"Frozen" Appeal: Theme Writing

Quality of 'Frozen'

Last week, I talked about Disney fairy tale movies in general.  This week, I will address one particularly, the one that is easily the best crafted.  My favorite is still "Tangled," But I can say without hesitation there is no mainstream cartoon more literary, if such can be said of film media, than "Frozen."  Disney's "Frozen" broke a billion very quickly.  There must be a reason for that, beyond the catchy tunes and the toddler appeal.  It's the kind of movie that appeals to people of all ages.  Why may that be, one may wonder.  For me, a big part of it is its tight writing around a central theme, that of loneliness.  [For a little about the script writing process, here's a transcript of part of an interview with one of the main scriptwriters, Jennifer Lee, in which she details the writing process with the brilliant Pixar and Disney crew.  The blog also links to a podcast with the original interview.]

Universal Themes 

The key to the brilliance of the writing and appeal in "Frozen" is that its theme of loneliness is a universal one.  We live in a world full of lonely people.  So many people feel isolated in the modern Western culture, people who are isolated from fellow humans by technology, by cubicles, by psychological issues and various disabilities, by so very many things.  Historically, families would live and work in large communities.  One's existence depended on teamwork with others.  Now, one can live and work an entire day without leaving their house once.  Some people's primary connection with friends and relatives is social media.  I, for one, work from home and only sometimes meet humanity apart from my family if I specifically seek them out.

The Frozen or Isolated Heart

"Frozen" opens with its theme song with its thesis statement, "Beware the Frozen Heart."  Every major character in the movie starts out with a frozen and isolated heart, either figuratively or literally.  Those who overcome those frozen hearts by reaching out to humanity are rewarded in the story, while those who do nothing to overcome it face an unhappy end.

Elsa is raised to "conceal, don't feel" by parents who seem caring and yet seem to spend all of their energies isolating Elsa from the rest of humanity.  True, it's for mutual protection after a childhood accident, but her parents could have instead taught her to engage humanity and control her gifts.  This is a form of abuse that she continues to inflict on herself when her parents, her only contact with humanity, pass away.  It seems to be a figurative punishment or isolation due to disability or unique features.  This isolation is amplified when she feels she has proven her parents right by lashing out with her powers, thereby facing apparent societal rejection.  Her declaration of the freeing power of isolation and her frozen heart comes in the form of the song that redefined the entire movie in the writing process, "Let it Go."  In the song, she seems to affirm that isolation and loneliness are the only way, that through isolation, she can't hurt anyone and no one can hurt her. "Don't let them [meaning the outside world] in, don't let them see/Be the good girl you always have to be./Conceal, don't feel, don't let them know./Well, now they know."  Yet at the same time, it's her ignorance of how to deal with her own powers that continues to harm outside her self-inflicted prison.  It is a false empowerment, an error based on her parents' error that isolation is the only solution.  Later in the story, her real freedom and empowerment come through getting past her frozen heart and embracing love and humanity, especially through the love and sacrifice of her sister.

Anna, too, is isolated by the same parents and Elsa and for less of a reason.  Their hearts and lives are frozen in isolation that Elsa embraces and Anna rejects but feels powerless to resolve.  One may argue Anna's warmth and passion show she's not frozen, and yet listen again to her duet with Prince Hans, "Love is an Open Door."  Both characters hint their desire for each other is not based in love but in what the other has to offer, thereby confessing to frozen hearts.  Anna sings that she loves him for the freedom from her isolation he offers. "All my life has been a series of doors in my face./Then suddenly, I bump into you...Love is an open door."  She does not love him for who he is because, as Kristof points out, one cannot know someone else that quickly.  She loves him because he appears to want to open her doors, to set her free.  Hans, meanwhile, hints in the same song and makes it very clear later that she offers him power.  "I've been searching my whole life to find my own place." [Emphasis added.]  He wants her because she offers a place he can control.   Anna, at least, does not acknowledge her reasoning, though Hans clearly hides his until there is no danger in its revelation.  Just like Elsa, Anna finds a way past her isolation and frozen heart when she reaches out to others and finds ways she can love and serve.  In the slow transformation of Anna's figurative frozen heart to a literal frozen heart, she begins to learn how to unfreeze her heart, by acts of true love and sacrifice.  She at first thinks she has to be the object, to be acted upon by a prince, but instead learns that her own love and decision to reach out opens the door.  The only heart of the main characters that remains frozen and isolated from the rest of humanity in his own selfishness throughout is Hans's.  Therefore, he, is banished.  He will not open his heart, so he is not welcome because of the dangers created by frozen hearts.  To emphasize this punishment to the frozen hearts of the narrative, Duke "Weaselton" suffers roughly the same fate.

