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.