5 Steps for Shifting Your Approach to Trauma and the Writing Process

By the age of 25, I had already internalized the idea that good writing should be almost impossible to produce.

I am in the first year of my MFA and I am writing, for the first time, for a professional audience. I am writing hard. My style is cramped. I am trying to mold myself into who I think my graduate program wants me to be. I am composing a bunch of complex sentences with maze-like structures, which are almost impossible to read.

(7 Ways Writing Heals Us—Even After Terrible Trauma.)

I am using pretentious language because I think elevated diction will make me a better writer. Concrete, one-syllable words become abstract, flowery words because I think my writing needs to be more complicated. Because I believe only when writing is complicated it is worthy. I edit everything I write to death. I am a people pleaser who is more focused on what others think of me than what I think of myself.

Around this time, I had recognized a relationship between trauma and my own writing process. One that I desperately needed to free myself from. So I started to reflect on my creative practice and gradually shifted my approach.

Step 1: Understand your trauma

They say awareness is the first step. After reflection, I realized that most of my trauma that interfered with my creative expression was not a result of major personal catastrophe, but a product of my socialization in the world.

First, my identity had a huge impact on my creative expression. My gender shaped my relationship to language. In real life, I am constantly cracking jokes—I love to laugh and make others laugh. But, in my writing process, I was afraid to use humor on the page. I was also afraid to write about sex from a female point of view because most of the desire I had seen on the page had been male centered. I was afraid to write about things that were disgusting because I was afraid of what people might think of me. Sex, humor, horror—none of these were creative spaces I saw available to me as a woman. This meant I had a shame-based writing practice, afraid to trespass upon taboo spaces. In other words, I was afraid to be myself.

Second, my years of education had conditioned me to suppress my creativity. Years of being a student in school teaches you, intentionally or unintentionally, that you need to deliver the correct answer. I had been assessed primarily through multiple choice questions from my early years right until high school. The fright of delivering the wrong answer had transferred itself to my artistic process. This made me feel like there was a right and wrong way to write, and that I needed to mold myself into what authority figures wanted me to be.

Lastly, personal traumas in my life resulted a high-strung writing process. This resulted in a specific relationship to language, one based on rigidity and control. As humans, we can try to tame and restrict language to try to counteract the fact that our lives are out of our control. But the truth was: Controlling language was not going to solve my grief, nor did it undo any of the harshness of what happened.

Step 2: Say yes

In the wise words of the beginning of Taylor Swift’s Grammy-winning album Folklore, she says in the lyrics to “The One:”

I’m doing good, I’m on some new shit

Been saying yes instead of no

In her documentary on the making of this album, she talked about how signing with her new record label resulted in greater levels of creative freedom. In short, she was saying yes to herself, creatively, instead of saying no.

I, too, had to learn how to say yes to myself.

What does this mean, exactly? It means never denying or stifling your creative impulses. Let me give you this example: When I was writing, I would often nip my best ideas in the bud. I would say no to myself. Practically, this meant not writing out the word, sentence, or passage I have felt impelled to write.

This used to happen all the time. It was often rationalized by a practical reason of why I should not write the thing I wanted to write: not the right time to use this information; the joke I had in mind was too inappropriate; the character wouldn’t say this; the idea was too crazy or too perverted, and I worried it would weird people out. As it turns out, I was saying no to a lot of my best ideas.

True creativity is deeply irrational, and often in the moment, it does not make sense why a writer might have an impulse to put something down. But by limiting the nonsense from my work, I was depriving my writing of a vital spark it needed.

I had to learn to say yes. I had to learn to let it flow out, however stupid or weird it was, however bad then idea may turn out to be—I had to trust myself to play, roam, and discover. I had to trust that I would find the flaws when I revised, and that I could use the act of writing to indulge all my instincts, good and bad.

In short, I needed to write towards my inner child, and neglect the concerns of an adult mind. My adult mind knew it needed to write a book to get a job. My adult mind was worried about what people might think or say about my hybrid novel, which used sentence fragments to create a unique voice. There were a bunch of fear-driven reasons to say no, both personally and professionally, to the things I wanted to write.

To write well, I needed to speak with my inner child, who had no social conditioning, lacked life experience, and wrote with total ease. To say yes, I needed to become a kid again.

