Writing Through and About Difficult Times

1. Introduction: Hello and welcome. My name is Jen. I'm a writer and a writing coach. And as a writing coach, I work with a lot of people who are writing personal essays, memoirs, and a lot of times really difficult topics come up. I love nothing more than to watch clients re-frame what they've been through or what they're going through and find a whole new perspective as they begin to write. It is the magic of writing. And not only that, I've experienced this myself as a writer, I think there's nothing more powerful than writing about our experiences. And so this class is all about re-framing reality. This does not mean fictionalizing our experiences are lying about events. It means taking true to life events the way that we remember them, harnessing our emotional truths. And then looking at things from a different perspective. Looking at things in a way that only the tools of creative non-fiction and the art of writing can bring. So this is going to be a very powerful class. It is for people who have been writing for a long time who want to pursue publication. But it's also for people who don't even write that often, but just want to reconcile with their life story or explore their life story in a new way. So let's get started. We're going to do a lot of writing. Grab a pen and notebook, or get your computer screen and your keyboard primed and meet me in the next module. 2. Objectives and Outcomes: Alright, so let's write through and about difficult times there by re-framing reality using creative nonfiction and techniques. So the way that we're going to do this is a few free-writing exercises and a few more intentional exercises leading up to what will ultimately be our larger piece. The objectives of this course are to identify the value of mining lived experiences, even the tough stuff. Approach, difficult topics with courage and grace. Learn to trust your creative voice when telling a true story and reconcile emotional truth versus factual truth. Then ultimately how to re-frame true stories by examining beliefs about the past and thinking about things in new ways. So the outcomes of this course will be that you'll generate loads of new writing. We're going to write a lot. You're going to find new ways of looking at past events. So you're going to have fun even while navigating the tough stuff. And ultimately by navigating the tough stuff, we're going to clear creative space for new writing and more creative stuff to come in. So the value of writing about our lives. I like this quote by Graham Greene that says, there is always one moment in childhood when the door opens and lets the future in. And I think that those moments are actually, they happen throughout our life, not just in childhood. And so we can write about any period of our life really and see it as a portal. So why should we write about the past? Why even bother? Well, there's creative value. As I mentioned, our lives contain the best material. And this material can be leveraged for all kinds of things. Fiction, non-fiction poetry, and jogging our imagination also jogs our most powerful creative energy, that energy that we had when we were kids, that free flowing energy. Then there's the psychological value. The fact is the past can haunt us when it's not examined and confronted, and writing is a really safe and effective way to examine the past. Also, telling our stories can help us to gain clarity and insight and even empathy. We will begin with a little exercise that is just ten minutes long. So it's really helpful if you actually have a timer. And we're just going to make a list of memories that you might want to explore in your writing. And if you came to this particular course with something in mind That's great, add to it, still create this list. This list is going to come in handy as we move forward. This is your first assignment. Very simple. Try to take the full ten minutes and list out as many things as you possibly can. And I will see you in the next module. 3. How: Alright, so how to move forward? We have a list of memories and now let's venture into a few exercises. So to begin, I'd like you to pick a memory that is not necessarily the memory you want to approach for this class, but just pick any memory that comes up. And I'd like you to just rewrite on it for one paragraph, capture one scene, and just write whatever comes from your own perspective as you remember it. Then we're going to rewrite that paragraph from a third person point of view. So here's my example. When I was eight, I lost my favorite toy. And remember the way I searched for it every day after school, imagining it might one day magically return. When I finally found it in my sister's room, my first thought was revenge. Now in third person, when Jen was eight, she lost her favorite toy. She lived under the same couch cushions and behind the same or more every day as though it magically appear when she found it in her sister's room for small fist tightened and the innocence lift her eyes. So things will inevitably change when you do this little rewriting exercise. It's really fun. And I do have to add a disclaimer here that is actually a fictional story. I did not have rage toward my sister for stealing my favorite toy. We had very different tastes in fact. But take a true story for your own exercise and just try this out and see what happens and jot down what happens. Then we're going to take this a little further. So let's pause the video and give yourself five minutes to write that paragraph and then rewrite that paragraph and meet me back here when you're done. All right, so what we're going to do is take that warm up and we're going to try this again with the topic you really want to write about. So the tough stuff. So if you already tackled it with the tough stuff and just keep going, dive a little bit deeper into the scene. And as you go, I want you to really ask yourself how this technique changed your relationship to the memory, what it revealed, what details came out that didn't come out before. Did it actually feel more emotional? And just take a few notes about this process and see what happens. So take some time with this, see if you can write a little bit longer form piece, maybe a couple of paragraphs or even a couple of pages. And then meet me back in the next module. 