There’s a saying supposedly meant to prompt one’s best writing: Write what is painful to you. What might be painful to you could shock the world, perhaps.
There are uses for shock value. Isn’t simply being a writer a wish to expose oneself for attention? We seem to be in a cultural moment where, in order to get noticed, the writer is expected or encouraged to offer up this kind of self-exposure, as a point of pride almost. It is to shamelessly expose oneself via a shocking truth, to get more attention than the next person.
My advisor in grad school used to talk about embarrassing oneself in writing; maybe we all have our own sense of what that could mean.
I’ve written about risk (here). Writing what is painful to you would probably have its share of more risks than rewards, I imagine. Because of the subject matter, it might be difficult to be objective, for example.
As well, there are pitfalls in trying to write about oneself.
Here is Vivian Gornick, in The Situation and the Story: The Art of Personal Narrative, talking about V.S. Naipaul: “Disgust makes him shrink back. The shrinking attenuates the performance. In the end, the reader registers only the nastiness of the writer’s feelings. He is standing too far back to achieve the right distance: the one necessary for engagement.” His nonfiction suffered from his discomfort with his subject matter.
Perhaps one has to be totally comfortable with their subject matter. Though I believe Naipaul is notorious for having looked down on everyone who was not, well, Naipaul. Gornick might be implying that a key to the personal excavation is to not caricature or characterize that which you do not like or do not understand. On the other hand, those involved may be considered “bad” or are in danger of being caricatured. But actions, of course, speak for themselves.
We take for granted the lessons we think we have assimilated, but our familiarity with ourselves, our biases, can be as firmly planted as the intractable weeds we need to pull out of our yards every spring. They are there, but we have learned to ignore them.
This is why writing about a taboo subject, one that, no matter how far in the past still has a terrible emotion connected with it, it may not be so easy to be objective.
At some point, the writer may not care what the effects of revealing this pain are for themselves. However, there is the issue of family and close friends, any one of whom may have a hard time understanding something that occurred under their nose years in the past. Ultimately, the writer has to take into consideration what any reader will think. My biggest concern would be the unenlightened person who will conflate what happened to me with that being who I am. And this sense that something happened to me: is that not making oneself a victim?
We go through years of costly therapy so that we can move on from our damage. There is nothing more difficult than trying to relate to someone who has not. They either cannot see a way past it or they do not want to. Perhaps by writing about this painful event, one can’t help but open an old wound. On the other hand, if this is to open an old wound, then it must have not been healed yet.
The last thing I want is to make light of something that was painful and has had long repercussions, but in the drafting of a piece one gains distance. There is distance, a chasm of time, really, and this has the biggest impact on the attempt to write it down. Particularly if we are writing about our childhood, which cannot be from anything but a distance; a distance that grows inexorably.
Writing that piece might mean that you have to learn to empathize with the monster.
Much of what gets published will not be around forever. Pieces disappear all the time. Your best bet for posterity is to get it between boards, but even then, who is to say how long a publisher is going to keep the work available?
In some way, if you don't have a recognizable name, you may feel the need to write whatever you can that is surprising even shocking, or controversial, because the timing is right. Also, I always think if you have the urge to write your piece, you should do it. It likely won't be around forever. You won’t be around forever.
And though the prompt to write what is painful provides the material, the second part of that prompt is just as important: the shaping, the editing.
This makes me think about the notion of writing as therapy. It is that, but even somehow more. It is the vehicle for transformation. But you do have to write it raw out of your system. And then somehow you have to make nice with it, persuade. That might mean that you then have to learn to empathize with the monster. The writing then becomes for everyone else. You want your readers to well with sympathetic indignation for you, your calm demeanor, your cool headedness.