Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.
“You should write a book.”
Maybe, like me, you first heard this as you shared the story of your daycare lady locking you and your sister in the closet before letting her creepy grown son perform puppet shows for the rest of the kids. Or, perhaps someone suggested novel-writing-as-a-release after you mentioned how close you'd come to getting car-jacked when your sweet, animal-loving friend pulled her Toyota into an unlit parking lot so you could both stand vigil over a dead dog in New Orleans' Lower Ninth. I call these types of experiences “story food,” the life occurrences so remarkable that you can't help telling other people about them.
Here's another possibility: maybe you've never shared your most intense experiences with anyone because you're private, or think no one would believe you, or simply and understandably don't want to relive those moments, even within the safety of words. Yet, some secret, scrappy part of you is whispering to get that story out. If that's the case, I'm telling you what others have told me.
You should write a book.
Sure, it's a pop-off answer to anyone who's had a traumatic or amazing or unbelievable experience, but it turns out there is science behind it.
Mountains of it.
The human need to creatively express ourselves can be traced back to the oldest-surviving painting, scratched into an Indonesian cave forty thousand years ago. (By the way, it says a lot about human priorities that the first plow wasn't invented until thirty thousand years later, a fact that makes me weirdly happy.) Visual art as expression expanded and flourished from there, producing Michelangelos and Picassos and Gentileschis, but it wasn't until 1939 that the therapeutic value of art was established. That year found WWI veteran and artist Adrian Hill recovering from tuberculosis in a British sanatorium. While there, he was asked to teach painting classes to his fellow patients, many of them returning veterans and a lot of them assumedly bored. Hill witnessed firsthand art's healing power on those vets. He brought his discovery to the general public, coining the term “art therapy” in 1942.
Hill believed that the symbolic mediums of drawing and painting busied the hands and freed the mind, allowing the body's natural reparative mechanisms to do their work unimpeded. His hypothesis was oversimplified, but science would soon prove him right.
Writing as therapy began to catch up to art therapy in the 1960s when New York psychologist Dr. Ira Progoff introduced the concept of reflective writing for mental health. He called this process the Intensive Journal Method. As a Jungian, Dr. Progoff subscribed to the healing power of accessing unconscious or repressed memories. Like visual art therapists before him, he witnessed the therapeutic value of externalizing an emotion or experience, encapsulating it in an image or an essay and thereby releasing it.
Innovators Michael White, an Australian therapist, and Dr. James W. Pennebaker, an American social psychologist, built on Progoff's work in the 1980s. White, along with his colleague David Epston, established the narrative therapy movement. The movement's central tenet is that “the problem is the problem,” not the person experiencing it, and that externalizing the problem by writing about it is the most effective way to address it. Dr. Pennebaker was a pioneer in the writing therapy, or expressive writing, movement, whose research into the connection between secrets, language, and mental health has been groundbreaking. Pennebaker was one of the first to clinically establish that basic writing exercises can significantly improve mental and physical health as well as work performance. His most famous book, Opening Up: The Healing Power of Expressing Emotions, accessibly demonstrates the connection between writing and healing.
Hundreds of studies have since been conducted to figure out how writing heals, because it does mend and transform. Social scientists have established that expressive writing decreases anxiety and depression; reduces pain and complex premenstrual symptoms; improves the body's immune functions including boosting antibody production; enhances working memory, physical performance, and social relationships; reduces illness-related doctor's visits; improves the physical and mental states of Alzheimer patients' caregivers, cancer patients, and people with HIV; reduces the symptoms of asthma, rheumatoid arthritis, and eating disorders; and positively addresses a host of PTSD symptoms. In fact, a recent pilot study of eleven veterans diagnosed with PTSD found that after a dozen sessions of narrative therapy, not only did over half of the veterans experience a clinically significant reduction of PTSD symptoms, but a quarter of them no longer met the criteria for PTSD.
That's just a start.
