Writing Your Way Through National Tragedy
By Carolyn Burch

In a world of constantly changing flows of negativity and challenge, writers sometimes are faced with deeper feelings of tragedy than the general population. To more sensitive members of the populace, sometimes this intense feeling for life and other people manifests itself by clouding the mind and making it difficult to continue on in the flow of writing. And we writers and artists are almost universally considered to be the most sensitive members of our species.

Last week I found myself in the throes of writer’s block. A world tragedy has occurred, and what can I possibly have to say that anyone needs to hear just now or that hasn’t already been said, I asked myself.

But the fact is, even if no one needed to hear what I had to say, I had a need to say it. And the fact is, so do you.

In a recent writer’s workshop I taught, one of the main questions I asked of my students was "why do you write?"  Their number one answer was a unilateral "to Get it Out." Writers have an urge, or need, to let out the words that roll over and over in our minds, and in times like these, these things, ideas, pictures, and feelings, need to be released. And since psychologists agree that even for non-writers writing is one of the healthiest ways there is of letting it out.

But how to begin? Put pen to paper. It’s as simple as that.

We’ve all overcome personal tragedy before, and to begin the healing, we must first stop feeling like this is something that we shouldn’t be so broken up about. Most writers have been told from the time that they were children that they are "overreacting" to everything. But we are not overreacting to have had this major event injure our spirits temporarily. This is a not only a national tragedy, but a very personal one that effects us all as we struggle with the movie-like activities we saw on TV and yet inside knew they were real. We all saw the videos of shocking events on the screen, made no less tragic and horrifying since we couldn’t see the faces or hear the voices within the plane. Our minds screamed out that we knew that there were live people behind those portal windows. Our minds and hearts knew and felt the pain, the fear those people must have felt as they saw the city below. 

Most of us knew people who worked there, or knew people who had family or friends there. And even if we didn’t, we all feel the invasion of our home soil as a violation. To hurt from it, to mourn, it natural. But to allow it to permanently destroy our creativity would be both a crime against ourselves, and a victory for those who inflicted this act upon us.

As writers, we feel it in a different way than others do and a key to writing through the events of recent days is to breathe in, mourn the event and the feelings it brought us, and then to understand and give ourselves permission to let it flow out of us.

Perhaps a good understanding of ourselves as writers should start with the recent studies on depression among writers and artists. In a study of the educators in the creative writing program at the University of Iowa on the writers that taught the program, some of whom were household names and all very talented and well-published, systemic studies showed that compared to a control group (who was matched in age and social class to the writers), 80% of the writers had experienced severe mental illness at some time in their lives, compared to the control group who had 30%. In addition, 37% had experienced severe depression in response to events in their lives compared to only 17% of the control group. 

Such groups of writers, artists and poets have long been thought to experience more mental illnesses than the general population, and artistic people have had to live with many such stereotypes throughout history. And although no studies have been done on sensitivity as related to mental illness that this author knows of, the fact that writers and artists are more sensitive than control groups to everything from light and noise to color, music, and feeling is of no doubt to any one of us. The simple truth of the matter is that things affect us more deeply than most people. And, since knowing that is half the battle, we must realize where to place our anger and how to release our pain. The above studies are nothing if not a warning sign of what can happen to us if we do not pay attention to the pain and learn to write through it.

"If you can survive the shock of being on incredibly intimate terms with the universe, then usually you can [learn to] find ways to turn down the volume," writer Diane Ackerman has said in her treatise on mental illness, implying that she herself knows something of the intrinsic battle we feel when things are less than rosy.

When writers are faced with something as monumental as the events of recent days, it is our habit to look deeply and long at the event and take it all in. That is how we are as writers, just as a monkey’s nature is to climb anything it can, or a cat to catch small animals, or a bird to fly. We are, before we are anything else at all, human sponges, attracting great quantities of information to ourselves, inhaling it, combining it with everything else we’ve ingested, editing it, and then excluding it as compiled information in a readable form. And yet our very nature as people, and as sensitive beings tells us that it is too much to bear, to let it go, to stop watching and thinking about it, and essentially to stop the flow before it consumes us. 

But as writers first, before being anything else, we must look. We must feel and feel deeply and take in the whole thing. We must allow the flow to move and do what it does, and then, only then, when we have felt it and absorbed it a bit, we must write.

Free form writing is the first step in the process and can begin while you are still in the shock stage of the surprise effects of trauma. Journaling is one favorite way of dealing with the momentous and daily events of our lives even when tragedy is not apparently on the horizon. But now, more than ever, journaling is important. It allows a person to freely form analyses of events, summarize feelings, and even to vent a little. And in any case, you are allowing some of the feeling bottled up within to get out, and like the pressure release spinning-lid on a pressure cooker, it allows you to let just enough steam out to keep from exploding.

After one has internalized and released some of the feeling through the journaling process, like talking with a friend, you will most likely feel better and be able to focus and take on the more intense and dedicated tasks of your usual writing. I suggest that you keep journaling as well, as it tends to unify your thoughts and allow you to reflect back on them later when it may be more appropriate to take some of the feelings from that time and insert them into some current piece of writing.

We as a nation, will get through this. But remember, the nation needs its writers up and functioning. Your insight is often able to put into words just what the greater majority of humanity needs to hear. So understand, grieve, and then get writing.

The person you help most might just be you.

Carolyn Burch is full-time internationally-known freelance writer from Phoenix, AZ. She writes frequently for several parenting, home and family magazines, as well as for the writing world on tips and techniques for new and experienced writers. She can be reached at: cburch4hr@netscape.net

Sponsored links

Ring binders

 

Make a Real Living as a Freelance Writer!

How to find a book publisher

Home

Text on this site Copyright © 1998-2007 Absolute Write, all rights reserved.
Please contact the authors if you'd like to reprint articles on this site.  All copyrights are retained by original authors.  And plagiarizers will be rounded up, handcuffed, and stuck into a very small and humid room wherein they must listen to Barney sing the "I Love You, You Love Me" song over and over again.

writers writing software