the inexplicable actions people take every day and, when we understand that and understand the source of it, we can harness that to craft powerful, meaningful characters and explain otherwise inexplicable character growth arcs.
So what is it, and what do we need to understand to wield this powerful tool?
Shame is not the same as guilt. Guilt registers when we feel we’ve done something bad—we’ve taken an action and it goes against our moral code, or the code of our community. Shame is the feeling that we are bad—our deepest secret is that we’re unlovable, and if anyone ever really gets to know us, they’ll uncover that awful secret, too. Or, as Dr. Brown puts it, “Guilt says: ‘you’ve done something bad’ or ‘you’ve made a bad choice.’ Shame says: ‘you are bad.’ There is a big difference between ‘you made a mistake’ and ‘you are a mistake.’ Guilt can often inspire us to change a behavior, make amends, apologize or rethink our priorities. When we feel shame, our self-worth is so low that there is little possibility for change.”[2]
When shame is triggered, it influences everything we do, everything we say, the way we move our hands, our heads, the way we smile, what we react to, how we act in crowds or with people we don’t know…you begin to see how it seeps into every single area of our lives.
Shame is a gun used on you every day of your life.
The only people who don’t feel shame, says Dr. Brown, is psychopaths.[3] “[M]ost of us, if not all, have built significant parts of our lives around shame.”[4] It can be stronger or weaker in people, but there is almost no one it does not affect.
What does it look like when a character is coming from a shame reaction? “Even now I talk too much and too loud, claiming ground….I sometimes meet women and recognize in them an instinct to run, to be gone before harm can come again, mixed with a ferocious recklessness because nothing else can be taken. I wonder what they could have done to be paying such a price. [Shame] makes me feel wildly vulnerable. I struggle still to claim a permanent space, an immutable relationship to those around me. It negates forever the ability to have a real friend. To speak in a room with confidence. To walk anyplace without believing that I have no right to be there and that I am in danger.” [5] “The moment when you just want to crawl into a hole and never be seen by the world again[.] You might find yourself defensive like a cornered animal. [I]t triggers a familiar wave of self-doubt. You might be overwhelmed by feelings of self-hatred or even self-harm.”[6] These behaviors are characteristic outer manifestations of shame.
But shame also has an inner voice, and this is a powerful storytelling tool. “‘I knew it—you are just a fraud. You don’t deserve to be here. Nobody likes you—they are just pretending.’ Other shame voices might harp on how lazy or slow or stupid you are. When the shame voice gets going, it can seem awfully loud.”[7] A character’s inner voice reveals to a reader the truth of what a character is dealing with, even, and especially, if the character is lying.
And that’s the most powerful piece of information for mining this character trait and using it well: when in a shame reaction, characters will do inexplicable things which continue to do them harm. How can we use shame to explain the inexplicable? Here’s Dave Barry: “Your brain cherishes embarrassing memories. It likes to take them out and fondle them. This probably explains a lot of unexplained suicides. A successful man with a nice family and a good career will be out on his patio, cooking hamburgers, seemingly without a care in the world, when his brain, rummaging through its humiliating-incident collection, selects an old favorite, which it replays for a zillionth time, and the man is suddenly so overcome by feelings of shame that he stabs himself in the skull with his barbecue fork.”[8] We, as writers, provide the backstory necessary so if your happy, well-adjusted-seeming character goes for the barbeque fork, the reader nods their head instead of throwing your book across the room and vowing never to read you again. Shame adds weight; it adds depth.
Shame has the power to drag people down like nothing else but depression (which has been described as an offshoot of shame). This phenomenon is so common it has a name: the shame spiral. Here’s one in action: “She messed up a presentation at work; didn’t get an award she was up for; went out and drank too much, ate even more, called her toxic ex and cried on the phone until he agreed that she could come over. The next morning, she woke up sweating, her heart racing. She wanted to throw up, purge herself of the booze and junk food she’d consumed during her nocturnal binge when she was feeling powerless and feral. I keep screwing up, she thought. She wanted to scratch the skin from her body, remove the stench left by her ex, an illogical choice of people to turn to when she was feeling isolated and alone as he had a history of making her feel worse and, right on cue, as they were in the throes of passion, all she kept thinking was: I am such a loser.”[9]
Each decision this woman made led to a further destructive decision and that’s the definition of a shame spiral. It makes no logical sense—there’s no logic to losing control of yourself and continuing to do things that make you feel worthless. The Urban Dictionary says a shame spiral “characterizes the loss of self-control over something that makes one feel worthless and pathetic. Due to these feelings of low self-worth and guilt, the action that triggered the shame spiral is repeated and the degradation of one’s self continues. Example triggers for shame spirals could be excesses of junk food, alcohol, meaningless sex, buying unnecessary gifts for oneself and the like.”[10] A shame spiral could incorporate some or all these actions and more.
Other ways a character can act when in a shame spiral: “‘[S]hame [is] highly correlated with addiction, depression, eating disorders, violence, bullying and aggression,’ which can all serve as masks or so-called armor we don to keep ourselves from dealing with, simply put, the reality of ourselves.”[11] Perfectionism is another way shame spirals can manifest. In a shame spiral, a character will do a destructive behavior, then continue to behave in this way more and more, unable to stop. For instance, if a character is addicted to sweets, he will binge on chocolates, then feel awful and use it as proof he’s a terrible person, then binge on donuts. This will happen again and again, as his mindset spirals down into darker and darker places and his self-talk becomes more and more hateful.