Kristoff, too, embodies isolation and a frozen heart in the beginning.  No human embraces him, so his only regular companionship is his reindeer, as he sings in "Reindeers are Better than People."  That song is his declaration of a frozen heart.  Throughout his early interactions with Anna, he maintains his frozen and isolated heart, rejecting any connection with her on every side.  However, when he is forced to consider her humanity and his value to her, he chooses to thaw his own heart and reach out.

The Thaw:

The figurative thawing of hearts hinges on the warmth of the literal frozen hearts of the story: Olaf and the rock trolls.  None of them have a beating heart, yet they embrace everyone else with "warm hugs" and words of love.  They are the Shakespearean clowns of the story, especially Olaf.  They seem so innocent in so many ways and yet know the most important thing to overcoming loneliness and thawing broken hearts: how to love.  Their antics and words amuse, yet they are the ones who retrain the other characters, the frozen hearts, how to get past their isolation and become a community of people capable of joy.  The warmth and thawing effect even rubs off on the apparent abominable snowman, Marshmallow, who sheaths his spikes and embraces Elsa's kingdom of ice.  His inclusion in the community is reinforced at the end of "Frozen Fever," when he allows a family of Snowjis inadvertently created by Elsa, into his home.  Embracing family and friends thaws all of the hearts. 

Using Thematic Writing:

In studying how the great storytellers of Pixar/Disney weave meaning into their story, a writer can see how to make a story successful not in spite of its meaning but because of it.  While it's true that the film probably wouldn't have been as successful without funny character and great music, what really appeals in the end is the story's heart.  There are a lot of cartoons and other movies out there with funny characters and sometimes even great songs, and yet they don't have quite the universal appeal of this movie.  "Emperor's New Groove" is brilliantly funny and witty with hilarious characters, and yet it didn't have the success of this movie.  It had the theme of friendship, but that theme was not so successfully woven into the characters and the story.  "Tangled" has the same artistic style as "Frozen," has catchy songs, great characters, and an awesome story, yet it didn't catch fire like this one.  The themes weren't as strong and did not resonate with the audience quite like this one.  It, too, was about an isolated and abused child with Stockholm's syndrome from which she struggles to break free, a story of kindness and friendship, but the themes and meaning don't come together to create the magic "Frozen" has.  The same can be true of so many other movies and stories.  

Conclusion: 

What makes a successful story and film?  Truthfully, it's probably a blending of all of the above, great characters, brilliant storytelling, humor, but above all, meaning that resonates with the audience.  What meaning touches the souls of all of society? If you can find those themes and combine them with brilliant writing and great characters, you may yet find the fire and magic Disney has with "Frozen."   

The Decentralization of Prince Charming in Disney Fairy Tales

What I Mean by Fairy Tale Disney

A lot of people look to fairy tales as a blue print for storytelling.  Maybe one day, I will find my voice in fairy tales.  I would like to do so since I have studied fairy tales in both undergrad and grad school.  If I do, I will look to the older versions of the tales.  But fairy tales are best known through Disney.  My post this time will be on the evolution of Disney's fairy tales, coinciding with shifting cultural ideals. I may yet gather ideas for my own adaptations by studying theirs. I will focus on fairy tale versions, skipping sequels and animal-centered yarns.   For this reason, I won't study Alice in Wonderland, Black Cauldron, Pocahontas, Hunchback of Notre Dame, or Peter Pan because they adapt books not actual fairy or folk tales.  Some of the same principles can apply to these films.  I will look at the fairy or folk tale adaptations in three sets, the earliest set from the 1930's-50's, the 1980's-90's set, and the Pixar or latest set.  