Writing makes everything better.
It's tied to how our brains are wired. We are creatures of habit, evolved animals who perceive stimuli, run it through our limbic system, attach significance to it, and then respond.
Stimulus—significance—response.
Here's an example. Let's say you're stuck in traffic. The traffic jam is a stimulus. It's the job of your amygdala, an almond-shaped glob of neurons housed deep in your brain, to process stimuli, organizing events into emotional memories. Your amygdala codes this particular experience with frustration, which is the significance you attach to it. You respond to this emotion by swearing and mentally squishing the heads of the people in the cars around you. This swearing and mental-head-squishing response becomes your established action pattern any time you perceive a stimulus that your amygdala has classified as frustrating.
Stimulus—significance—response.
Traffic jam—frustration—mental head squishing.
But you don't have to remain a slave to this feedback loop. Thanks to your evolved prefrontal cortex, the big chunk of brain directly behind your forehead that governs executive reasoning, you have the ability to break free of this stimulus-significance-response pattern. (Pavlov's dogs were not so lucky.) Still, as anyone who's tried to quit smoking knows, being aware of the best path and choosing it are two different beasts. And the more intense the emotion, the less blood flow to the prefrontal lobe, therefore the weaker our ability to make rational choices.
To add to the problem, it turns out your neural pathways cement themselves in the case of traumatic events. The result is that some people respond to reminders of stimuli, a condition known as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). This trauma-induced reprogramming of the brain explains why it's impossible for many veterans to enjoy Fourth of July fireworks, for example. Their limbic system, the creamy nougat center of the human brain where our memories and emotional lives are housed, has coded “explosion” with “danger,” and so when these veterans hear fireworks, they react as they would, as any of us would, to a bomb going off nearby.
From the outside, this condition may appear simple to correct. They're fireworks, not bombs, after all. But neuroimaging proves that when people are merely reminded of trauma, blood flow ramps up in the brain structures associated with extreme emotions and decreases in the areas associated with communication. The sufferer essentially becomes trapped in their own fear, at the mercy of neural patterns. The good news is that writing therapy, along with other mindfulness practices, including dialectical behavior therapy, art therapy, yoga, Qigong, tai chi, Alexander Technique, and meditation, allows you to reprogram your brain.
You can literally change your mind.
Drawing on the wide body of research in this area, the three most promising explanations as to how this works are habituation, catharsis, and inhibition-confrontation. I explain all three below.
The effectiveness of habituation (note that the root word is “habit”) in changing negative patterns is based on the fact that central nervous system arousal decreases with repeated exposure to a single stimulus. In other words, the familiar becomes boring.
Let me give you an example. Say you show up to your office job next Monday, thinking it's just another day. When you get to work, however, you discover a red-nosed clown sitting in your spare office chair, smiling opaquely at you, his red clown feet so huge that they disappear under your desk.
That would be frickin' terrifying.
You would call people. They would tell you not to worry, that the clown is there as some sort of cost-saving, effectiveness-lacking productivity exercise. You believe them, but Creepy the Clown is still horrifying, particularly because that empty smile remains stapled to his face as he silently watches you type.
Day two he's still there, he'd maybe be a little less freaky, but for sure you keep one eye pinned on him at all times. On day three, because he hasn't killed you yet, you decide maybe it's safe to move both eyes to your computer screen, at least when checking email. Come day four, you're in the middle of texting your friend a photo you've just taken of the front of your shirt, and more specifically the toothpaste smear shaped like a famous singer (#ifoundmintyelvis), before you remember that Creepy the Clown is sitting five feet away.
You see where this is going?
By the end of the week, you're all meh. He's a clown in a chair and you've crap to do.
You have become habituated to the clown.
Like all good programming, habituation has a genetic advantage. If we respond to something that is proven safe with a heightened nervous system, we don't have as much attention to give to what is actually dangerous. Now that we're walking upright, we can use this power of habituation to our advantage. Specifically, by writing about past stressful or traumatic situations, we can gain mastery over them, freeing up room to worry about the actual threats, which are far rarer than our ancient limbic systems would have us believe.