What triggers shame? “There are no universal triggers. There are no events or situations that make all of us feel or experience shame.”[12] So you can use anything in a character’s past about which they’ve been shamed by others to explain their present shame reactions.
In Part 2 of this article, I’ll explore how to use shame to chart character growth and regression.
And by the way, this is a tough article. Unlike most writing on our craft, this has the potential for you to recognize much of what I’ve written about in yourself, as well. I know it was hard for me to research and write. Please know that, wherever you are in relation to this subject, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. As Dr. Brown says, if you are able, grab those people you trust the most and “reach out and tell your story. You’ve got to speak your shame.” If you are struggling, please—help is both available and necessary. Take good care of yourself.
In my October 1st article, I defined shame and described how it shows up. I outlined the shame spiral, which makes explicable characters acting in inexplicable ways. Now we move on to how to use this tool to craft character arcs.
Shame is a powerful way to show character growth. Dr. Brené Brown, who’s been researching shame and vulnerability for over a decade, outlines three steps to follow to break the cycle of shame. Starting with a character lost in shame (as outlined in Part 1), chart a character’s recognition and use of them to chart growth:
Talk to yourself like you talk to someone you love. “I would say to myself, ‘God, you’re so stupid, Brené,’” Brown says. “I would never talk to my kids that way.” Show a character’s self-talk shifting.
Reach out to someone you trust. Show a character moving from isolation to increasing levels of vulnerability with others.
Tell your story. “Shame cannot survive being spoken,” Brown says. The ultimate level of vulnerability is sharing a shame story. This could complete a growth arc as a character finally shares her/his deepest secrets.
Secrecy, silence and judgment: those are the three things shame needs to grow exponentially in our lives. The antidote? Empathy. [Shame] cannot survive being spoken and being met with empathy.” [1]Your character will need to find someone who has empathy for them in order for these steps to be possible. [Italicized comments mine.
These are not easy steps to follow, so don’t show them as easy in your story. It’s a hard truth that “the greater the humiliation, the more strength of character will be required to overcome it.”[2] Please don’t show a character overcoming such a challenge alone. It’s unrealistic, and it sends the shaming message that asking for help is weak. As someone who has suffered from a crippling level of shame her whole life, I can tell you with authority and from personal experience that it’s not until you ask for help that anything can really begin to shift. But asking for help is as difficult as living in the prison of shame.
There are three reasons overcoming shame so difficult to do. “We change from a place of self-worth, not a place of shame, powerlessness and isolation.”[3] So first a character must deal with powerlessness and isolation; only then can they shift their self-worth.
Powerlessness: “Shame often produces overwhelming and painful feelings of confusion, fear, anger, judgment and/or the need to escape or hide from the situation. It’s difficult to identify shame as the core issue when we’re trying to manage all these very intense feelings. It would be highly unusual to be in the middle of a shaming experience and think, “Oh, I’m aware of what’s happening—this is shame. What are my choices and how can I change this?” Even when we recognize it, the silencing and secret nature of shame makes it very difficult for us to identify and act on the choices that could actually facilitate change or free us from the shame trap. This is what I mean by powerlessness.”[4]
A character is powerless to change in the face of shame because they can’t necessarily recognize it’s in control. The first step is to recognize what is making them feel powerless—the secret they can’t bear to share with anyone for fear of the isolation threatened if they do.
Isolation: Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver, Relational-Cultural theorists from the Stone Center at Wellesley College, have beautifully captured the overwhelming nature of isolation. They write, “We believe that the most terrifying and destructive feeling that a person can experience is psychological isolation. This is not the same as being alone. It is a feeling that one is locked out of the possibility of human connection and of being powerless to change the situation. In the extreme, psychological isolation can lead to a sense of hopelessness and desperation. People will do almost anything to escape this combination of condemned isolation and powerlessness.”[5] As awful as this feeling of isolation is, because of the secretive nature of shame, sufferers feel trapped in it. Why? Because it is combined with powerlessness.
by Andrew Vasiliev
Then they must deal with the issue of self-worth. “It’s no easy feat to admit to flaws, because that means they’re real and we have to confront them. Accepting our mistakes or shortcomings—choices that may not have served us well, unflattering ways others may perceive us, or subtle imperfections that gnaw away at us—is uncomfortable….”[6] To put it mildly. Empathy from another character is both how your character develops trust and a big part in how they begin to change their self-talk, which reveals self-worth. “[S]elf-talk is essential in breaking free from the shame spiral.”[7] When a shamed person recognizes another’s empathy, the hold shame has on them begins to lessen, and there is room for their self-talk to shift, as well. Showing our character’s inner voice is how we chart this shift.
These reasons are why it is so terribly difficult to move beyond shame. To do it, a character must reveal the very thing they believe will make them isolated outcasts forever. The arc must follow a) recognition of the secret being kept and/or the power of fear it has over them; b) the ability to develop a trusting relationship with someone based on empathy; and c) the ability to overcome the fear inherent in revealing that very secret, which can’t be done until the character’s self-worth is stronger than their fear. This happens when the character realizes a very important distinction: “[W]ho she is [is] distinct from the things she’s done.”[8] Again, this cannot be done alone. Please don’t show it being done in isolation.