First Set

If you'll notice, the first three fairy tale adaptations--"Snow White," "Cinderella," and "Sleeping Beauty"---tell essentially the same story.  The princesses live with mother figures who make them live like peasants, doing manual labor.  This mother-based or matriarchal order is, for the most part, presented as unfortunate or less than ideal.  The ideal for all three is to rejoin the patriarchal or father-based order in which the father of the prince wants his son to give him grandchildren through marriage.  The princes tend to get less characterization than even the princesses, who are primarily viewed as the ideal of the day, beautiful and docile.  They are perfect and two-dimensional.  Because the princesses are the ideal woman, magical creatures help them achieve the culturally acceptable dream of marriage to the prince.  The princess has little to do with her own happily ever after.   If I were to adapt any of these tales into fictional form, the Disney versions would be useless to me because the ideals have changed so drastically since those times and docility does not make for a very interesting character trait in a modern princess figure.  In fact, it runs contrary to the modern ideal woman.  

Middle Set: 

Decades passed without a real Disney fairy tale adaptation.  By the time Disney restarted their fairy tale versions, it was late 1980s, early 1990s, and ideals had changed considerably.  These tales would be more fruitful to study for ideas for a modern adaptation. The strength of the patriarchal connection and ideal was weakened by that point.  Kings no longer appear in the films to demand grandchildren.  Furthermore, the prince figure no longer has to be an actual prince. They just have to conform to the masculine ideal of noble, muscular, heroic, self-sacrificing, charming, often wealthy, and kind.  It's more or less the same ideal as in earlier versions but allows for more character and variety.  Prince Eric from "The Little Mermaid," Belle's Beast, and the title character of Hercules [not based on a fairy tale, but still based on Greek folklore] are all technical princes, though Aladdin and Mulan's [once again, based on folklore, not fairy tale] Captain Li Shang are not.  Regardless of their profession, they conform to the heroic ideal.  This is where the centralization of the prince starts to slip some since suddenly, not all princes have to be actual aristocracy.  

Women's ideals for themselves have shifted not just in the culture but in women themselves.  Not every one of the female protagonists fantasize about becoming part of the man's world as Ariel does.  Ariel could easily be compared in terms of plot line to the earlier set, though she has far more character and is rebellious against the patriarchal order.  As with the earlier set, she very quickly fantasizes only of becoming Prince Erik's bride.  Other main characters have different goals.  Belle dreams of adventure, Jasmine wants to escape the bonds of aristocracy, Mulan seeks to save her father, and Hercules's Meg tries to free herself from involuntary servitude.  These female characters, princess or otherwise, have dreams that do not include fantasizing about how "Someday, my prince will come."  This middle set is a more useful prototype for a modern character.  Most of the time, the prince figure is tacked on as an afterthought or a means to an end.  

As part of this, the center of control starts to shift.  No longer is the man solely capable of choosing the woman.  In many cases, the man makes the advances--as in Beauty and the Beast, Aladdin, Hercules, and Mulan--but the woman can and often does turn him down at first.  Jasmine is the princess and the only one in the relationship capable of having the power to choose.  Belle has the power to simply walk away but chooses to return. Ariel actively pursues her prince rather than waiting for him to come to her.  Love for these characters is suddenly a choice, not a compulsion, a two-way street.  It is no longer an easy matter of leaving the negative influence of a woman's house and going to the idealized home of the man.  A man is not always the rescuer, or actor, but can be the rescued, or acted upon.  The prince as the heroic center of the tale about which the woman's desires and choices revolve, has slipped and become somewhat off-center.  

Pixar Set: 

With the latest set, prince characters no longer have to be princely or even worthy. In the middle set of fairy or folk tale movies, the woman still ends up with the man across the board.  The man is still princely and usually makes the advances toward the woman in the first place.  These versions have taken steps away from the original ideal of a prince-centered world but not as many as one might first suppose.  This does not make them in any way bad or necessarily inferior, but it just shows a step along the way to where the tales are now.  

One might class "Enchanted" with the third set because it was intended to be the first of the latest princess tales, though it was not a Pixar team movie.  It makes reference to the basic plot of the first three, with a girl immediately swept off her feet by a prince.  Now, the fairy tale in "Enchanted" seems to be formulated from those earlier movies and was fabricated for this story, but it blazes the pathway for the tales that follow.  In it, the princess figure becomes more complicated, more modern, and rejects the simple, two dimensional prince that appeals to her in the beginning.  Instead, she turns to a modern man who is not perfectly princely. She begins with the desire to marry a prince, and ends up married but not to a prince.  We take yet another step on the pathway to decentralizing the prince, yet the tale is still man-centered in the end.  This could be an interesting study, however, for ideas about adapting fairy tales for a modern audience.  