At its most basic, a catharsis is an emotional release or a cleansing. You've likely felt catharsis after confessing to a professional or venting to a friend. My first memory of catharsis came when I was seven. My family had moved from a medium-sized city to the small town of Paynesville, Minnesota, right before I began second grade. I had to hit the ground running. New school, new kids, new rules, and I was the kid wearing homemade jeans and garage sale tennis shoes with teeth stained gray due to an antibiotic I was injected with as an infant. As a scraggly bonus, I fiercely refused to comb any part of my hair that I couldn't directly see, which meant that whoever sat behind me got a real treat.
Suffice it to say, I was not fitting in.
That first day on the playground, three girls, their names mercifully lost to time, cornered me by the slide. The one with rainbow barrettes spoke for them all. “Where you from?”
Probably she was only curious. Maybe she was trying to be my friend. For sure, I blew it.
“St. Cloud. My dad's an actor on TV.”
That's what's called a BIG FAT LIE. My dad had just quit his job as a cartographer to make a go at his dream of being a full-time alcoholic. What black alley that lie lurched out of, I'll never know.
“No way!”
“I swear on my mom's life.” The air rushed out of me as soon as I said it. Whoof. Like I'd punched myself in the stomach. My mom was everything to me—security, safety, food, love, my oasis in a hurricane of a home life—and I'd just lied her life away. Talk about following the shit with the shovel.
You better believe the girls wanted to play with me after that. Everyone wanted to play with me. I should have been thrilled, but I was sick at what I'd done. I spent the rest of the day weeping in the nurse's office. When she offered to call my mom to come pick me up, I demurred, positive that if my mom wasn't already dead, she'd certainly croak on the drive in.
At the end of the day, I could barely drag myself off the bus and into the house. Against all odds, my mom was there, dead lady walking. She took one look at me before bundling me inside a hug.
“What's wrong?”
I rolled over on myself like a professional narc.
And you know what? I felt a thousand pounds lighter, imminent punishment for lying notwithstanding. I'd been hauling that weight all day. It felt great to lay it down.
Catharsis really can be that immediate and that effective. Think of cathartic sharing as removing the lid from a bubbling pot, where the steam is any extreme emotion—guilt, fear, anger—that has been bottled up. Engaging a negative experience by talking or writing about it, or a version of it, releases the more intense emotions associated with it. Catharsis “lets off steam.”
According to inhibition-confrontation, the third theory of why writing is an effective pathway to emotional healing, it's hard work to avoid thinking about stress or trauma. This is the inhibition part of the name. Somehow, someway, the negative thoughts and impulses leak in despite our best efforts to tamp them down. This denial leads to chronic stress, which takes a toll on the mind and body.
Confronting these stressors through writing—the confrontation part of the name—produces immediate boosts in mental and physical well-being. The trauma or stress—in other words, the stimuli—still exists in memory form, but when you face it, its significance changes.
Here's an example. Think of your life ordeals as zombies trying to get in through your front door. You spend all your energy shoulder-to-the-door trying to keep them out—inhibiting the zombies' arrival—which doesn't leave much time or attention for anything else. Your very survival depends on keeping that door closed, but you're exhausted; you can only keep this up for so long, so you finally let down your guard. The zombies charge through, and—what??—you realize there were never any flesh-eating monsters on the other side of the door. It was memories of zombies you were holding back this whole time.
The arts, and specifically writing, provide a protected route for opening that door and letting the memories-masquerading-as-life-threats in. Once they're through, you free up all the time and energy you've spent shoring up that door. For my money, the most exciting part of this last theory is that what we've been inhibiting or holding doesn't need to be traumatic or long-buried. Through writing, we can confront even a minor annoyance and still reap health benefits.