You can also use the reverse of this process of moving closer to show setbacks in your character’s growth arc. The reverse involves moving away, moving toward, and moving against. “In order to deal with shame, we have learned to move away by withdrawing, hiding, silencing ourselves and secret-keeping. We have also learned the strategy of moving toward. This can be seen when we attempt to earn connection by appeasing and pleasing. Last, we develop ways to move against. These include trying to gain power over others, using shame to fight shame, and aggression.”[9]
The back-and-forth nature of this struggle is tailor-made for the romance genre, or any genre which features a relationship. We add power to our stories when we understand the underlying reasons why we’re adding events to a character’s arc. Shame, and the ways I’ve shown we can use it as writers, makes our job easier and adds such depth and sympathy to our characters—and draws empathy from our readers.
There is so much more I could write about this very important subject and its connection to deep characterization and growth. Please, if you’re interested, start by reading Brené Brown’s Women & Shame: Reaching Out, Speaking Truths and Building Connection (3C Press, 2004).
As I said at the end of Part 1, this is a tough article. Unlike most writing on our craft, this has the potential for you to recognize much of what I’ve written about in yourself, as well. I know it was hard for me to research and write. Please know that, wherever you are in relation to this subject, YOU ARE NOT ALONE. As Dr. Brown says, if you are able, grab those people you trust the most and “reach out and tell your story. You’ve got to speak your shame.” If you are struggling, please—help is both available and necessary. Take good care of yourself.
[2] David Corbett, The Art of Character, Penguin Books, 2013, p.148. This book has several excellent discussions on shame and exercises to explore it in a character.
[5] Jean Baker Miller and Irene Stiver, Motherhood, Shame, and Society,www.mothersmovement.org, August, 2004.
[6] Jill Di Donato, author, Beautiful Garbage, in “The Shame Spiral,” Huffington Post, 4/21/2014.
[7] Dr. Brené Brown quoted by Jill Di Donato, author, Beautiful Garbage, in “The Shame Spiral,” Huffington Post, 4/21/2014
[8] Jill Di Donato, author, Beautiful Garbage, in “The Shame Spiral,” Huffington Post, 4/21/2014
[9] Karen Horney (pioneering psychologist who disputed Freud and explained the differences between men and women through culture and society instead of through inherent differences) via Dr. Brené Brown, Motherhood, Shame, and Society,www.mothersmovement.org, August, 2004.
Will McAvoy: “I always wanted to have a full set of encyclopedias. Pull down ‘S’ off the shelf, flip to a page, read about, I don’t know, salic law and why a woman can’t inherit the French throne…”
Dr. Jack Habib: “You can google it.”
McAvoy: “That’s my point. You have to know what you’re looking for. You can’t browse for anything anymore.”[1]
From The Christian Science Monitor Weekly (CSMW):
“Higher education…is a mental journey. One morning a teaching assistant used E.M. Forester’s ‘A Passage to India’ to spark a memorable…discussion about syncretic religious systems….Sometime around then, a political science class detoured from theory onto the real-time 1972 presidential election. And the next day, another set of mental challenges and opportunities occurred. All of that and more is part of me…”[2]
Two completely different sources, two seemingly different ideas. But my interest, engaged by the Newsroom observation about our silent, yet monumental, shift from the world to “the world as revealed by google,” made me open to seeing the CSMW passage differently.
In these two passages, the speakers talk about a certain kind of insight gained from linking disparate sources of information together. These links create a third thing in us when we mix them with what we already know—that third thing is something entirely new, something we then use to create even further links. The key in both instances is intellectual exploration either without any specific aim in mind or by following another’s thoughts and listening to how those thoughts impact a group in real time, as new thoughts branch out from the original one and an entire tree grows where once there was just a sprout.
In my case, I had no specific aim in mind as I went through my day after watching The Newsroom except the links I’d made in my recognition of McAvoy’s comment as important. But I was thinking about what he’d said. I was wondering what I was missing when I turned solely to google to research my fiction.
When I came across the second passage, a light went off in my head. This, I said to a friend sitting next to me, is exactly what McAvoy was talking about missing. We had a very interesting discussion about that link I’d made, and this article was born.
See all these totally unrelated ideas, waiting to be linked together? You have to find a place with unrelated ideas, first…
All of us, whether for reasons of historical accuracy or just needing to know how, exactly, a lens registers light in the camera we’ve put in our character’s hand, do research for our books. All of us are linking things together—thoughts, pictures, feelings, facts, lies, truths, whatever—to bring depth to our stories. And as writers, we draw from and connect together everything we run into. How often do we turn to the internet to answer all our questions, and take it no further? What are we losing when we do that?
The CSMW source shows the vast importance of allowing for a kind of hodge-podge way of collecting information and the importance of talking about ideas with others. When I mentioned to a friend she might look up how a camera works, I thought of a professional photographer friend of mine. I imagined the amazing discussion we could have about cameras. I imagined the thematic and symbolic use I could put a camera to based on that discussion—because I know that’s what would come from it. Through exploring the actual thing, he would spark thoughts in my head, and I would make connections far beyond what he was saying. I could also take the discussion in those directions because he was right in front of me; I wasn’t limited to what was on a screen.