It was at this time Pixar was acquired by Disney and was given reigns over Disney animation.  I will, therefore, use both Pixar and Disney movies interchangeably since they are all made by the same parties.  The first truly Pixar-run fairy tale movie is "The Princess and the Frog."  There is a prince, and they do end up together.  But as with the middle set, Tiana at first has no desires to get married.  She's much like Belle but to more of an extreme.  Her dreams circle around her career, and her romance can only begin when not one of them but when both of them become beasts, equals on the same playing field.  Class differences become, thereby, meaningless.  It is very much like the middle set in terms of ideals and gender relations except that the prince is a selfish egotist, poor, and unprincely.  If anything, the prince is most like Gaston, Belle's villain.  This is the main shift from the middle set.  In the latest set, the ideal of perfection for both male and females is discarded.    

"Brave" shifts again with yet another original fairy tale in which the only princes are unworthy of the main character.  They are not charming nor her equals in any way.  She becomes her own champion, her own best match, able to complete herself.  The only love story centers on the relationship between Merida and her mother.  There is a father, but the center of power is clearly in the realm of the women.  The father defers to the mother when it comes to authority, and women are at the center of the story.  This movie is one of the most extreme cases of the decentralization of prince charming.  The prince has become a footnote to the woman's story. 

    

"Tangled" brings the central male back, yet he is still anything but prince charming.  He is a thief, like Aladdin, but selfish and egocentric like the prince from "Princess and the Frog."  He isn't even a diamond in the rough.  He is the rough.  Meanwhile, Rapunzel has been the victim of abuse for most of her life and is emotionally damaged.  Neither is perfect.  At the same time, the movie reintroduces romance.  Yet the one with the upper hand, the one with the power in the relationship is Rapunzel.  In some ways, it's also like the middle set in its romantic storyline, yet in its imperfect characters, particularly the male figure, it departs significantly.  

"Frozen" expands on the cultural shifts of previous movies.  It offers both the pathway to romance as in most of the other modern versions and a pathway to power, independent of masculine influence.  The locus of power, both political and magical, starts with both mother and father and is passed to Elsa alone. The pathway to romance offers possibly the most striking shift for the prince yet.  While Elsa has and needs no romantic options, Princess Anna has two. Like Belle before her, she is presented with one man who is handsome and charming and another who is more at home with the beasts.  But in this case, she falls for the wrong one, one who appears to be the perfect Prince Charming but yet turns out to be a murderous usurper and traitor.  Prince Charming is not just imperfect but villainous.  He is far from ideal in the end, but her other option, Kristoff, a blue collar worker with hygienic and social issues, is also not the princely ideal.  Yet of the two, he conforms to the current social ideal, the average guy.  The prince has thoroughly been pushed out of his traditional place at the center of the narrative, especially when he's banished and made to do manual labor.  One may be tempted to say his place has been taken by another man, but that's not really the case, either.  The true central love story full of acts of heroic self-sacrifice does not involve him but centers on the sisters.  The romance is a side note and inessential.  This movie respects the idea that there are multiple pathways for a woman, and some of them may include mistakes and independence.  The ideal of perfection for male and female have disappeared.  All of this allows for the possibility of female power, shared power, and choice.  

Conclusion: 

All of these newer movies would make for an interesting study of how to adapt a fairy tale to modern fiction in a way that would appeal to and be meaningful for modern audiences.  In the earlier adaptations, male characters hold all choice, most power, and almost all responsibility to act.  In the newer ones, more possibilities present themselves for men and women.  The ideal of perfection gives way to uniqueness and fallibility.  For me, the newer ones are the far more interesting ones and much more useful as I look to create my own adaptations.   

Rhyming

Introduction:

I am not a great poet, but I have learned a few things about poetic writing from great poets, including a former poet laureate of Utah.  Poetic writing like rhyming can be used in any context from poetry to fiction to nonfiction to essay.  I may venture into more poetic writing techniques later, but in this one, I will focus on rhyming.