In further good news, it isn't necessary to know which one of these three explanations you're tapping into to be sustained and healed by writing. You just need to write. You don't need to choose autobiography or memoir as your vehicle either, though both narrative therapy and expressive writing therapy are centered on factual writing, often in the forms of essays, journals, and letters.
What I have returned from the dark side to tell you is that fiction writing works just as well.
For some of us, it works even better.
In 1996, when nonfiction-specific writing therapy was gaining traction, Dr. Melanie A. Greenberg crafted a clever study in which she measured the curative properties of writing about a real traumatic experience, an imaginary traumatic experience, and a real neutral experience (the control group). Her findings? People writing about imaginary events were less depressed than people writing about actual trauma, and the fiction writers demonstrated significant physical health improvements. I liken this healing power of directed fiction writing to straight-up art therapy. You don't need to (and most of us probably aren't capable of) painting an exact representation of the issues you want to work through. Instead, you paint/sculpt/ write/sketch an abstraction, and in the act of creation lies the cure.
The specific benefits of rewriting your life make even more sense when you consider Dr. Pennebaker's discovery that two elements above all else increase the therapeutic value of writing: creating a coherent narrative and shifting perspective. These are not coincidentally the cornerstones of short story and novel writing. Writers call them plot and point of view. And identical to expressive writing, the creation of fiction involves habituation, catharsis, and inhibition-confrontation, but from an emotionally safer perch than memoir. While I enjoy reading memoirs and wholly support anyone who wants to write them, and all of the healing benefits and many of the instructions in this book can be applied to this type of writing, writing memoir has never felt like a good fit for me. Writing fiction allows me to distance myself, to become a spectator to life's roughest seas. It gives form to our wandering thoughts, lends empathy to our perspective, allows us to cultivate compassion and wisdom by considering other people's motivations, and provides us practice in controlling attention, emotion, and outcome. We heal when we transmute the chaos of life into the structure of a novel, when we learn to walk through the world as observers and students rather than wounded, when we make choices about what parts of a story are important and what we can let go of.
I believe this in my core, but I knew none of this when Jay and I married. Back then, I hadn't heard of narrative or expressive writing therapy, and if I had, I'd have been put off by their focus on essay writing and memoir. I'd always enjoyed creative writing, though, had even crafted a rambling semblance of a novel as my master's thesis before I'd met Jay, a novel so awful that years later I tried to steal the only copy from the college library. (I was actually in the clear, thesis in hand outside the library, when guilt overtook me. In retrospect, bringing my then-ten-year-old son along was a mistake. The problem with raising your children right is that they're real wet blankets when it comes time to commit a crime.) After graduate school, though, I found myself newly married, teaching full-time, and pregnant with my second child. I barely had time for personal hygiene, let alone creativity.
Then, in the days and weeks following Jay's suicide, I couldn't imagine formulating a coherent sentence, let alone a book. Even landing in a cold puddle of dog pee wasn't enough to shift my grief into novel writing.
It took my deepest shame for me to learn to rewrite my life through fiction.
I'll try to type this without crying.
It was January, dead cold winter in northern Minnesota. Jay had been in the ground for exactly four months. The sharp loneliness that I wore like a shroud was all the more unsettling for the fact that I was carrying my son in my body—I felt like the unwilling meat in a death-and-life sandwich. I'd been shambling along, teaching a full load, parenting Zoë as well as I could. Life had become a numb routine: wake up, shower, drink coffee, get Zoë ready for day care, drive her there, teach, pick her up, drive her home, feed us, play, give her a bath, head to bed.
Wake up and repeat.
Something that still surprises me about grief is how much time you spend not feeling anything. You expect the crying jags and the pain so sharp you think you're having a heart attack. You can't prepare for the long stretches of feeling nothing, though, not curiosity, not joy, not even annoyance.
Nothing.