A friend once mentioned I should write an article about audio books. I could not for the life of me imagine writing an article about audio books—much less researching it. I imagined searching for statistics on sales, hunting for information about the industry…but, she said, what I want to hear about is how is it connecting in to telling stories aloud? I would never, not in a million years, have thought to google the kind of rich meta-consideration she mentioned as she stared off into space, her hand curved, as if cupping the voice of a beloved mother. Through our exploration of her idea, now creating links in my own head, was born the article Tell Me A Story.
Even looking for books to aid in research on the internet is limiting. Online retailers make links to other books they think may interest us. But how many of us have walked from the Romance section to the World Religions section, then on to the Manga section? And how often has that journey sparked an idea in us we never would have had otherwise? No online store is going to replicate that journey. It can’t.
When I’m researching online, I don’t know what I’m not looking for. I don’t know all the lines that radiate out from what I’m researching, and I don’t know what those lines connect to. What happens when we narrow ourselves down only to the terms we can search for? What happens when those terms invariably eliminate ideas and connections? What happens when we’re content with online research, and stop discussing what we’re looking for with others?
Great idea for when you’re writing! Not a great idea for communicating with/connecting to/becoming inspired by others…
I wonder how much having the internet, and seemingly everything we could possibly want to learn at our fingertips, has impacted our ability to remain wide open when out in the world, to information in forms we’re not expecting. How much has it stopped conversations between writers, and conversations between us and others in general, because we feel we know as much as we need to about something?
As writers, our job is to make connections. I’m not saying we no longer do that because of the internet. And obviously we don’t always have time to discuss our ideas with others. But it would pay to look at how much the internet has made our worlds smaller and take some steps toward re-expanding them.
Exploration—connection—communication—this is writing. This is not reflected when we follow a singular journey imposed by search algorithms.
What we know, our connections, those are “a part of us.” Practice sharing, and receiving, those parts as much as possible.
[1] The Newsroom, HBO drama, Season 1, Episode 9, “The Blackout Part 2: Mock Debate.”
[2] John Yemma, Christian Science Monitor Weekly, Vol.106, Issue 28, 6/2/2014, p.5
I read with interest the article “Literature and Life” in the June 9/16 issue of TheNew Yorker.[1]This is the first I’ve heard of trigger warnings, defined as “preemptive alerts, issued by a professor or an institution at the request of students, indicating that material presented in class might be sufficiently graphic to spark symptoms of post-traumatic-stress disorder [PTSD].”
It seems students at the University of California, Santa Barbara, “earlier this year…agreed upon a resolution recommending that such warnings be issued in instances where classroom materials might touch upon ‘rape, sexual assault, abuse, self-injurious behavior, suicide, graphic violence, pornography, kidnapping, and graphic descriptions of gore.’” This was sparked by a sexual-violence survivor’s shock “when a teacher showed a movie in class which depicted rape, without giving advance notice of the content.”[2]
Trigger warning proponents are not, at this point, arguing that pieces with this content be removed from syllabi. They just want a heads-up that they’re going to run into it.
As an author who writes extensively about PTSD and intense situations, I sat up straight in my chair. And as anyone who writes books knows, some of the acts listed are so common, whether they form part of the plot or the backstory of a character, they’re called tropes.
How long until the publishing industry notices, or is forced to respond to, this debate? Do we need to consider putting trigger warnings on our books?
On the one side, I completely agree with the UCSB students. I personally have experienced haunting reactions to situations I’ve encountered in books, reactions it’s taken me days or sometimes even weeks to get over—and some I’ve never gotten over, and wish to this day I hadn’t read. Do I wish I’d been warned? Hell yes.
This may be true. And it may not be. A traumatic episode in whatever media it occurs in is a traumatic episode.
And yet…
If I’d been warned, I wouldn’t have read the book. I certainly wouldn’t have bought it.
If we cover our books with trigger warnings, we’re risking several things. First, and most obviously, we’re risking sales. But there’s a deeper and more insidious risk—who, exactly, is going to come up with the definitions of these things? The trigger warnings listed above lack something very important, and that’s nuance.
I’m not being stupid here—a rape is a rape is a rape. But if your scene is at all nuanced, do you deserve this warning on your book? I’ve read books where it’s not clear total consent was given, but I wouldn’t call what happened a rape, either. To slap a rape warning on such a book would be…what? Wrong? Or is it close enough that those who have suffered such a horror should be warned? Do the legitimate needs of those who have suffered outweigh the damage done to a book when it has a label attached to it? Because what happens when powerfully dark words are linked with a book? If you write a story consciously to add something to the ongoing discussion of trigger topics, such labels could take your contribution out entirely.
And look at “graphic descriptions of gore.” Just about every crime novel I’ve ever read needs this warning. So how useful is it? But in the other direction, what is the line you have to cross to warrant such a warning? An otherwise gentle story that involves a farmer slaughtering a pig for the family’s food stores for the winter—does that invoke the warning? Is the “graphic gore” of such a scene enough to trigger anyone who’s sensitive to such things, or traumatize someone who isn’t?
Think of Where the Red Fern Grows, a staple in elementary and junior high reading lists. I warned the heck out of my ten-year-old son that the dogs were going to die before he read it. In fact, I had him read it at home, before he finished it in class, so he could allow himself to react however he wanted without worrying about the embarrassment of such a reaction in front of his classmates. And thank goodness—he sobbed, hard, for two hours, and asked…why on earth a teacher would ask his students to read such a book without any warning.