A lot of people think that poetry has to be rhymed like a Dr. Seuss book.  But one has to keep in mind that rhymed poetry came out of language in which a lot more words rhymed than do in modern English.  This allowed for more versatility than in modern rhyme.  Spanish, for instance, makes for easy rhyming because verbs generally have one of only three endings.  In my view, some rhymed poetry in English is excellent and meaningful; however, so much of modern rhymed poetry sounds contrived and fake.  Often, poets force their writing to serve the form rather than adapting the form to serve the meaning of their writing.  When I write poetry, I like free verse because then I'm not slave to a set pattern.  When done well, there are only small steps between poetic prose and free verse poetry.

Whether one prefers free verse, lyrics, iambic pentameter, prose, or something else, there are things that can be learned from poetic writing.  Poetic writing is all about shaping the language in a conscious way to make it more meaningful and powerful.  This will not be an exhaustive list.

Some Types and Purposes of Rhyme:

1.  Rhyme creates a unity of sound, tying words together and creating emphasis. There are many kinds of rhyme, and several of them are listed in that website.   End rhyming matches the sound at the end of the line like in Shakespeare.  This is the most commonly used in rhymed poetry.  There are several rhyme schemes that can be used, but my favorites are the sneaky kind, where it's not the same rhyme repeated two or three lines in a row but where the same rhyme might appear in the first and third or first and fourth line, and a different rhyme or no rhyme at all appears in the middle.  It doesn't at first seem to rhyme.  The rhyme sneaks up on you and doesn't slap you in the face.

For instance, this is the kind of rhyme that is obvious and in-your-face:  If you don't know how to rhyme/It's obvious in no time./It can be such a crime,/And you won't earn a dime.

Meanwhile, the kind of rhyming that works for me better than most is where every line does not rhyme, or every so often, you might find a rhyme.  Bruce Larkin's "Dad versus the Bug" provides an example: My mom saw a great big bug/Strolling across the kitchen floor./When mom spotted the oversized insect,/She bolted for the door."  [Excerpt]  In poems like this, the rhyme is a little more hidden.  It still gives the strength of rhyming without becoming the main point.

Internal rhyming is a little more useful in prose. Internal rhyming is where two or more words in one line rhyme.  This can be more or less subtle, depending on how it's done. If I write, "My fat cat is wearing a hat and sitting on a mat," I start to sound like I belong on Sesame Street.  However, if I am more sneaky with my rhyme, I may be able to craft my language by tying words together with sound.  For instance, I might write that "My cat annoyed me by destroying my boy's toy, which killed what remained of my joy in my day." I'm less glaring with my rhyming, yet I still tie the words together with rhyming.  Still, some might feel that sentence feels contrived and forced.  It's usually best to use any rhyming with a light touch.

In order to make such rhyming more subtle still, one can do the same sort of internal rhyming but do it with slant rhymes.  That's where the words may not rhyme all the way but have much in common.  For instance, in the line about the cat destroying the toy above, "joy" and "day" are slant rhymes because of the commonality of the "y" sound.  Their vowels and beginning sounds are different, yet they still make a rhyme.  If we take that same line with the cat above, we can use slant rhyming to tone in down.  "My cat tried to annoy me by taking my child's toy, so I yelled any time it started to play."  Here, the y is emphasized through slant rhyme.

My favorite rhyming tool in prose and poetry, alliteration, may not sound like rhyming.  It is a kind of slant rhyme and isn't too different than the example above except it refers to the matching of the first letter in a word.   A broader definition just requires that the sound be repeated over multiple words.  Consonance is using the same consonant sound over multiple words, while alliteration is using the same vowel sound over multiple words.  So some souls use slant rhymes by starting words with the same sound, which ties and unifies a sentence. Go back and count the S's in that last sentence, and you'll see what I'm talking about.  This is a sneaky kind of rhyming of which the audience may not be aware as they go through, but it affects the reader subconsciously.

Incidentally, the above techniques can be used and combined to help with characterization.  If you're writing dialogue for someone you want to seem snaky and sneaky, you might use a lot of S's.  For a person you want to have sound powerful and strong, you may use a lot of strong sounds like K's and T's.  For someone who you want to growl all the time, focus on the R's.  This is really useful with prose.  For someone you want to sound silly, whimsical, or magical, you can use more exact rhyming.  Rhyming in its variations is a technique to use during the polishing process to make your writing more intentional and poetic.  Try it sometime, and let me know where it takes you.