Four months into my full-time grief, I actually thought robot-me was doing pretty well, which shows the depths of my depression. My wake-up call came on January 15. Zoë was still three. She was also still stubborn, willful, and outspoken, like any respectable three-year-old, plus a little extra because she's always been my Princess Fury.
A blizzard had just roared through, and I knew the roads were gonna be tough. Plus, it was a new semester, so I had a whole slate of new classes, new students, new questions. Life felt extra heavy, a yoke on my shoulders and a person in my belly. And that feeling of nothingness was getting to me, a constant low buzzing that made it almost impossible to climb out of bed that morning.
But I did. I think it was muscle memory.
On this particular day, Zoë didn't want to go to day care, even more than usual. Yet, we went through the motions. In a numb haze, perched at the top of the basement stairs and near the garage door, I helped her with her pants. She flapped her legs like a wind-up doll the entire time. I tugged her shirt over her head. She screamed. I tried to yank her jacket on, and she went no-bones, melting onto the floor.
Then it came time to wrench on her boots.
One of her flailing legs connected with my face. Smack. The pain was raw and white and I snapped. Just like that, the force of the kick broke through my nothing and released pure black rage and something terrifyingly primal, a monster I didn't know I housed.
Here I need to take a break and tell you that my parents, for all their foibles and deep dysfunction, had never so much as yelled at me, forget spanking or hitting. I was raised to be an organic granola pacifist, someone whose go-to in times of conflict and stress has always been research followed by earnest communication. The idea of striking a child was as foreign and abhorrent to me as cutting off my own finger. Hitting Zoë, my baby fuzz, the tiny precious peanut I'd played music for while she was in my tummy, planned a water birth for to minimize her stress as she entered the world, nursed her whole first year despite a full-time job and a forty-minute commute each way so that I could directly deliver every nutrient she'd need to thrive?
Not on your life.
But dammit, I was gonna return that kick.
I was going to smack her back.
And I wasn't just going to hurt her. I was going to punch her shut her up punish her make her hurt as bad as I did so help me it's survival to finally feel something because I am drowning in numbness and I can't go back to feeling nothing again so after I take care of her I'm going to—
I can still taste the mustiness of the basement wafting up the stairs.
I can still see her red face, shock suffocating those beautiful green eyes.
She recognized, smelled it maybe, what I was about to do.
Hand still in the air, I fled. Like a woman morphing into a were-wolf, I raced out of that house before I became a full monster who'd eat her own children.
The icy air wasn't enough to slap me back to my senses. I jumped into my car.
I started it.
I raced out of that driveway, the snowdrifts a sun-blocking wall of white on each side. My eyes were dry. Have you ever cut yourself so deep that it didn't bleed? That's what I'd done, cut too deep to even cry. I just drove, abandoning my wispy-haired, short-armed baby girl, the child who'd walked into her first day of Just for Kix, all belly and knees in her black leotard, clapped her hands to get everyone's attention, and in her high, precious voice thanked all the other little girls' parents for taking time out of their busy day to come watch her dance, the first true love of my life, Zoë Rayn.
I ran out on her because I feared what I would do if I stayed.
It took just past the end of the driveway for my prefrontal lobe to calm the animal in me. My daughter was three years old and alone in our house. I don't think she'd ever been alone in a room before. She was frightened of the dark and the entire basement, would grab my hand with her chubby fingers when strangers talked to her, was as defenseless as a newborn fawn.
My fear bowed to nausea. I tried to turn the car around, but the snow was too high, only a single lane plowed on my back country road. I had to drive one more icy mile before there was enough space to change direction, and by then, I was sobbing so hard that I was gagging. I'd seen the look of betrayal on her face in the forever-moment before I'd raced out of the house. It had been ringed with terror.
I pulled into the driveway and leapt out of the car without turning it off.
I'd been gone for six minutes, a lifetime to a three-year-old.
I raced into the house.