As a high school English teacher, I routinely warned my students of intense or troubling scenes in their upcoming reading and gave them space to discuss their reactions in class, if they wished, and you would not believe how many did.
If labeling did become mandatory (this isn’t completely far-fetched—think MPAA ratings on movies and TV), would authors begin to avoid scenes and topics that would get them labeled?
Where do trigger warnings cross the line into censorship?
Of course this couldn’t happen. Of course not. Right?
Which brings up the other side.
Because I’ve also seen how incredibly valuable it is to read about such things and have a safe place to explore them—as long as the teacher/leader/facilitator has enough strength and trust and respect to hold the space for such a discussion.
Trigger warnings allow those who do not want to encounter such content to opt out of the book, the movie, whatever it is that contains the trigger. But they aren’t just opting out of the content—they’re also opting out of the discussion sparked by the content. And it’s the discussion which can be so rich and valuable, even if the triggered person doesn’t say a word.
Just being in a room where such a thing is discussed openly; watching fellow human beings wrestling with their own reactions; and hearing and feeling the validation that comes from others acknowledging the horror of such experiences can be very healing. It can give someone the courage they need to seek help, either to get out of a situation or to work through the aftereffects.
It really can be like this when you realize your feelings aren’t crazy.
Or not. Again, it could, instead, reinforce the original trauma.
Trigger warnings can be used as a way to raise consciousness—to name that which is not seen is to bring it from the unconscious to the conscious. When we learn about racism, for example, we are more sensitive to the fact that not everyone experiences the world in the same way, and we become aware how we either add to or help solve the problem. Problems about which we know nothing are problems we can’t do anything consciously about.
However, no one needs to be re-traumatized, ever. And those who have experienced trauma have a right to be warned if they are about to encounter a situation that could negatively impact them, especially if they are in any way not prepared to deal with what would come up for them around it.
I have no answers. For now, and possibly forever, this is a hypothetical exploration. But I think an ongoing debate both around this issue, and the existence of triggers in the stories we write, could be rich, deep, consciousness-raising, and empowering for everyone involved.
[1] All quotes from The New Yorker, June 9/14, 2014, p.39-40.
[2] There’s an obvious problem with this list, in that it doesn’t even come close to covering all the possible triggers for PTSD, but there is no way to create such a list—as “Jessica Valenti has noted on The Nation’s Web site…, potential triggers for trauma are so manifold as to be beyond the possibility of cataloging.”
You’re sitting there, steaming cup of tea next to you, several hours blocked out for writing and…no words are coming. Worse, you can’t even seem to settle enough to get to any words.
What’s going on?
There is an obvious check-list to look at, the one involving emotional and physical issues: are you going through a very stressful time such as the death of someone close to you or a divorce or is someone you love seriously ill? It could be something less dire, like you’re afraid emotionally to go where you need to go in your story.
But there are many more times when none of these things are the case and we still feel like we can’t quite grab the writing gods by the tail. Here is a list of things we might not notice, but which can actually have a serious effect on our ability to sit and concentrate:
Having to go to the bathroom: Yes, this sounds funny, but I have noticed that if I have to pee, I have about a third the patience I usually have. I find myself trying to hurry through first-draft writing or letting things pass in editing I would ordinarily stop and work on because there just seems to be some sort of hurry to get somewhere… Why? My body is sending a constant “Hey—hurry up and get to the bathroom” signal. In my less-body-conscious, “get writing done” state, this translates as “I need to be getting through this page as quickly as possible.” You’d be amazed how fast focus returns after a bathroom visit. (And don’t get me started on sitting there being too hot or too cold…put on a sweater! Or take one off!)
Sitting too long in one position: Aches and pains sneak up on us. The longer we sit in one position, the more our bodies start to whisper, then grumble, then shout. Don’t wait for the shout. Get up every so often and swing your arms and walk around the room. Recent research in creativity shows that taking a short break every 20 minutes to let your mind wander around (not on the internet) and let your body move actually improves retention of information and allows the mind to make connections it otherwise wouldn’t make—like how the vase you spontaneously added in scene 4 now plays a pivotal symbolic role in scene 16 that you hadn’t even considered. Set your timer for 20 minutes and let your brain go on walkabout.
But using a jackhammer instead of standing up is fine. In fact, it’s encouraged.
Hunger: Of course we know when we’re hungry. But more important than that is what our bodies do the longer we go without eating. We only have a limited amount of energy before we have to refuel. As we run out, the body starts sending that energy to higher and higher priority systems. No matter how it feels to us, writing a novel is not high on the survival scale. Our brains start to drift, we lose focus on our themes and character arcs and plot points and soon we’re writing that crap we know we’re going to have to re-write extensively later. Better to stop and eat even just a banana than push ourselves to some word or time goal at the expense of our story.
What You Eat: But wait! Don’t just eat anything when you’re hungry. This is a huge topic, but believe me when I say everything you eat affects your brain. What you eat before you try and sit down to write may affect you more than anything else on this list short of water (addressed soon!). Instead of trying to discuss all the things that negatively affect your ability to concentrate (short short list: simple carbohydrates like sugar, foods made with white flour, candy, soda, packaged cereals, etc. or foods with MSG, nitrites, nitrates, or other neurotoxic ingredients), here are some great brain foods you can eat that will support your writing. Look for complex carbohydrates that take longer to digest and don’t spike blood sugar the way the simple carbohydrates do: Fish, cottage cheese, vegetables, beans, chicken (organic), potatoes, yams, whole grains (brown rice, oatmeal, quinoa, and millet to name a few), dried apricots, bananas, plain yogurt, carrots. Have a meal (not a huge one) based on complex carbs and then hit the desk!
