Writing Trouble

If, in experiencing a trauma or difficulty, you feel alone, you have left your ordinary life. Leaving ordinary life behind resembles the hero’s journey (and let’s think of hero as gender-neutral). The hero leaves the familiar, the everyday, the sense of home.

“I was, in that moment, separated from the rest of the world.  My mother and father…might want to help me. But I had just crossed over into a world unknown to them, where they could not follow me the whole way.”   –Charles L. Mee, in A Nearly Normal Life.

Mee was diagnosed with polio as a child, shortly before the vaccine was developed. He was put in an iron lung, quite literally separated from everyone. Being alone, finding his way into the new and terrifying space of illness, he had also started on a universal human journey that he later wrote as a powerful memoir.

“From Augustine’s Confessions to The Autobiography of Malcom X to Nancy Mairs’ Remembering the Bone House, the tale, if it is done well, is always the classic hero journey, the Dantean descent into the hell of sin, or oppression, or sickness, the long night of the soul, the gradual redemption, partial or complete. This is the story we as humans tell ourselves over and over again…” –Lauren Slater, “One Nation, Under the Weather,” in Writing Creative Nonfiction.

If every element of experiencing trauma is a difficulty, it also has the potential to be a gift, for writing. If the difficulty here is isolation, the potential gifts are empathy and connection with others (through writing, yes, but not necessarily). The gift in terms of writing is that the story can be structured as a classic hero journey. This is a structure that resonates, in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and film. We know this structure as readers and viewers.

For writers, the heroic journey story provides a roadmap, an outline, a way forward. To begin, you might describe a time when you felt truly alone.

What was it like where you were?

In what way had you left ordinary life behind?

Try writing for ten minutes. It’s an amount of time that allows us to relax into writing, without feeling overwhelmed. People say they wish they had more time to write–but sometimes what we need is less.