Zoë was exactly where I'd left her, on the floor, boots lying beside her. Potty-trained for well over a year, she had wet herself in fear. The dark stain flowered on the front of her elastic-waisted jeans. A puddle had formed underneath her. She was staring at the ceiling, shuddering.
She'd seen that awful thing in my eyes, and then she'd heard me drive away.
I picked her up. I held her until she stopped shaking and the weeping came, that heaving gale of the shattered child. If my heart wasn't already broken, it would have cracked when she stuttered, “I'm sorry, Mommy. I'm sorry about my shoes.”
I cried with her, told her she hadn't done anything wrong. I apologized, but I knew there would never be enough sorries. I cleaned her up, me up. I wanted to stay at home and hold her all day, shut out the world, but sometimes you catch a glimpse of unbending Truth and I knew that if I didn't step back into the stream of life that day, I wouldn't ever again.
I drove to day care. I confessed.
When I arrived at work, I called her dad, Lance, and told him, too, what I'd done. I'll never forget how kind he was in that phone call. I expected him to take her away from me, for day care to call the authorities. They would have been well within their rights. Instead, everyone supported me with that peculiar aching sadness, like they knew something I didn't.
I started writing May Day that night, after Zoë fell asleep.
Compiling journal entries wouldn't have worked for me. I couldn't survive reliving the pain, not then, not on my own. I needed to convert it, package it, and ship it off. All those mysteries I'd been devouring offered me a glimpse of the potential order I could bring to my own story, a way to rewrite my life. Based on the number of people who line up after my writing workshops for a private word, or who contact me online, I know I'm not alone. There are many of us who need to reprocess our garbage, but who can't bear the idea of writing memoir, whether it's because we are too close to the trauma, don't want to hurt or be hurt by those we're writing about, or simply prefer the vehicle of fiction.
I kept up writing May Day, rubbing it like a worrystone, afraid to relapse into that gaping darkness where I was the monster. I wrote about laughter, the unexpected, a woman startled by the death of someone she loves. She thinks she's responsible but is held up by unexpected allies. In the end, she solves the mystery of his death.
May Day is an uneven book, my first real novel.
It's entirely fictional and was deeply therapeutic to write.
When I typed the last word of that book, I knew the darkness would never return, not at the level that I'd experienced that day with Zoë, not in a way that had the power to obliterate me.
The research would tell you that I was externalizing the story, habituating myself to it, inoculating myself against deep grief by exposing myself to it in small, controlled doses. All I knew was that my brain wasn't spinning as much and I was beginning to feel again, even if it was the emotions of fictional characters. Little by little, I was carving out new space for thoughts that were not about death or depression. Through the gentle but challenging exercise of writing a novel, I was learning how to control stories, which is what our lives are—stories.
I'm not the first writer to discover this healing process.
Charles Dickens' David Copperfield is his public grappling with some of his more haunting childhood experiences, including a complicated, troubled relationship with his father. In addition to Dickens declaring David Copperfield his most autobiographical and favorite of all the novels he wrote, The Guardian places it at number fifteen in a list of the one hundred best novels in history.
Tim O'Brien is a Vietnam War veteran whose The Things They Carried is about a Vietnam War veteran named Tim O'Brien. The work is fiction. He coalesces something fundamental, something almost mystical at the heart of rewriting your life, when he writes in his most famous book, “A thing may happen and be a total lie; another thing may not happen and be truer than the truth.” The Things They Carried has sold over two million copies internationally, won numerous awards, and is an English classroom staple.
Isabel Allende was the first writer to hold me inside a sentence, rapt and wondrous. It's no surprise that her most transformative writing springs from personal anguish. Her first book, The House of the Spirits, began as a letter to her dying grandfather whom she could not reach in time. Eva Luna, one of my favorite novels, is about an orphan girl who uses her storytelling gift to survive and thrive amid trauma, and Allende refers to the healing power of writing in many of her interviews. Allende's books have sold over fifty-six million copies, been translated into thirty languages, and been made into successful plays and movies. Such is the power of mining your deep.