To-Do Items: writing writing writing writing dang it I have to get printer ink pause…refocus…writing writing writing what was it I had to get? Think think think think give up refocus refocus refocus kind of writing kind of writing Printer ink! Yes! And I have to get a new car no writing happening
I don’t know what your to-do lists look like, but if they’re floating around in your head and you’re trying to remember them over and over, they’re taking up valuable writing-connection space. Albert Einstein said he didn’t memorize his home phone number. One reason was because it was easy to look up and he didn’t want to waste brain space he could be using thinking about what he needed to be thinking about. It’s the same for us—you need to be thinking about your book, not re-remembering the things you need to do later.
Have a piece of paper next to you and when you think of something, write it down and get it out of your head, where all it’s doing is poking your story like that annoying kid next to you in the school assembly in fifth grade who thought he was soooo funny, and he wanted to make sure you heard every non-funny thing he whispered, and…writes on notepad next to article…
Noise: Obvious, right? Sure, if the noise is happening right when you sit down. But what about if you’re really deep in your story and then the noise starts? You may only be aware of it the way you would a gnat buzzing around your head, but that gnat is going to derail your story if you keep giving it even a part of your attention.
Try adding white noise—a fan or one of those cool radios that play forest scenes or water or something if you’re working at home or, if you’re in a café, break out the headphones and pick a song to put on repeat. The repeat part is key—the more you’ve heard the song, the more your brain relegates it to the background, where it masks that annoying business guy sitting across from you having a conference call in a café. Really? What is he thinking?
NO. BAD GUY. STOP IT.
Water: Much like having to go to the bathroom and being hungry, the body also has a signal for when it needs water. But this signal can be much more dire. It is no exaggeration to say that the body runs on water. The neurochemicals in the brain are transported on water. The electrical connections in the muscles, including the heart, depend on water. All your hormones are transported in water. You can’t flush toxins without water. Blood pressure is dependent on having enough water to transport red and white blood cells and platelets. And that’s a very short list of how much the body depends on water.
So when we’re thirsty, our body sends us a very powerful message that all is not well. But not many people know what this message feels like. Yes, we will get a headache, but that’s like saying “Don’t worry about the horses getting out of the barn until they’re actually running by you in the driveway.” There are many earlier signals—one I notice is a strange tightness in my throat. In fact, if you find your brain wandering when you really are trying to concentrate, try drinking water first.
It will take about 20-30 minutes for your body to absorb it and send it where it needs to go, so you might actually want to drink water before you even sit down to write, and keep drinking it regularly throughout your time. Water, more than anything else, is the key to a full-functioning brain.
The next time you find yourself struggling at the keyboard, take a quick look through this list and try a few of the things on it. Hopefully, you’ll be back up and running in no time!
I love reading books about writing. I love workshops. I love classes and seminars. I love being in a room with other writers, learning a fresh new way to bring my stories to life on the page.
What I don’t love is how I feel about pretty much everything I’ve ever written after said books, workshops, classes, and seminars. Why? Because here I am in a class, untying the knot of my writing and realizing not just that something is not working in a scene, but finally understanding why it’s not working. Then I realize the thing that’s not working in that scene is why this scene, and this one, and oh this one too, isn’t working. It’s systemic!
One of the most important things we do as writers is continue to learn our craft. As much art as there is on the page, there is just as much, if not more, craft helping to bring that art to a new level. So this isn’t an article about scrapping classes and seminars because we as writers need these forays into the depths of our ability to create.
It’s about what we do when we know there’s a problem with a work we thought was finished, a problem we now know how to fix.
Eager interviewer: “Do you ever read your books after they’ve been published?”
Author (face resembling that of someone attempting to be nice to a person who has set a plate of drowned worms in front of them and encouraged them to “eat up”): “Well, you know…no.”
Internal Author response: “It is very clear to me that you have never, not once, had something published. Because if you had, you would know that the idea of re-reading something when there is no way I can fix all the thousands of things I would find wrong with it would fall somewhere lower on the list than cleaning beneath my car seats with my tongue. And I have a toddler. And a dog.”
That one time Superman was asked to re-read.
We have a job where nothing is ever truly finished, in the sense of “Well, that’s absolutely as good as it’s ever going to get, and at no time in the future will I ever think it could be any better.” But obviously books get turned in and published. Where do you halt the re-writes within the realm of “never really finished”?
There doesn’t seem to be much middle ground in the answers I’ve gotten to this question from writer friends, and these are writers with successful careers and, in some cases, NYT bestsellers under their belts. Pretty much all of them say “Use what you’ve learned in your class in your next book. Turn the ‘finished’ one in.”
90% of me totally and completely agrees with them.
It’s that 10% that keeps screaming and throwing trash cans across the alley under my window at two in the morning. That 10% is the worst soccer fan on the planet.
So I re-write.
But why does that 10% win out over the very wise and correct thinking of the 90%? Because I know I’m not alone here.