Anne Lamott articulated this well in her well-known craft essay, “Shitty First Drafts,” from her book Bird by Bird. In this essay, she encourages you to give yourself permission to write badly. “The first draft is the child’s draft,” she writes, “where you let it all romp out.”

Allowing your inner child to take part in the writing process is similar to saying yes. It encourages the writer to forget about adult concerns. A child lacks socialization: They have no fear when it comes to expressing themselves.

Step 3: Write towards your fear

In some weird logic of the universe, I realized the very words I needed to express were often the ones I was afraid to write. For example, my book, The Flat Woman, is powered by elements of horror and disgust. But as a young writer, I was scared to write disgusting things on the page, worrying somebody would make a judgement about me.

Mary Shelley published Frankenstein anonymously for a similar reason: She feared her children would be taken away. This points to the vulnerability of female-identifying authors across history who historically lacked the insulation of male privilege.

And as I began to consciously write into my areas of fear, I realized that terror was actually a great barometer of something worthy, interesting, or powerful to say.

So I came to this conclusion: If I was afraid to write something, I should not repress it, I should actually write into that space bigger and harder than anywhere else.

In expressing what we’re afraid to express, our truest selves can emerge. Success as an artist can be defined as an act of self-authenticity. If you get into the practice of articulating your fears, you can train yourself to have a better artistic process, even if the substance of your fears does turns out to be useless.

Step 4. Write with the body

We think of writing as a mental process, but we often forget it is physical one, too. Your hands are the instrument of your creativity, after all, and ultimately, your fingers are the tools a writer uses to express themselves. For me, I had to remember the writing process happens with the body as well as the mind. Focusing on the physical feeling of the keys beneath my fingers helped me let go of control. Lots of style elements can be palpably felt when you type: Rhythm, for instance, is a very physical experience. Paying attention to the rhythms and the texture of the language helped me experience writing as a process of self-hypnosis.

Self-hypnosis allowed my subconscious to dominate my artistic process. Jack Spicer encouraged poets to think of themselves as a radio receiving a signal from outside of them. I found the idea of this helpful: to think about transmitting a source of inspiration from outside of me as opposed to writing from my own mind. So I started to let my hands transmit the inspiration as opposed to writing it. What is the difference between writing and transmission? Transmitting is something we allow to happen with our bodies, whereas writing felt like an activity I controlled with my mind. Transmission with my hands allowed me to receive the radio signal, which is another way to say creative inspiration.

A lot of writers say their best work feels like it comes from somewhere else, somewhere beyond them. This can only happen when we relinquish control and let our fingers dictate where the poem, story, or essay wants to go. Oftentimes, when we let go, our subconscious takes over. Sometimes, the things our subconscious produces are surprising, disturbing, or unusual—but they are usually interesting. Our subconscious has a lot to teach us, if only we let the right one in.

Step 5: Write the thing

It took me about seven years, but I eventually finished my first book, The Flat Woman. This would not have been possible without an intensely disciplined practice. Every morning of the week, I carved out an hour or two to write. In the context of my regular practice, I slowly and gradually made changes to my process. None of these changes came over night, but were the product of a slow, methodical expulsion of bad habits.

To say yes, I had to put in effort and pay attention to what I wanted to say. By becoming aware of the ways in which I restricted myself, I trained myself to give myself permission. I transformed my writing from a rigid practice into a free-flowing hobby. In this state of hyper concentration, hours and days of the week evaporated. Writing, which was once a stressful process, became a really relaxing hobby—a process where I hypnotized myself into forgetting my hobby was also my career.

There were developments in my life that helped: I fell in love and got married. I bought a house and got promoted. Everything that helped make me happier in my personal life helped me have a more grounded and focused relationship to my art.

What started out as a poetry manuscript of approximately 13,000 words, its language preened and pruned to oblivion, became a 27,000-word short novel called The Flat Woman. In the end, it was nearly double its original length. There are probably some who will still say it’s too short, too fragmented, too absurd, but I don’t care.

In the seven years I spent writing it, I learned how to say yes, which is another way to say letting go. When I let go, what finally came out was weird, funny, and unapologetically feminine—all of the things I had been afraid to let myself be in the beginning.