4. Emotions and Opposites: Okay, So we've rewritten our story in third person and we did that as an exercise because it reveals certain details and a certain amount of perspective. So now that you've evaluated that and hopefully have a little bit more dimension to the scene that you're writing. Let's go one layer deeper and look at the emotions that live beneath this scene, the emotional memory, and ask ourselves what to do with these emotions. So take your pick of whatever extreme emotion shows up in this scene. It might be a few emotions. A lot of times the ones that come up or anger, fear, jealousy, worry, sadness. These are the ones that comprise usually the tough memories. And we're going to take one of these classically negative emotions, the heavy stuff. And we're going to write about it a little bit, explore it a little bit. So I want you to just pick one of these emotions, the emotion that underlies that scene. And just free write for one minute. Either about how you feel and say it's anger, angry right now or eight, How You Remember anger from that scene? And when you're done, come back and meet me and we will do part two of this exercise. Okay, so now we're going to flip emotions, cultivating the opposite. So part two of this is to take the emotion we just investigated and think about what the opposite of that emotion is for you. So if there is a spectrum of emotions and anger was all the way on one side, what would be on the other side? Might it be empathy or kindness? So whatever it is for you, this is your definition. What we're going to do now is look at what we wrote. Look at the scene that we're trying to communicate. And we're going to ask ourselves where this polarity lives in the writing. So if we wrote a scene about violence and fear, where does courage live in this writing? It may not be in that moment. You may play with time. You may have the courage now to write about it and that works its way into your piece. So think about this in a really broad way and sit with the question if you need to for awhile. But where does this polarity, this opposite of positive emotion, live within this memory? Alright, so see what you can come up with and see if it deepens your piece. And we will meet back here to talk about how to trust your creative voice and re-frame our reality. We're also going to talk about adding structure to all these different pieces that we've written so far. 5. Adding structure: Alright, so we have gained perspective. We've examined our emotions, and now it's time to just look at our piece as a whole. So to begin, I really want to take a moment to address the fact that ultimately we need to trust our own creative voice. There's a lot of fear and hesitation that I've seen from clients when approaching their own true stories because they worry about offending other people. They worry about not representing things accurately. But I think if you've done the work of the exercises we've done here together, you've really done your due diligence as far as looking at an event from different perspectives and coming at it from a logical as well as an emotional perspective, which is what we want. The fact of the matter is emotions are complicated, as is the human brain. We store information like a computer, but files get lost. And unlike a computer, there's only one person doing the input. So it is completely biased information. Recognizing our biases allow us to trust our emotional truth, because the fact of the matter is, our truth is all we have. But at the same time, it is the art of creative nonfiction, the art of essay, writing, the art of memoir, to retell a story and to trust your voice fully, but always know that there is more to it. And as you can maybe investigate that a little bit. When we start to think about structure, we can't deny the fact that if we're writing something that's emotional, it's probably going to be a little messy at first. With memoir, I find that it's really helpful to reframe reality by thinking about the macrocosm after we've captured our emotional truth. So we have to consider the fact that we never know what others were thinking. We never know other's motivations. We don't know the conditions that led to the event we're writing about. We don't know all of the conditions. That is, we may know some of them. We don't know what we couldn't since through our, our input. So what we couldn't see, what we couldn't touch, what we couldn't smell, taste, or here, we likely haven't looked at how much strength it takes to live to tell the story that we're telling. So sometimes people will write a story that feels very much like a victim hood tail. And they won't give themselves credit for moving beyond it. They'll stop the story at the negative event rather than telling the whole story, which is about someone who endured and thrive despite. So when we're talking about our personal story, the full story may be given a little bit more steam if you ask yourself a few questions. The first of which is what you would tell your former self now, or what advice you might give a friend who is in this situation you're writing about how someone else would tell the story differently. So somebody maybe who was in the scene or who heard about it second hand, where there is a glimmer of hope in the tough conditions that we're talking about. And who your reader is, who are you writing for? If you're writing just for yourself, that is perfect. That is where you can really do these ad hoc exercises and just keep doing them. And never really worried about what I'm going to talk about next, which is adding structure. So the final thing I'd like to unpack is how we can add structure to what is essentially structureless real life. There are a few tried and tested ways, ways that I've seen in many successful essays. What is to start with our current day self narrating, introducing who we are today than telling the story from the past and coming back to the present day to conclude the essay or a memoir or whatever it is we're writing. Another way would be to start in the middle, to start in the action in the heart of the emotional scene, and then offer your reader background information as you move the event forward. This is more of an integrative sort of storytelling. Another way that I've seen that has been very successful is to start with an explanation about the topics. So more of a journalistic tone, then intersperse your personal story. So you have options. There are so many different ways to tell a true story. Just to recap all that I've said so far, your emotional truth counts. It will always count. It is always your true. We can always gained something from trying to gain new perspectives on what we've experienced. And writing and of itself can help us to pan back. And I think you'll find that as you reread some of your scenes, rather than feeling incredibly emotional about them, you may actually feel a little bit more distance from them in the sense that you'll realize that this is something removed from who you are today. It was a stepping stone to who you are today. 6. Thank you!: All right, Here we are at the end. So we've done a lot of really deep dive writing. And we have truly explored the art of creative nonfiction, not just from a craft perspective, but from a holistic perspective and even from a healing perspective. And I hope that you've enjoyed these exercises. I know not all of them were easy. So please know that you showing up and getting to the end of this class is a huge accomplishment. I applaud you and I am very excited to read what you wrote. Or if you don't feel comfortable, you can always just write about your own process and share that below. So I look forward to connecting with you again. Definitely reach out at John Knox.com or Jen knocks 395 at Gmail if you want to follow up on this course or you have any questions for me, I wish you all well, right, well, be well, and I look forward to reading your writings down the road.