A writer friend recently said she’s come to believe people who teach workshops don’t teach them to show writers how to be better writers—they teach them to get the writers to come to the next workshop. We laughed and we certainly don’t think that’s the sole motivation of teachers the workshop-world over, but that feeling in writers, that “There’s still something wrong with this story” feeling that does drive us to take classes forever, whatever that feeling is is very, very real and is much more responsible for many seminar sign-ups than anything else. It’s also what drives all these re-writes.
Turns out this article isn’t about the dilemma we face every time we learn something new about writing. No, this article is really about fear. Fear of turning something in that isn’t perfect, that someone could find fault in, that could get rejected, which we could see coming, because see all those flaws?!
This is Walt Whitman, people. Case closed.
That may be the biggest reason why nothing is ever “done.”
So to re-write or not to re-write?
The answer to that question doesn’t lie in what we do or don’t know about our craft. It isn’t found in our finally reaching such a pinnacle of perfection we disappear in a pink cloud of enlightenment.
It lies in the ability to say “This is good enough” and to be satisfied in that.
And the most important part of that sentence is not “good enough”—it’s “satisfied.”
There’s so much work to do behind that one word. It doesn’t mean “settle” or “I can’t make this piece any better”; it doesn’t have anything to do with the piece. “Satisfied” means “I am happy with who I am as a writer.” That is a crucial distinction. I may never be satisfied with a certain piece—it may need more work on the theme, the emotional arc, whatever. But I can be dissatisfied with a piece and still be satisfied with myself as the creator of that piece.
Fear is necessary, because it’s what drives us to write better and better stories. But there needs to be a healthy balance between fear and satisfaction and there are times when it’s out of balance. At those times, and we all find ourselves there, we have to look outside the piece, outside ourselves as writers, and root out the source of the fear.
When you do that, you’ve added yet another dimension to your ability to tell stories. The saying over the entrance to the temple of the Oracle at Delphi said “Know thyself.” Knowing the depth of our fears is the source of the depth in our stories. And creating a story with depth is truly satisfying.
We toil away writing, getting all our words just right, wonderfully lost in our own created worlds. Day in and day out we struggle with plot holes and microtension lags and settings where we changed the color of the furniture but now all we’ve accomplished is we can’t find all the places we mentioned the sofa, so at some horrid moment our beta reader’s going to write a note saying “I thought the sofa was dark green? Here it’s yellow. That’s barfy. Please be consistent.”
When we’ve finished one book, we can’t just wipe our hands and go get a sandwich. No, it’s time to get to work on the next book.
Ha ha! If only it were that easy!
Because of course I’m leaving out the bit between where we feel satisfied/go eat a sandwich and then start our next book. Between those two things we have to Talk to People. People We Don’t Know.
Strangers.
Very nice, encouraging strangers. Not the ones who give you nightmares.
Of course, in our new Writer’s World, we’re talking to people we don’t know all along. Twitter and Facebook and Blogs and more Twitter and so forth, churning out little soundbites (writebites?) over which we have at least the illusion of control. And it could end there, really, in these microenvironments, but at some point, most of us are going to have to get out there and try to interact face-to-face with actual humans, in the form of book signings and book tours (even if our tour comprises the book store in our immediate neighborhood) and even parties where we run into people who could have, or should now leave the party to go, read our book.
And it’s here where the burden we carry becomes supremely evident.
When I was in ninth grade, in the mid-eighties, I found Dave Barry. If you’ve never read any Dave Barry, I suggest you stop wasting time reading this column and go read him, right now. It’s the only way you’ll get the full impact of what he meant to a sad, “different” girl (I was a punk at a time and in a town where just wearing Chuck Taylors was enough to bring derision down on your head, much less having a head sporting less hair than others, due to the fact that I’d shaved quite a lot of it off) to find something that, for the span of time reading that article, made her forget the outside world and actually laugh at something. He created for me an alternate universe, one where things were light and funny and even when he drew in current events it was in such a way that, generally, I was unable to draw breath for whole minutes at a time. I followed him for years and years, always searching out his column in whatever town I moved to, the one small space of home in a kaleidoscope of change.
Fast-forward a few decades, and I am, for the first time, going to meet this man, Dave Barry, on his tour for his newest book—this man who, through his writing, brought me so many moments of joy and laughter.
A man who, honestly, has never heard of me and has no reason whatsoever to pay any more attention to me than the sandwich he will eat during the lunch I will share with him…and seventy-five other people.
Imagine the space in my heart I carry for him and his work, the relationship I’ve had with his writing over the last thirty years. Imagine what it’s meant to me to have looked forward to his columns, and now to look back over so many years and see the line of bright spots his writing has created. Imagine how I called the second I saw the announcement of this event to buy tickets, terrified they might already have sold out, then the elation of securing a spot, and how my fingers shook as I put the day and time on my calendar, hardly daring to look it was so exciting, but carrying that day inside, warm, waiting to arrive.
Imagine being him. Imagine being in your sixties, exhausted, on the third leg of a brutal book tour, with yet another meet-and-sign to get through, God, this one made up of having to sit through an entire lunch. What will be going through his mind? Will he be wondering how quickly he can get through it? Will he be grouchy because he’s in yet another time zone in a backward progression where he is actually getting less sleep, not more, because it’s right after Spring Forward? Will he be thinking of the event he has later that night, trying to conserve energy to make it through both, by not truly engaging in this one?
