“Because this business of becoming conscious, of being a writer, is ultimately about asking yourself … How alive am I willing to be?”
—ANNE LAMOTT, FROM BIRD BY BIRD
“Whenever a taboo is broken, something good happens, something vitalizing.”
—HENRY MILLER
The idea of taboo—a forbidden or scary subject—in writing is such an interesting concept. What may be taboo to me may be laughably no big deal to you. Each of us is shaped by a set of experiences in which certain topics are “allowed” or comfortable, accepted or not. And there are stories you may be burning to tell that cross a taboo line only because they reveal information about others, as well as stories that are tenderly vulnerable because they expose you personally. You may also want to tackle some topics in your fiction that you have a personal stake in and that take on culturally taboo or controversial subjects.
Just because subjects are taboo doesn’t mean that you should not write about them. There’s an art, literally, to writing about what challenges you and others—in fact I’d say that writing what is raw and real is one of the essential roles of the writer. Who else opens up these sealed spaces for others? If we hark back to Richard Bausch’s quote in chapter eleven, “Be Bold, Write Bravely,” then you might even say it is the duty, the responsibility, of writers to write about what other people cannot. By writing what is taboo for you, you act as ambassador for others who will never find the words.
Taboo challenges can make an activist out of many a writer. A good friend of mine became active in marriage equality campaigns on behalf of beloved friends and family members, and she used her writing to spread her message, even though it’s a hot-button issue. Another friend of mine has used her considerable social media platform to write about her own childhood sexual abuse and has provided a forum for others to do so in the process. She’s turned her pain, a formerly taboo topic in her family, into an outlet for a greater good.
In the gorgeous and painful memoir Truth and Beauty, which tells of Ann Patchett’s friendship with the late writer Lucy Grealy, Patchett recounts Lucy answering an audience’s questions after she’d given a reading. Grealy suffered from a childhood cancer of the jaw that led to disfiguring surgeries and a lifetime of struggle out of which she crafted a remarkable memoir.
An audience member asked, “How do you remember all those details?” And Lucy, noticeably annoyed by the question, is said to have answered, “I didn’t remember it; I wrote it.”
The point being she crafted her story as she wanted to tell it and turned it into art—provocative, powerful material that is designed to take the reader to places that real life might not actually provide in the moment of living.
Writers make art of experiences in order to both understand them and also to shed light and reveal truth. The hotter the topic, the more necessary for you to make your experience into artifact, that is, to do the work of the craft—to revise—so you can put distance between that which terrifies you and the reading public. When you craft your stories, rather than bleed them out onto the page, you turn them into something new, a bit removed from you, and reduce the sting of fear or shame. Then, you can also take pride in how your story is written, and why, rather than just focus on the raw nerve that’s been exposed. This is just another reason why revision—honing your work to find just the right image, just the right structure, sentences, and tone—is so important. The point is not to push you into perfectionism but to urge you toward using the craft as a vehicle to write about the full spectrum of the human condition, from the beautiful to the horrifying.
Many writers will tell you that it took years to work up the nerve to write about certain subjects, while others will admit they were waiting for relatives to die before they could tell the truth. But as Anne Lamott so humorously reminds us in Bird by Bird: “You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories. If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better.”
Writers who tackle taboo subjects are the ones that bring us stories of the Holocaust, of the oppressed, the abused, and the silenced. In some countries it is taboo to criticize leaders or discuss the past, and writers ranging from Salman Rushdie to Orhan Pamuk to Malala Yousafzai have risked their lives or alienated family to write about these prohibited topics.
Some taboos are closer to home: tales of abuse and addiction, of poverty and racism, of single parenthood, and of choosing a different religion or political party or lover than one’s family would like. There are taboos about revealing your parents’ line of work or how little money they made, and there are taboos about discussing wealth, inheritance, or opulence in your family.
