Down Dark Corridors (part II)

On transmogrifying pain into poems.

Last month’s newsletter was part I—it went over some details of my memoir, and the experience of putting it out in the world. You can read that here—just know that it contains references to institutional child abuse and the “troubled teen” industry.

By contrast, this month’s newsletter needs…

…*NO* Trigger Warnings

Although in my workshop I shared excerpts from my book (and thus traumatic material), I decided to write this edition of my newsletter without any mention of actual traumatic topics.

This keeps the focus on the process and the tools, rather than getting bogged down in hard material.

---

Okay—first, a goofy dragon and a pep talk.

Take courage. As a writer, you’re in a position of immense power.

Writing is expression, getting things out, which can be relieving, and healing. And in the case of writing about trauma, writing can even be a kind of exorcism—the forceful eviction of harmful forces from your mind and body, onto a page. Into a poem.

But it’s much more than that.

You can use words to define a person, act, or circumstance. You can set those words on paper, and then close them into a book—this is the power of definition.

In cases of writing about a difficult past, it’s the power of redefinition.

We can redefine the things and people and circumstances that harmed us.
We can change the story that is told about them.
We can redefine our relationship to harmful elements in our past.
And we can redefine our identities.

Who were we then? Who are we now? This is in our pens, in our hands. Not theirs.

My Process

I’m a poetry chart nerd!

Below is a picture; I’ll be briefly going through each of the items. If you want to print it out or hang it up for reference, here’s a PDF you can download.

1. Order? Nah.

The chart shows my personal process and the general direction of the steps I took, starting at the top middle—but you could start from anywhere. You can jump around, and double back. I did.

2. The Core of the Process: Support

Simply put, don’t attempt to write about serious trauma without support—professional and/or social. Just don’t.

I made that mistake. I felt like I could manage it without guidance, so I didn’t try to get therapy.

I didn’t want to “inflict” my traumatic stories on others, so I didn’t confide in my social circles about the topic I was spending my days diving into, or how it was affecting me.

I ended up getting therapy after I had finished writing the book, but I deeply regret not getting it while I wrote the book. The process was so much harder than it had to be. I felt alone.

Don’t be like me! Therapy isn’t for everyone (and definitely isn’t available to everyone) but make sure you have a bedrock of some kind of real support before tackling the hard stuff.

3. “Police Report” (Info Dump)

This isn’t a real police report, it’s just a reference to the style of writing: Dry, cold, hard, facts. For mine, I didn’t try to be literary or poetic. I wrote primarily prose. I described things I’d experienced as if I were writing them down in a police report. Simple, short, straightforward.

Sometimes a more poetic tone came through; when that happened, I let it. Some aspects were too difficult to write about without some kind of buffer of metaphor or surrealism.

For some events, I didn’t feel ready to write anything but a few words—simple placeholder text so I wouldn’t forget it.

The “police report” step may not be right for your process. It also might work best for longer-term traumatic memories (my book covered 2.5 years of events, plus the decades after). But IF it feels right for you to do this step, then try to stay focused on just getting down exactly what happened. It does NOT have to be detailed.

If this step doesn’t feel right for you, try making a 1-page outline with 1-2 words representing each moment/event/aspect. The goal here is to survey the experience, contain it, and begin to see its boundaries (as far as storytelling goes).

The police report is basically an info dump. Once you’ve written it, you have a well of raw material from which to draw, and the beginnings of an overall shape or form.

4. Boundaries?

Where does your story begin? If, for example, you want to write about X (where X is a traumatic topic), does the story begin when it happened? Or does the story begin years before that, when something set you on the path toward X? Perhaps the story begins before your birth, within the annals of your family history, or your cultural history.

Where does your story end? Does it end when X ended? Or does it follow beyond X and into the ripples/effects of X through time? Does it end at your present-day experience?

Your topic is a wild and complex beast, I know, and may have affected much of your life and the lives around you. But a book needs boundaries.

You can always change or expand the boundaries, but setting some up at the beginning can help you feel less overwhelmed by the sheer enormity of it all.

Fence in the beast.

5. Expand!

Inset maps are the perfect analog to what I’m describing. You have the big picture, and then you pull out and blow up a tiny detail into its own large picture.

This is the fun part, or at least it was for me.

Take a look at your info dump/police report. Start highlighting or underlining individual sentences or phrases that could be blown up into a poem.

For example, let’s say this is an imaginary (non-triggering!) paragraph from a “police report” about a benign thunderstorm:

A thunderstorm was really loud outside. The electricity went out. I spilled my pop. I went to get a flashlight and tripped over the sofa. When the lights came back on after a few minutes I saw that I'd also spilled my bowl of cereal and my friend was standing in the milk from the bowl that was on the floor. Her socks were soaked in milk. Her face was scrunched up in an "ewwww" expression. I laughed. 