Imagine being him, meeting me.
Imagine you, meeting your thousandth fan. Your ten-thousanth. Imagine you’re tired, stressed out, just wanting to get to your hotel, or home, so you can finally take something for this pounding headache, people should understand how difficult it is for you, all you ever really wanted to do was write, this whole “talking to strangers” thing was never part of the deal you saw spreading before you when you started this whole gig…
Imagine killing thirty years of love and caring and specialness, because you’re focused on your own crap. Imagine losing that fan, a fan who has raved about you their entire adult life, who has clipped your writing to share with friends, to save because it reminds them of that one time, imagine having all that crash to the ground because of one interaction with you.
Then imagine creating a cherished memory, a story someone will tell and re-tell. Imagine adding a personal dimension to a reader’s experience of your stories. Imagine how much it could mean to someone, the decision to shove that headache to the back of your awareness and, for a brief moment, authentically connect.
This is the weight I’m talking about. We carry the weight of dreams, of hopes; we carry people’s souls in the ships of our books. You may meet countless people; they meet one—you.
(For the record, meeting Mr. Barry was one of the best, warmest, most genuine experiences I’ve ever had meeting a writer. He was every bit as wonderful as you’d hope someone in his position would be with an adoring fan. I take my hat off to him, and will forever cherish my happy memory of finally meeting him, after thirty years.)
Me and the wonderful, amazing, extraordinary Mr. Dave Barry.
We’ve all heard this question. And we’ve all struggled with how to answer it. My initial answer to this question used to be “not very much at all”—after all, I can honestly say I’ve never been in the situations I put my characters in. But then I thought about that. I’ve never been in those situations, true, but I’ve certainly felt the emotions my characters are feeling.
Maybe my answer should be yes.
After all, I’m tipping more of my hand than I think when I write character reactions. I’m telling the reader what my reaction to a given situation is—how frightening I think it is, or how sad. Think of the veteran who throws himself to the ground at the sound of fireworks or the person who can’t breathe when someone drives too fast, while others love the Fourth of July or want nothing more than to weave in and out of traffic as fast as possible. The reactions I write, just like the veteran and the person afraid of fast driving, reveal how autobiographical a story truly is.
The real question is, why does this matter?
And this brings us to “core story.” Shelley Bates, in a wonderful class on the symbolic and thematic importance of setting, said every writer has a core story. This is the story you’re really telling over and over, regardless of the outward trappings of the words on the page. But what is a “core story”? And why would we write it over and over? Theresa Stevens’[1] answer is…paradox. For example, death is a paradox. We don’t know what happens and we don’t really understand it. But in a novel, we can know—we can solve the paradox in the microcosm in a way we can’t in the macrocosm.
Core story is driven by the things we haven’t figured out. It’s the problems we keep trying to solve, the wounds we keep trying to heal. It’s the things that go bump in the night of a writer’s mind.
“Darkness is for the imagination, and provides a canvas to reveal the light.”
–Lighting architect Rogier van der Heide
We know the places in us that hurt, that won’t sit still, that feel like red ants stinging under our skin. We can’t escape the voice at the core of our soul, the one that’s longing to be heard. It’s this voice, I believe, that drives us to be writers in the first place. And those unresolved issues constitute our core story.
It’s easy to scoff at this. “No way. I write sweet romance. There’s no dark thing hidden in what I write.” I felt this way, too, but even in sweet romance there are always complications, conflicts. Look at what those are—I guarantee there is something tying those conflicts together in every book you write, something at the base of all the complications.
It’s important to dive into this because if we can figure out our core story, we can write consciously about it, and that brings a whole different level to our writing. At this level, every story is autobiographical, and every story has the chance to offer a new angle on the same paradox many others face. When we write from this level, we offer true, conscious hope.
When I looked at my own stories, I discovered something I was trying over and over to solve in the microcosm. I discovered…a scream. The kind of scream your soul makes when you feel totally, utterly alone, haunted by past pain and fear.
Before you start to worry about me, I’m fine. But this scream is something that echoes in me and it’s something I’ve spent every word I’ve written trying to understand, and take a step toward healing. Every one of my stories is different, and yes, I could even write sweet romances, but at the core of all of them is the same hunt: over and over, I put my characters in situations where they have to deal with some kind of incessant, internal scream.
My core story.
This is Flannery O’Connor. You bet your ass she knew her core story.
Because I know that, I can now consciously create these screams and I know how to plot them and how to create conflict that will at first intensify them and then, ultimately, bring them to an end (or at least a conclusion). But more importantly, I can use my stories to explore the very real paradox of trying to find authentic connection with such a scream at your core. I can explore thousands of answers to the questions I now know I’m asking. Knowing my core story gives my stories a focus they didn’t have before.
Can a core story change? Of course. As we gain age and wisdom, we can’t help but solve some paradoxes, only to uncover others. We will move through our core stories as we move through our lives, as we dig deeper and deeper into ourselves and understand not only what we’ve been through, but who we really are. I can trace my progress with my own core story as I re-read the stories I’ve written over the years.
Core stories are the real answer to the question “How autobiographical are your stories?” And it’s by coming from core stories that we create the kind of art that touches others on the deepest levels. Don’t be afraid of the things that go bump in the night. Give them voice—and offer up your own growth and understanding to the world.
[1] RWA Meeting Presentation, Fairytale Structure, September 2013