Notice when, during the writing, you find yourself suddenly so sleepy you think you could lay your head down and fall asleep right there. Listen to what your body tells you: are your muscles tense? Does your skin go tingly, or numb? This is your intuition speaking to you. Sometimes these body messages will mean, Write more now. Sometimes they will mean, Get me the fuck out of here. You’ll learn the difference—maybe the hard way, by trying to ignore the body totally, like I did (which—spoiler alert—didn’t work all that well).
We claim every word that could fit into any mouth. We do this every day, or most days—we claim regular and consistent space for our creative emergence and delight. We write until we don’t understand what we’re saying anymore. We write until we’re bored with the trauma. We repeat ourselves, think we are tapped out, and then we stumble over a scent and we describe it and that leads in to a story that taps into a vein of new memory, so we write more.
We are not trauma but we know the words for it. We know how to speak to it. We know how to reach inside of it. We know how to recognize its underseams. We have stories that can save children, save sisters and daughters, brothers and sons, the mothers lost to themselves, the men who think rape will save them—we want to strip them all down. Those who pretend not to know this song cannot help but hear our chorus. We hold no room for pretense. We call out the names anyway. We tell the true stories anyway. We describe tactics, smooth smiles, rage. We teach each other lost languages. The liars don’t have to read our stories, but their women are, and their sons. Girl children are sharpening their blades on the stones of our stories. This time we name endings. We feed the young ones what we know and they will save their own lives. (2014)
We use poetic language or the conventions of science fiction, we write mythologies and fictions, we use legalese or academese or our mother tongue—we write trauma as a business letter. We write trauma as a movie script. We write trauma as a novel, a piece of flash fiction, as a shopping list, a letter to the editor, a to-do list, a song, a piece of art criticism, a recipe, a series of haiku, notes for an essay, a blog post, a guide book, an encyclopedia, a dictionary, a thesaurus; we write it as a travelogue, as erotic fiction, as pornography, as a poli-sci textbook, as chant, as spoken word, as a map, as a series of blueprints, a guide to a demolition. We write it as translation, as a phone book, a contact list, as religious ceremony, as a bible, as a how-to manual. We write it as pulp fiction, as noir, as a series of public service announcements, as ancient spells, as feminist polemic, as a letter in a bottle; we carve it into rock, cave, treebark, write it in sand and beach glass, sing it to deer and ducks and hawks. We tell it with eagle eyes and up close like flea bites.
Write the rage. Write letters that will never get sent. Say everything you wanted to say, everything you did say, everything they should have been able to hear you say.
We take every angle, every form. We use what works, and as we write, we discover, uncover, recover and (re)create ourselves. We are naked and named, we declare ourselves. We find the language for the normal, everyday evil in the world. We don’t just say Me, too—some days we also say, Fuck you. We take our tongues back from between their teeth. We name exactly what they did. Their language is only part of our story. Their daily and commonplace violence is only part of the story. How they meet us with big smiles and generosity later is only part of the story. We must write, too, our aching bodies, the breadth of our laughter, how our mouths still know how to smile: we give the whole story of our lives to the page.
Practice trusting your own words
Set your timer for ten minutes. On a new page in your notebook, start with the phrase, “This is what they told me to say…” (If the prompt isn’t clicking, try changing the pronouns: “This is what they told her to say,” or “him to say,” or, “This is what he told us to say.” Let yourself notice what works). Write for about five minutes, then stop. Take a breath. Begin again, on a new line, with the phrase, “This is what they told me not to say…” Write for five more minutes. If you want to continue, pick up your pen, take another breath, and then dive into anything that came up for you during the first two writes.
For twenty years, I put myself and my healing psyche in front of a notebook, nearly every day, opened the notebook to a fresh page and begun to write. My mornings often look like this: wake up to the electronic harp of my smartphone’s alarm, make some green tea, settle into my writing room with my notebook and light a candle—I like it to be early enough that it’s still dark, early enough that there’s nothing else I should be doing. So often I’ve felt like I’ve got to steal my writing time: from partners, from my job, from chores that need attending to. There were years when I rose at 4:30 or 5 a.m., well before my partner woke, so that I didn’t feel guilty for taking time alone to write. For me, this regular practice of morning writing is saying to writing, “My first and best breaths are still yours.”
Long before I read Julia Cameron’s The Artist’s Way, I was waking up early in the morning to write for an hour or so, as close to every day as possible. I called these morning writes my “core dump” times. In computing terms, a core dump is a file that’s created to collect everything that was in the computer’s memory when there’s a crash. When I apply the term to my writing life, I mean a write in which I dump onto the page anything and everything that’s in my head and heart at a given moment—no matter how random or seemingly disconnected. Poet and artist Brian Andreas describes the spaciousness with which I try to hold such inner disorder: “he tried for days to put / it all back in the proper / order, but finally he / gave up & left it there / in a pile & loved / everything equally.” These were the hours that I could get everything out in front of me, my worries and frustrations, trauma memory and work struggles, trouble or longing in my relationship. It was like a long talk with a good friend who listened intently and accepted me unconditionally.
Writing has been the place I trusted the most—the place where I learned to trust myself. And I have been fortunate to live with significant others who treated my writing with respect, who did not read journals, who treated my journals as if they were as private and inviolate as the inside of my own beating heart. I’ve rarely shared with anyone what I wrote in my notebooks—the notebook was a place for me to work things out, a steady and long-suffering companion who didn’t judge or criticize or interrupt or tell me what I ought to do. I needed this kind of sacred, protected, nonjudgmental space—that is, I needed to learn to treat my whole self as sacred, to release myself from judgment.
Even after all these years of daily practice, though, I can still struggle to give myself what best serves my words: those earliest morning hours devoted to the tender skin between dreamtime and waking life. Things get too busy, there are too many jobs or a love affair just beginning (or suddenly going down in flames) that needs all of my otherwise-creative energies, and suddenly there’s no time to write three pages in the morning. It’s so easy—even after twenty years of practice that proves otherwise—to convince myself I just don’t have the time. And then, slowly but surely, my well-being begins to unravel.
Fortunately, every day I get to begin again. I get to decide to show up for my creative and healing self all over again. Writing practice brings me back into my human realness: I don’t have all the answers, I am complicated and ridiculous and loving, I am not as shiny as I pretend to be, thank goodness.
•§•
At the 2010 Healing Art of Writing conference, an attendee asked how one develops a writing practice, how one gets in the habit of writing. The questioner was new to writing, and she wanted to do it right. She’d heard, maybe, that the way you become a writer is you write every day, no matter what. Underneath her question, I heard: What do you do to become a real writer?
Responding to the question, poet Jane Hirshfield spoke of her own writing practice: she doesn’t especially have one—well, not one that looks regular and regimented, anyway. She told us that she writes when she’s drawn to write, and when she is not drawn to write, she doesn’t force herself: when she tries to force writing that’s not ready to come, the writing’s not good, doesn’t work for