From Pain to Page: Writing From Life Experience
The eggs were broken. All of them. My mum had given me a dozen from our farm, in a box, to bring into school—I was supposed to give them to another child to give to their parents. But I didn’t know the other child and hadn’t plucked up the courage to approach him in the playground, so I sneaked into class before lessons and placed the eggs precariously on a windowsill, before going back outside.
(Writing Mistakes Writers Make: Putting All Your Eggs in One Basket.)
When the bell sounded, we traipsed inside. Miss Jones was standing in the classroom, arms folded across her heaving bosom, eyeballs threatening to burst free from their sockets. ‘Who is responsible for this?’ she demanded, gesturing at the broken eggshells oozing yolk and albumen over the carpet. A gasp, followed by hushed sniggers, fell into the silence that followed. Of course, I didn’t speak up. I was six years old, vulnerable and ashamed. The class were kept in at break time; the culprit (me) never discovered.
But the childhood memory has endured, because I can still remember how it felt—the fear of lying, the fear of being found out. The fear of persecution from my classmates. And now as an adult, but especially as a writer, it is in harnessing those feelings and experiences and putting them to use in stories that I can better connect with readers. They may not have left a carton of eggs too close to the edge of a classroom windowsill, but they will almost certainly remember a situation where they felt frightened or embarrassed as a child. When writing from real-life experience, the story is secondary to the power of the shared human emotion evoked by it.
That’s not to say that writing from real-life experience is easy. I experienced Vanishing Twin Syndrome (VTS) 13 years before I began writing My Name Was Eden, and at the time the loss was too fresh, too difficult to understand, being wrapped up in a tangle of nappy sacks and sleepless nights with my healthy surviving twin. I still have the scan photos—evidence of both twins’ existence, complete with two beating hearts—before the missing twin was absorbed in utero at 14 weeks. Over the years, I continued to wonder: What happened to my other child? It led me to question everything I thought I knew: about physics and biology, about spirituality, life, and death.
Break out of your shell
I wanted to use my personal experience with VTS to tell a story. Doing so was painful and cathartic, joyous and terrifying. When writing from real-life experience, honesty is important. You have to be prepared to take a scalpel to the parts of yourself you’d rather keep hidden and offer them up for the world to see. Get naked.
Eyes are not the window to the soul; words are. Allow yourself to feel the smoky trail of hatred that burned in your chest long after the confrontation with your new neighbor. Allow the tears to fall as you relive the memory of that first minty kiss, followed by the salty wet sorrow when he told you it meant nothing. Write as though no one is watching. Write as though no one is reading.
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Explore the possibilities
I’m endlessly fascinated by human behavior and how we can be driven to extreme actions when faced with trauma, guilt, loss, love. I’ve worked with families in their homes, at family courts, supervised contact centers and Her Majesty’s Prison Service, and the question I always ask is the same one that remains the basis for all stories: What if? Is there another way to look at this? Is there a possibility we haven’t considered? What might happen next? Applying this curiosity to your own life experience can help you excavate all potential avenues a story has to offer.
During my pregnancy, knowing absolutely nothing about the tiny humans growing inside me, I kept pondering the what if question. What if one or both of them inherited the funky triangular little toenail on my right foot? What if they looked everything like me, and nothing like my partner (or vice versa)? What if they didn’t share the same sense of humor, mannerisms and morals as me and my partner? What if they hated me? And, of course, when I discovered that one twin had vanished—where did it go?
This became the foundation of the central premise in My Name Was Eden, quickly followed by the proposition: What if the vanished twin came back? I was excited. I wanted to dive into the things I’d learned about human behavior and how we are not always the predictable, rational beings we consider ourselves to be. I channeled the feelings of insecurity and fear from the early days following the birth of my own children to create Lucy and used their opposing characteristics to create conflict between herself and husband James. I remained objective by creating a fictitious setting with characters who were a patchwork of people I’d met, conversations I’d overheard, and random words and images that drifted, like bones, from long forgotten memories.
Check out Eleanor Barker-White’s My Name Was Eden here:
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“The unexamined life is not worth living”
This quote from Socrates reminds me of something I was taught by the late, great Fay Weldon while studying my MA in Creative Writing. She said we should find the philosophy that underpins our story and use it to drive the plot forward.
In My Name Was Eden, I didn’t want to just talk about vanishing twin syndrome and pose the question of whether the missing twin had returned. I wanted to explore how women feel when they become mothers, how daughters and sons are sometimes viewed differently by parents, how it’s impossible to disentangle self, ego, and experience when raising a child. I also wanted to examine how relationship dynamics can be altered and damaged by intergenerational trauma. Think about your story, your life. What are you trying to say about the universal and fundamental truths of human nature?
If you’re not sure, look closer. We are all constructed of stories; the stories of our ancestors as well as our family, friends, lovers, and enemies. They form a part of our identity. In the retelling, we hope that people will understand, that they will empathize, laugh, cry, and say “yes, yes, me too.” Celebrate life. Create something new from your joys and fears, triumphs and failures—broken eggs and all.