Besides, we all have different definitions of a “challenging experience.” The point is to learn how to recycle your facts into fiction so you can experience the personal transformation that comes with rewriting your life. The novel you will craft will function as both your lighthouse and the Viking funeral boat upon which you get to burn your garbage once and for all.
An added bonus? At the end of this adventure, you will have a powerful novel inspired by your life, cooked of the same ingredients but wholly different.
By the way, while the instructions in this book work equally well for short stories, I consistently use the term “novel,” because writing short stories has always reminded me of carving Mona Lisa on a grain of rice. If short stories speak to you more kindly than they do me, simply replace “novel” with “short story” in everything you read from this point forward. Rewrite Your Life offers you a road map for using your own life experiences, however fresh or ancient, deep or temporary, painful or proud they are, to craft a lush, powerful piece of fiction, regardless of that fiction's length.
One more thing. You don't need to be a gifted writer to rewrite your life. If you have something to write with or on, you're golden. I guarantee you're going to surprise yourself with what you create, on paper, inside yourself, and in the world.
So come on. Pack what you need. We're in this together.
Orientation
Throughout this book, you are asked to explore your history with a goal of translating it into healing, compelling fiction. Think of this process as a pilgrimage to your best future, an adventure that paradoxically requires you to travel through your past. Each chapter is full of examples, insight, and activities that will lead you through a purposeful excavation of your memories, showing you how to turn them into something greater than their individual parts, something healing and transformative. To that end, look for modest writing goals in each section that when added together result in a magnificent achievement: a healing novel inspired by your life experiences. See these helpful markers to guide you in best using this book as well as a packing list for this road trip of a lifetime.
MARKERS
Look for these icons to guide your odyssey.
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The Mile Marker symbol indicates a focused opportunity to unearth and repurpose a life experience. Have a paper and pen handy. |
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The Map icon signals that you will be required to map out a leg in your novel-writing journey. Plan on writing when you see one of these. |
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When you spot the Navigate icon, look for a tip that relates what you're presently reading to information covered in a previous chapter. |
Recommended Packing List
Pen or pencil.
Notebook. A cheap drugstore-style spiral bound is perfect. If you're going to write your book longhand, make sure the notebook is big enough to hold all your words. On the inside cover (or the front cover, if you're feeling ballsy), write “Novel in Progress.” I recommend writing it with a magic marker, scented, maybe cinnamon or blueberry, to lock in the memory of this brave undertaking. Plan on carrying that notebook around with you until your novel is written. You'll need it when you least expect it.
Computer. This isn't necessary, but if you plan to type your novel on a computer, you'll need that in addition to your notebook.
If you've still got room, consider packing a sense of humor, too. Actually, screw that. Pack humor.
PART I
THE POWER OF FICTIONALIZING YOUR LIFE
CHAPTER 1
THE SCIENCE OF WRITING TO HEAL
Writing fiction is the act of weaving a series of lies to arrive at a greater truth.
—Khaled Hosseini
All sorrows can be borne if you put them into a story.
—Isak Dinesen
“You should write a book.”
Maybe, like me, you first heard this as you shared the story of your daycare lady locking you and your sister in the closet before letting her creepy grown son perform puppet shows for the rest of the kids. Or, perhaps someone suggested novel-writing-as-a-release after you mentioned how close you'd come to getting car-jacked when your sweet, animal-loving friend pulled her Toyota into an unlit parking lot so you could both stand vigil over a dead dog in New Orleans' Lower Ninth. I call these types of experiences “story food,” the life occurrences so remarkable that you can't help telling other people about them.
Here's another possibility: maybe you've never shared your most intense experiences with anyone because you're private, or think no one would believe you, or simply and understandably don't want to relive those moments, even within the safety of words. Yet, some secret, scrappy part of you is whispering to get that story out. If that's the case, I'm telling you what others have told me.
You should write a book.
Sure, it's a pop-off answer to anyone who's had a traumatic or amazing or unbelievable experience, but it turns out there is science behind it.
Mountains of it.
A BRIEF HISTORY OF CREATIVE THERAPIES
The human need to creatively express ourselves can be traced back to the oldest-surviving painting, scratched into an Indonesian cave forty thousand years ago. (By the way, it says a lot about human priorities that the first plow wasn't invented until thirty thousand years later, a fact that makes me weirdly happy.) Visual art as expression expanded and flourished from there, producing Michelangelos and Picassos and Gentileschis, but it wasn't until 1939 that the therapeutic value of art was established. That year found WWI veteran and artist Adrian Hill recovering from tuberculosis in a British sanatorium. While there, he was asked to teach painting classes to his fellow patients, many of them returning veterans and a lot of them assumedly bored. Hill witnessed firsthand art's healing power on those vets. He brought his discovery to the general public, coining the term “art therapy” in 1942.
Hill believed that the symbolic mediums of drawing and painting busied the hands and freed the mind, allowing the body's natural reparative mechanisms to do their work unimpeded. His hypothesis was oversimplified, but science would soon prove him right.
Writing as therapy began to catch up to art therapy in the 1960s when New York psychologist Dr. Ira Progoff introduced the concept of reflective writing for mental health. He called this process the Intensive Journal Method. As a Jungian, Dr. Progoff subscribed to the healing power of accessing unconscious or repressed memories. Like visual art therapists before him, he witnessed the therapeutic value of externalizing an emotion or experience, encapsulating it in an image or an essay and thereby releasing it.
Innovators Michael White, an Australian therapist, and Dr. James W. Pennebaker, an American social psychologist, built on Progoff's