Writing from Dreams

On Dreams: 

Another possible source for creative writing is from dreams.  When I was in undergrad at Vassar College, I took a class on dreams and dreaming.  It was an enlightening class that taught me a technique, one of many, I'm sure, for translating dreams.  I often use it with my friends to this day.  Step one is to start a dream journal.  If you record your dreams, your subconscious is a lot more likely to let you remember more dreams.  This generally works for me.  Once you have a dream you find fascinating and that feels significant, you can take apart the dream for meaning.  You can look at each symbol--each person, each item, each word, each emotion--and look at them in relation to each other and your life.  If you're frustrated at your inability to learn something in college, that may come out as frustration with a magic talking pen, frustration with an ogre you know is your roommate, or something like that.  If you're scared of something new, that may come out as something you're scared of in your life.  When I was going through stress and fear as a child, I often dreamed of spiders, which symbolized fear for me.  Spiders rarely appear in my dreams anymore since I no longer fear them like I once did.  

For Instance: 

You can go look up symbols in one of many dream dictionaries, but in my experience and according to that class, a symbol in a dream is a personal thing.  There are cases where these dream journals apply but many cases where they don't.  One can look up meanings suggested by such journals and then figure out if that interpretation is right in a given situation or not.  If not, this method can perhaps suggest to the mind ideas about where to go from there.  A pop tart in my dream may symbolize a treasure hidden in something bland, a boring obstacle I need to work through in order to discover something sweet.  If I hated Pop Tarts, it may symbolize something nasty, some trial I would have to go through.  Meanwhile, a friend of mine had a dream of a Pop Tart wherein she kept trying to toast it in the toaster where she thought it ought to be, but it wouldn't work.  Then she tried nuking it in the microwave and it did work.  When I walked her through the emotions in her dream, how she felt about the situation, she realized she was the Pop Tart.  She was trying to make her current situation work, and it wasn't working.  She realized if she went home and tried something else, it may work better.  That dream became part of her decision making about a life change.  The best person to translate a dream is the dreamer because they would understand what the symbols mean to them.  It's also best to translate within a week, so the symbols still mean the same thing. 

Literal Dream Use in Writing: 

I have often turned dreams into short stories or used them as a spring board for a scene or character in a book.  Sometimes, it's after I have taken apart the dream and figured out what it meant for me.  Sometimes, it's after I lay in bed post-dream, in daydreaming mode, and transform the dream into story that makes narrative sense.  I dreamed once that I was a child prince who was challenged by a dragon to participate in a contest.  He was looking for someone special, so he had several kids throw plastic utensils at a wall to see if they could get it to stick in the wall.  Several other kids tried and failed.  When I threw the plastic fork, he threw a dagger at the same time, and the dagger stuck the knife into the wall.  I turned that into a scene in a fantasy novel I wrote in high school, without the plastic knife, about a little abused boy saved from his miserable family life by a dragon who discovered his true worth.  I am in good company when I use dreams in this fashion.  According to many sources, Jo Rowling's original creation of Harry Potter came through visions and dreams.  

I did not then understand how to translate dreams, but I was still able to use the dream in a story.  It's hard to know this far removed what the parts of the dream meant to me at the time, nor can I recall many of the emotions surrounding it.  If I used a Freudian dream interpretation, chances are the dream would come out sounding sexual, even if it meant nothing of the sort to me at the time.  

I have heard that everyone in a dream somehow represents the dreamer.  I can sometimes learn something different from a dream, interpreting it both ways, with me-as-everyone and with people in the dream representing relationships or people in my life.  If I had to guess, on a figures-in-dreams-represent-others level that the dragon was something intimidating, possibly high school or a teacher.  I clearly felt isolated from the other kids in my dream, as I did in high school.  But I also felt special, like I was, perhaps with the help of someone intimidating [a teacher?], able to overcome a challenge that others were not able to overcome.  If I translated the dream in the me-as-everyone way, I would say that the dragon was my sense of responsibility to be perfect in school, which intimidated me.  However, because of the help of my own perfectionism, I found a way to overcome challenges.  Both meanings work.  

Symbolic Dream Use in Writing: 

I used the events in the dream on a literal level when I was in high school to write a story about a dragon and a little boy.  That is one possible use.  On the other hand, if I use my translation of the dream, I can broaden and deepen the meaning.  For instance, I could write a story about a young person, possibly male, who feels isolated from his peers because of some unique ability or disability.  He has a lively fantasy life wherein those around him become dragons, fairies, or monsters in his imagination.  One particular "dragon," a teacher he finds scary, gives him an intimidating challenge that at first scares him but then allows him to shine with the help of the teacher.  That story could be written as a children's story, a short story, or a piece of a bildungsroman,  or coming of age novel, wherein this was a formative event in his life.  

