Going deep makes us healthy, and healthy people go deep.
WHY GOOD WRITERS ARE SELF-AWARE
If deep self-awareness is crucial to mental and physical health, it's also the key to the candy store when it comes to crafting powerful fiction. According to author Joanne Harris' Writer's Manifesto, writers' most important task is to be true to themselves. Natalie Goldberg, in her awesome Writing Down the Bones, calls this state of authenticity “metaphor”:
It comes from a place that is very courageous, willing to step out of our preconceived ways of seeing things and open so large that it can see the oneness in an ant and in an elephant. . . Your mind is leaping, your writing will leap, but it won't be artificial. (37)
Jeff Davis, author of The Journey from the Center to the Page: Yoga Philosophies and Practices as Muse for Authentic Writing, offers further insight on the necessity of writing authentically: “Part of writing the truth includes exploring the truth of our self (or selves)” (193). He doesn't mean writing memoir; he means writing honestly. According to Davis, a straightforward retelling of an event lacks the depth and complexity needed to create a powerful narrative. As writers, we must make connections by exploring the choices that led us to one outcome or another as well as the forces beyond our control, all of which leads naturally to an exploration of this mortal coil.
Deepening our self-exploration naturally results in deeper storylines in our fiction and in complex characters that speak to the universal human experience. Foregrounding these collective truths means readers will see themselves in your tale, but only if you tell it true. I've seen this proven time and again in my two decades of teaching creative writing, where I've discovered one constant: people who live unexamined lives write boring stories. If you don't know the truth about yourself, you are not equipped to touch on bigger truths, and writing without a profound level of personal and thus universal honesty is nothing more than a fancy grocery list.
Renowned writers agree. Eudora Welty claimed that the novel is the most truthful of all artistic mediums. According to Stephen King, compelling fiction is the truth inside the lie. Tennessee Williams describes writers as the opposite of magicians: magicians create an illusion that looks like truth, but a novelist hides the truth behind the impression of fiction. Barbara Kingsolver argues that a writer's main job is to figure out what she has to say that no one else can. Kurt Vonnegut, with his usual humor, said, “Do you realize that all great literature is all about what a bummer it is to be a human being? Isn't it such a relief to have somebody say that?”
To discover your unique message, you must know yourself.
It's not just writers who recognize this; readers understand it as well. Think of the last book that captured you and pulled you inside its sweet pages. What do you remember about it? What resonated with you? I'm willing to bet it wasn't “The main character did this and this and then that.” Compelling fiction offers more than a list of events. It offers Truth about ourselves and the world we live in.
Do you see where I'm going with this? Fiction is, paradoxically, the most honest mode of expression, and you can't write it if you don't practice it in your own life, any more than someone who doesn't swim can be a lifeguard. You have to be true to your roots. It is where you find your voice, what you need to write about, what you have the juice to make worth reading. You must first know yourself to write authentic fiction, the kind of fiction that transforms and heals you.
CULTIVATING DEEPER SELF-AWARENESS
Like every other part of the learning-to-rewrite-your-life process, I stumbled upon the importance of this know-yourself-before-you-write purely by accident. At the time, I was searching for a different kind of truth: the reason Jay had chosen suicide. I contacted his ex-fiancée, credit card company, doctor, realtor, coworkers, brother, and went through every scrap of paper he had in storage to dig up answers. It became a full-time job, an obsession. Three months later, when I was beginning to wonder if the truth I was chasing was undiscoverable, I adopted a puppy. Four months in and still no answers in sight, I found myself impractically daydreaming about famous actors coming to save me from my grief. It was usually Matt Damon because he's cute and seems handy but also sometimes Kevin Bacon because I'm a child of the '80s and have eyes. There was even a period when I waited for the first Steve from Blue's Clues to come and rescue me.
This tells you how destroyed I was. It also tells you an uncomfortable much about how I spent my downtime.
When my search for an outer truth dead-ended, I aimed it inward. I had a predisposition to head this direction as I've always been Manson-girl intense about personal accountability, of which self-awareness is a crucial piece. The scariest movies to me were always the ones in which a creature took ownership of another's will. The Blob. Invasion of the Body Snatchers. The first Spy Kids, because in it, secret agents were turned into incoherent thumb creatures. I lose sleep over being blind to my own faults. Like Christopher McCandless' parents. Did you read Into the Wild? That man and woman destroyed their son, and by all accounts, to this day they choose to believe he was simply a free spirit following the wind. There is nothing more horrible to me than accidentally hurting others. It made sense, then, that in the wake of Jay's suicide, I turned over every stone in myself to discover if maybe the why was hidden there.
My wonderful therapist at the time recommended journaling as a way to organize this rigorous self-examination. I demurred for two reasons: (1) At that point in my life, I'd never really journaled and it seemed like a lot of treading word-water, and (2) I'm chickenshit. In fact, that's what I initially called writing behind the veil of fiction: chickenshitography. I still like the name, but the truth you will soon discover (as I did) is that it doesn't really describe the process.
Knowing yourself is no task for a coward.
Writing May Day took the place of journaling for me. I pumped my fears, my insecurities, my need for justice and answers into that novel. The fact that I became self-aware during the writing of it is one of the reasons it's such an uneven book, and also why I recommend you undertake this chapter's writing exercise before you dig into your novel. You'll save yourself time if your compass is pointed true in advance.
Healing yourself, healing others, and creating powerful fiction are not the only reasons to confess to yourself. You'll also discover soon enough—if you don't know it already—that writing novels serves as both a shield and a microscope. That's why it's important to reach a certain level of self-awareness in advance. You don't want to accidentally share an embarrassing secret you meant to conceal or dig deep into a memory you aren't ready to explore. Eventually, of course, you'll examine it all. That's the beauty of writing fiction. You'll peek in your own dark cracks, and it'll feel like playing. But you need a scan of your own internal terrain so you can control the process.
In shorthand: know thyself.
Take the whole of who you are and put it on paper, first in a journal in its undistilled form and then in your novels in its fictionalized shape. Because you know what? All our ugliness, fears, joys, and journeys are more similar than they are different, and when you're honest with yourself, you can be honest with your writing, and when you're honest with your writing, it reverberates. It connects. It makes people say, “I'm not the only one.”
Let me demonstrate by telling you a story.
Several winters back, I was returning from Tae Kwon Do with my kids. We'd moved from the rural house where Jay spoke his last words to a 1940s bungalow in a conservative central Minnesota city. My kids were six and ten.
We used to hit Tae Kwon Do every Tuesday and Thursday, and every Tuesday and Thursday, we returned to our little house in St. Cloud at 8:30 p.m. It was always the same routine except for one Thursday in early March. When we returned home that night, there was a potted begonia resting on our back step. The temperature was hovering