It almost doesn’t matter what the taboo is, only that you identify these hot-button areas in your writing and then find a way inside them. That’s right—I’m urging you to explore the taboos in your life rather than walk away from them. For one thing, these forbidden topics have a way of seeping up through the cracks if you don’t let them in. They might even cripple your attempts at creativity because they want, or even need, to be written before you can move on to other territory.
Not to sound depressing, but the news keeps rolling in that life is short. Okay, so maybe it’s longer than our medieval ancestors’, but in the aggregate: short. And the fact is, if you wait for someone to die, move, approve of, or validate you before you write your story, the chances are stacked against you already; people rarely do things on your schedule, especially if they don’t know you’re waiting, and most likely because they may not see things the way you do.
And they shouldn’t. You have a singular perspective; it’s no cliché. You are the only one with your particular vision and view. And you are also probably the worst judge of the value of your own material or whether your life is “interesting.” You may think your stories are dull or already done or not good enough, but that is all just ego bluster. If you haven’t noticed, the ego may be part of you, but it isn’t always your friend. It’s like an avaricious, mean-spirited, pesky little sibling that lives inside you and urges you to always be better than you are now—there isn’t a lot of self-acceptance inherent in its structure. It’s not all bad, of course—your ego also helps you survive in the world, and it gives you a fallback when you need to muster confidence. But you can’t let it run the show. In other words, don’t listen to it or any other voice that tells you that you can’t write your story.
Your story belongs to you. It is your perspective, your version. You lived it. You own it. Just as no one can tell you that your feelings are wrong, your experience isn’t wrong either. They may not agree with it or like it, but it’s still your experience. It may be different from the experience of those who were with you, but it’s yours. Memory is an unreliable witness anyway; science has shown that what we think of as ironclad memories are not only subjective but also change and fade over time. All anyone has is their version of experiences, and even if someone else thinks it’s “wrong,” no one can deny what you remember, because no one is inside your head.
This year, I’ve published more raw, personal essays than in the twenty years I’ve been actively publishing. Since these pieces tell about some of the hardest experiences of my childhood, including my mother’s years struggling with addiction, I’m always a little nervous about how she’ll feel. So it was gratifying when, after reading a recent piece, she texted me:
Keep that cathartic narrative flowing. It’s really helpful. All of us need perspective from outside ourselves. It’s like my favorite quote from the Shawshank Redemption: You either have to get busy dying, or get busy living.
She then went on to remind me of what her former sponsor, Ruby, once said in her early days of sobriety: “The truth will set you free, but first it might make you throw up.”
Ken Eisold, Ph.D., writes in a Psychology Today article in March, 2012: “… neuroscientists have shown that each time we remember something, we are reconstructing the event, reassembling it from traces throughout the brain … We could also say [memory] is adaptive, reshaping itself to accommodate the new situations we find ourselves facing. Either way, we have to face the fact that it is ‘flexible.’”
To me, this position offers great freedom in recounting your experience through an artistic lens in a way that will make meaning out of experience. The specific facts may matter a whole lot less than the feelings and realizations they evoke.
I’m confident you’ll find great power in writing about what once seemed taboo and giving it a new shape, a new understanding.
All that said, there will come a time when you do need to write about others, those people whose experiences you can’t speak for, per se, except as a witness or to quote their words. Or you may be writing about them as they relate to you. I’ve found a couple of key tricks for writing about others in personal essay and memoir that, once again, allow you to tell your version of events.
As long as you write with the intent to explore a subject for the purpose of coming to greater understanding, rather than blaming, you can approach the material as it abuts other people’s lives with care. Here are some methods for approaching personal material.
Beyond your personal taboos are larger taboos, cultural taboos, religious taboos. You may want to write about some dark things to shed light on them: sex trafficking, family abuse, anarchists, terrorism, incest. These aren’t easy topics that everyone knows how to handle. Again, if you listen to voices that try to silence you, you are depriving the world of an opportunity to learn something new.
