Writing as Translation

“Remember that writing is translation,” E.B. White said, “and the opus to be translated is yourself.”

An article in my local newspaper recently cited a study which gave proof that we get pleasure from talking about ourselves. No surprise there. Surely that’s a phenomenon we’re all aware of. But what was interesting about the study is that psychologists actually monitored people’s brain waves during conversations and watched the pleasure centers light up when they were being self-revealing.

So this pleasure can actually be measured, and it affects everyone, not just you and me.

Perhaps the hardest thing to comprehend about self-absorption is that it is universal. Every single person is, to him or herself, the most important person in the universe.

How does that relate to the overall topic of writing I keep circling around?

Stories can work only if they elicit empathy from the reader/listener. Without empathy we would simply be experiencing some oddity, someone out there struggling with a problem that has no connection to us, and we would probably quit reading. It is because we can see ourselves caught in the struggle, actually feel the pain, the frustration, the triumph, that we care about stories at all. It is because we care about ourselves first that we are capable of caring about anyone.

And so we writers approach the stories we create through understanding our own psyches. The stuff of our stories is drawn from the bewildering complexity of our own thoughts and emotions. And the more deeply we dare plumb, the more honestly we dare see, the richer our stories will be.

It’s a curious irony that the more personal and individual the moments are that we carry to the page, the more people we will touch.

So if we want to write about love, death, joy, abandonment—any of the universal themes—the best place to start is with our own most private moments, the ones we’ve never dared share with anyone.

And the shield fiction offers, even for our own psyches, allows honesty without embarrassing exposure. Who can sort what is my character and what is me?

Often not even I!

What we are writing toward, always, is that moment when our readers will say—probably in the silence of their own minds—“But I thought I was the only one who ever thought that, felt that, wanted that.” When they say that, they are truly hooked.

And when they say that they will know what our truest stories always teach . . . that we are not alone, not the writers writing out of our most deeply hidden psyches, not the readers approaching our stories with the same kinds of unspoken experience of being human.

So we translate ourselves not as an act of hubris—though there is that in there, too, of course—but as an act of our deepest generosity.

If we give ourselves to our stories, we give ourselves to the world.