Jeanette Winterson acknowledges that her novel Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit is her own story of growing up gay in a fundamentalist Christian household in the 1950s. She wrote it to create psychic space from the trauma. In her memoir, she writes of Oranges, “I wrote a story I could live with. The other one was too painful. I could not survive it.”
Sherman Alexie, who grew up in poverty on an Indian reservation that as a child he never dreamed he could leave, does something similar in his young adult novel, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian, named one of the “Best Books of 2007” by School Library Journal. He has said that fictionalizing life is so satisfying because he can spin the story better than real life did.
Nora Ephron's roman à clef Heartburn is a sharply funny, fictionalized account of Ephron's own marriage to Carl Bernstein. She couldn't control his cheating during her pregnancy or the subsequent dissolution of their marriage, but through the novelization of her experience, she got to revise the ending of that particular story. In Heartburn, Rachel, the character based on Ephron, is asked by a friend why she must make everything a story. Her answer speaks directly to the power of rewriting your life: “Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn't hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.” Heartburn is Ephron's first published novel. In addition to being a bestseller, her screenplay was turned into a box-office hit starring Meryl Streep and Jack Nicholson.
This alchemy of transmuting-pain-into-gold isn't the purview of an elite group of gifted, well-trained authors who were born with pen in hand. You too can access this power. When I wrote May Day, I had an English degree but had never taken a novel-writing class. I didn't even know the basics of writing a short story, let alone had I met a person who actually wrote books. Plus, I was living in rural Minnesota and, pre-Internet (at least where I lived), I had no access to writing groups. I taught myself to write a novel.
Nor is the therapeutic power of novel writing exclusive to those who have experienced deep trauma. Dr. Pennebaker found that directed, expressive writing is beneficial for everyone, meeting us where we are, whether we're coming to terms with a difficult commute, struggling against an annoying coworker, navigating a divorce, or coping with deep grief or PTSD.
You don't even have to want to publish what you write, and in fact, it's okay if you don't. Undertake this journey as if your writing is for your eyes only. You can always change your mind about publishing, but if you begin from the perspective that your writing is private, you give yourself permission to write freely and with integrity without polluting your story with the fickle demands of the publishing world, because here's the truth: it doesn't matter if you burn the novel the second you finish penning it. You can even toss it in the air, still burning, fire bullets into it, pour acid on it when it falls, and bury the ashes. You'll still reap all the physical and psychological benefits of writing it. The balm and insight lie in externalizing and controlling the story, not in showing it to others.
If and when you do decide to publish, though, you'll have something genuine and powerful to offer the world. Dickens, Alexie, O'Brien, Ephron, Allende, Winterson, and hundreds of other best-selling authors created compelling stories because they pulled them from a place of truth, vulnerability, and experience. Turning crucible moments into a novel is not only regenerative for the writer, but it's also glorious for the reader. That authenticity creates an indelible story.
So, now you know what brought me here. It wasn't Jay's suicide that was my rock bottom. It was what I let grief do to me, how I allowed it to sneak up and turn me against my child. You also know how I dug myself out—writing fiction. I didn't know the science behind narrative therapy, though it was already firmly established. I just sensed that I had to write, and it had to be fiction.
I am staking out this territory.
I'm calling it rewriting your life.
I'm inviting you to visit. Stay as long as you want. Redecorate, even.
This book is your map to this land. It puts the merciful, transformative, and very possibly profitable power of novel writing in your hands. It combines the science of narrative and expressive therapy with the practice of novel writing and a juicy vein of “I'll show you mine, so you can show you yours.” The result, I hope, will be your prescription for health and renewal from wherever you are, something you can accomplish any place, anytime, cheaply, alone or with others. Above all, this journey will be gentle and humane, and the end result will be a novel with the bones to be great.
You don't have to believe any of this.
You just have to do it.
This is the power of writing.