Writing Through Crisis

 For much of my early career, I used to joke that I couldn't afford writer's block. I began writing

Cemetery, New Orleans, 2012

professionally when my first child was a baby and I learned to use very small amounts of time. This involved "pre-writing," going over the next scene in my mind (while doing stuff like washing the dishes) until I knew exactly how I wanted it to go. Then when I'd get a few minutes at the typewriter (no home computers yet), I'd write like mad. I always had a backlog of scenes and stories and whole books, screaming at me to be written. The bottleneck was the time in which to work on them.

 

I kept writing through all sorts of life events, some happy, others really awful and traumatic. Like many other writers, I used my work as escape, as solace, as a way of working through difficult situations and complex feelings. I shrouded myself with a sense of invulnerability: I could write my way through anything life threw at me!

Unfortunately, I was wrong.

Telling the Truth

Elsewhere I've written about how my experience as a family member of a murder victim has led me to public advocacy to abolish the death penalty. This isn't a discussion of the pros and cons of the death penalty; it's about story-telling. In general, I use this blog for writerly professional stuff and put more personal issues into my LiveJournal. But I think the process by which we learn to tell the truth in our personal lives is related to the process of excavating the truth in our fiction.

I'm not a political activist. In fact, I've often described myself as allergic to it. I certainly have opinions, but the prospect of placing myself in a confrontational, adversarial position (with those nutsos who don't agree with me, right?) has been overwhelmingly intimidating. It took me a long time to find a way that was at all emotionally possible for me to state my case.

That way, it turns out, was to tell my story.