In other words, dreams can be used on at least two levels, literal and figurative.  If we concentrate on the literal level, we can write a story inspired by events of the dream.  If we use them on a figurative level, we seek the meanings and emotions behind them, inspired by our own experiences, to give them a deeper meaning.  I could still use the dragon as a dragon, for instance, but also use him as a symbol for intimidating people in a child's life who turn out okay.  Our dreams can inspire us to a more exciting and sometimes more profound level of writing than we might if we're limited to our own waking consciousness.  

Trauma Writing in Fiction: Starting with Truth

START WITH PAIN YOU KNOW: 

Last post, I talked about the writer's net, how to gain ideas for writing.  One place a lot of us start is with our pain.  I took a class on trauma writing for my master's program.  I learned a lot, but the main message I took away from that class was that writing, art, speaking, expressing one's pain is a valid and healthy way to cope and to heal.  Keeping it in can help it fester.  I wrote my master's thesis about the power of fiction, a safe, imaginary space, to aid in the healing process.  It's called "Fairy Tale into Fantasy: Emotional Healing through Genre Fiction."  

Little did I know when I took that class or write that thesis that trauma writing would become such an important part of my life.  I just wrote a novel about a woman traumatized by loss seeking healing.  Before my masters program, I had experienced no trauma out of the ordinary.  I had lost pets and my elderly grandparents and had been through some hardship, but I didn't fully understand the concept of trauma as I do now.

PAIN BY DEGREES: 

Trauma in all its varieties is different for everyone.  People going through the same kind of loss, even the very same loss, can have a very different experience.  A couple I knew experienced a miscarriage.  For her, it was traumatic and world-changing, while he only felt bad for her but felt none of the pain.  When my brother died a month before I lost my baby, some of my family felt it deeply while others had emotional distance and did not truly grieve because they'd had little to do with him in years.  There is no single way to look at loss or pain.  Even the same person can experience each loss differently.  I had been close to my brother in childhood but hadn't seen him for a while before he passed.  It was painful to hear about his death, but since he wasn't directly in my world at the time of his passing, he already seemed more like a memory.  To lose him was painful but didn't send me into the process of deep mourning and grief like my baby's loss did because my whole world circled around my baby's every breath up until that last day.  Even my individual miscarriages have had various impacts on me, depending on where I was emotionally, how far along I was, whether or not I'd prepared myself for another loss, and all kinds of other factors.

WRITER AS ACTOR:

But regardless of the kind of trauma one has experienced, it changes one's perspective, one's emotional state, one's everything.  I look at pictures of myself before 2010 and see a different person, a person with a smile that lacked the weight and understanding of pain I have now.  I now speak a language known and understood by those who have lost.  I write about my pain to speak to others who have been there and to help them feel understood.  I also write to help others find healing in a safe space of vicariously living through my characters.  For those who [thankfully for them] don't yet speak that language, don't yet understand deep trauma and loss, I help them see, if only in a small way, my perspective of loss.  If one has never been raped, it is hard to portray the experience in a way that speaks to those who have been there.  If one has never lost a baby, that's also a difficult experience to understand for outsiders. One can still try to convey the pain, can research, interview, find ways to borrow others' experience, but it may not reach the level of realism of the writing of someone who has been there.  It's kind of like an actor's attempts at realism.  A childless actor can take on the role of a mother for a show, but it's much harder to draw on something real without experience to back it up.  She can think back to their love for a pet to simulate a mother's love, but there will still be people who aren't convinced.

WHAT DO YOU KNOW?

Whatever your trauma or hardship, there will be people who understand and who can be helped through a process of healing with your writing. There can also be people who learn from your writing what it's like to be there, so they can help others. This is how fiction writing can have a kernel of truth and can become more meaningful than just a story told to amuse. Say you have lost your home in a fire or have been dumped or have had a friend betray you.  Almost everyone has been through loss or hardship of some sort.  That is the place to start your writing.  What pain do you understand that others may not?  What language do you speak that only those who have been there understand?   That is a place to start your writing both for your healing and for the healing of others.  Because as you write, you will also find healing yourself.