Here are some strategies for tackling a larger taboo.
At the end of the day, remember that your subjects, experiences, and memories belong to you.
Identify five to ten hot-button topics you’ve always thought you couldn’t or wouldn’t write about. Pick the scariest one, and freewrite about it for a minimum of ten minutes with the knowledge that you never have to share it with anyone. How do you feel after your freewriting is done? Excited, euphoric, scared?
Continue to move down your list of taboo topics, and complete a freewriting session for each of them. See if other topics grow organically from your original list. Eventually you may decide to share what you wrote with a trusted member of your Creative Support Team.
When you begin to freewrite about one, pick the least-charged or least-hot topic on the list and work your way up to the more intense ones. Start small.
Taboos keep you small and confined. For your movement break, do one of the following big movements.
by Rachel Thompson, best-selling author of Broken Pieces and Huffington Post blogger
Do you have confidence in yourself, not only as a person but as a writer? I had to reach a point of confidence in myself in order to write my third nonfiction book, Broken Pieces. The book contains poems and essays about the sexual abuse I suffered as a child and its effects on my adult relationships, and I’m still dealing with it as I write the next book in the Broken series, Broken Places. I also touch on date rape, the loss of an ex to suicide, and love and loss. I didn’t have a long-term plan to write about these topics, but after writing two humor books, I found myself drawn to the idea of sharing these more serious experiences. In the past, the stories had been there for so very long, patiently waiting to come out. Suddenly they weren’t so patient. They were ready, pushing me, wanting to be heard.
I felt afraid—well, not so much afraid as tentative. Would anyone really be interested? Would they think that when I shared such personal stories I was being exploitative or perhaps even vain? At some point, I let all of that go and just wrote, silencing those “What if?” voices and mining deeply to find the core of each story. I felt lighter and less scared after I wrote Broken Pieces.
Sharing my story has connected me to an amazing survivor community that, frankly, I had no idea existed. People (mostly women, but many men as well) e-mailed or contacted me on social media with their own heartbreaking stories of childhood sexual abuse, which led me to connect with survivor, therapist, and author Bobbi Parish to start #SexAbuseChat weekly on Twitter (Tuesdays at 6 P.M. PST).
As I finish up writing Broken Places, I’m grateful to have such wonderful support not only from the survivor community (one in three women have experienced abuse before the age of eighteen, and one in six men) but also a large community of readers and fans who support my work.
Writers, especially young writers, commonly look to others for validation: teachers, classmates, friends, or family. I was no different.
I started writing seriously in 2008, and I released my first book in 2011. In our new online society, we receive validation in the form of blog comments, retweets, Facebook or Google+ shares, and book reviews once books are published. Sometimes the comments are positive, sometimes negative.
The issue with looking to others for validation and support is that we’re afraid to go too deep. We fear that people won’t like what they see. In essence, we’re still acting like children searching for external approval.
Before we can get to the point of writing and sharing our stories, we have to first do a little work. Ask yourself what’s holding you back. Typically it’s one of the following reasons.
Every writer asks herself these questions. The trick is not to let these fears prevent you from writing.
Humor is my defense. In fact, it’s a form of dissociation. I wrote two nonfiction humor books that have done quite well. But it wasn’t a perfect fit. Even I could tell that I wasn’t going deep enough—I wasn’t digging into the truth.
And then I came upon this quote by author and professor Lorrie Moore in Elle magazine: “The only really good piece of advice I have for my students is, ‘Write something you’d never show your mother or father.’” That sentence alone, just that, was very freeing to me. Turns out I didn’t need anyone’s permission but my own.
If you are a writer—and you need to own that title if you are—you don’t owe anyone an explanation about what you write. You are an adult. Write like one.
Not writing your story the way you really want to is an excuse; you’re feeding your insecurities. Acknowledge them. We all have them. Tie them up with a string, put them in your desk drawer, and sit down to write.
They’ll still be there when you’re done.