I might highlight the following phrases to expand into individual poems:

• “really loud” - I could write a poem about the noise of the storm, the way the lightning flashes cast ephemeral shadows, and how I felt about the noise

• “electricity went out” - I could write a poem about this sudden loss of convenience and of sensory perception, and how I felt about that

• “lights came back on” - I could write a poem about the relief and humor of this valuable resource popping back into my life

• “I laughed” - I could write a poem about why I feel comfortable laughing at my friend’s displeasure at standing in the milk—what kind of friendship is this?

When I was writing my poetry memoir, I found the expansion process exhilarating. By highlighting certain lines or phrases, I gave myself very limited, very focused topics to write about. It was such a relief not to have to grapple with the Whole Big Thing—just these little micro-bits.

Later, in the revision process when I put them all together, these poems formed a book about the Whole Big Thing. But when I was writing, I wasn’t having to worry about that at all.

6. Whose Voices?

Obviously, you’re the writer. But is your current voice the only one you want to include?

Consider other voices you might want to focus on, or include—the voices of:

• your past self or selves

• your future self or selves

• others in the story

• animals, objects, or places in the story

• historical figures

• an omnipotent third-person voice

• fictional characters

I ended up choosing a sort of hybrid approach. I told my story, but everywhere I might have written “I” or “my,” I changed it to “you” and “your”—I used 2nd person. I also kept it in present tense.

For a quick example, here’s a (benign!) line at the beginning of a poem:

You sit in the grass by the pond.

By addressing the reader this way, I attempted to access their empathy, and make them feel closer to the experiences I was describing.

7. What’s the thesis of the book?

This one is simple, yet so difficult:

What is the essential message of your book?

If you can figure this out early, it can help guide the entire writing process. Sometimes it’s hard to know the thesis until the revision process, and that’s okay too. In either case, you can shape the book around this central message.

For example, let’s say you write several poems that, upon reflection, don’t support this central theme or message or thesis. You might consider cutting them, or changing them to be more supportive of the thesis.

By “support” I mean literary support. So a poem might contrast or offset the thesis of the book, or be tangential to it, while still supporting it. Hence why this can be so difficult to determine.

(I’ve written in more detail about the thesis of a poem here—the same principles apply to determining the thesis of a book.)

8. Prescriptions for Different Poems

Each poem (well, each verse actually) might need its own individualized approach. Here are a few categories of approaches – pick and choose according to what feels right:

• Tell: Describe what happened, literally. Lead the reader through the story and sum up the meaning. Sometimes this is the best approach if the topic is confusing and you want to make sure the reader doesn’t misunderstand.

• Show: Instead of literally describing something/someone/an event (“It was an old rocking chair” “They put their shoes neatly in the closet”), try to get across the same idea but by using sensory details, metaphor, simile, spacing on the page, or other poetic devices. The goal here is to provide the reader with tools with which they can picture something, instead of telling them exactly what to picture.

• Realism: Stay rooted in the real world—for example, a world seen through a sober person’s eyes.

• Surrealism: Allow an alternate reality to shape the poem. For example, think of the strange ways that things work in the world of dreams.

9. Emotional Takeaway

Your book is for you.

But if you publish and distribute it, your book is also for other people.

How would you (ideally) like someone to feel when they finish reading your book? How would you like them to feel about your book a year after they’ve read it?

It’s a book about a tough topic, so obviously there will be a lot of feelings. But do you want them to finish your book feeling outrage (so they will maybe join a movement to stop X)? Or would you like them to feel hope, or solidarity, or understanding? Maybe you’d like them to feel a solid mixture of sorrow and beauty.

This step ties in closely with identifying the thesis (#7 in this list).

For example, if your thesis is “I am powerful and X can no longer define me” then you might try to shape your poems so that a reader viscerally feels your power, maybe even walks away feeling powerful themselves.

If your thesis is “X is not okay and should be stopped – people, do something!!” then you might try to shape your poems so that a reader feels called to action.
That’s the approach I took.

10. Be Intentional

I’ve written about this a lot, so I won’t get into it here (but if you follow that link there’s another glorious poetry chart!).

This is just a regular ol’ step in revising/finishing any book. It’s all about making sure you’re not doing anything automatically, without thinking it through—it’s about making sure you’ve been careful to make choices about each aspect of your book.

11. Pick a Title

I did this last in my process. You might know your title from the first moment you start writing, or maybe you’ll discover it in the middle.

I used several different placeholder titles over the 1.5 years it took to write my book. I only found the final title at the very end of my process—it’s a phrase from one of the poems in the book.

Even if you know your title right from the start, it’s worth revisiting it when you’ve got a finished and fully revised manuscript. Does the title still reflect the book? A book can mature and evolve throughout its writing process. It can be helpful to ask a friend or colleague who has read your manuscript if they feel your choice of title works well with the manuscript.

---