The Self as Character: Writing Through Crisis
Some tips and a prompt...
Hello, everyone,
The semester is over, it’s spring, the work of the semester is quieting down, and it’s time to write! I’ve got a draft of a new book to finish by the end of summer. I’m going to be posting regular exercises and hope you’ll follow along. This week, I want to return to thinking about writing in the first person, and in particular, writing about the self in moments of crisis.
There’s a strange paradox at the heart of writing about personal crisis: experiences that undo us—grief, illness, forms of harm—are often those we most long to make into story, to give shape to. But suffering, that messy thing, does not necessarily translate easily to the page. As I often tell my students, you could have one of the saddest stories in the world but not be able to make the reader feel any of it. Or you might be haunted—as I was, when I started thinking about writing The Long Goodbye—by the idea that your story is so ordinary, in fact, that it doesn’t merit sharing. (Even as something in you pushes you to write about it.) Then, too, we want to avoid telling overly tidy versions of messy experiences—and yet we have to make some kind of narrative shape as we go.
In these moments, technique is really everything: the ability to create effects that make readers feel, through the specificity of our observations, the music of our sentences, the clarity of our vision, the weight (or tragicomedy) of what took place. The paradox, though, is that the tools we once relied on (linearity, coherence, perspective) may no longer serve when we are trying to convey the slippage that comes in crisis. The self we were—who once contained a kind of narrative consistency—has been altered, sometimes irrevocably. And so the challenge becomes not only what to say, but how to say it when the “I” is no longer intact. Today, I’m offering a few examples and a special prompt I’ve found very helpful in writing myself!