Transformation through Writing
In response to my blog, two weeks ago, Steve said: I’ve often thought that both acting and writing are ways to temporarily try on personalities and circumstances that our more reserved selves couldn’t really maintain in real life.
Here’s a question: do you think you’ve ever been changed or transformed by the process of getting into the mind and heart of character?
It was a question I didn’t find easy to respond to, so I turned it over to my readers.
Sarah Lamstein said this: When I wrote my novel about an 11-year-old girl who finds her voice, there were times I cried during the writing. I also found myself acknowledging my own feelings and felt my own voice strengthening. I began speaking up more. A welcome outcome.
Sarah’s experience makes perfect sense. If we are choosing well when we climb into a story idea, we are asking questions that still have urgency for us, not giving answers we’ve already found. Carrying a character through to a resolution in such a struggle will, almost inevitably, carry us to a new place as well.
A response from Mary Goulet involves a whole different kind of writing. Mary doesn’t build characters out of her own psyche. As a nonfiction writer she has explored other people’s experience, experience that is very different from her own. This is what she has to say about the impact of that exploration:
As a writer of non-fiction, perhaps I should not be making a comment, but as a faithful reader of your blog, I had to weigh in. While writing my latest book, Reveille in Hot Springs: The Battle to Save our VA, I found myself losing my perspective. While interviewing veterans from WWII through Afghanistan, I asked questions and listened to the stories. It was after each interview that I began to find myself crying while writing the stories, having nightmares and finding myself in the jungles of Vietnam during my sleep. My nights were disturbed and at times I woke in the middle of the night and continued work on an unfinished chapter.
After a few weeks of this my husband came into my office and suggested that we take a week off. I realized that I was getting PTSD by osmosis, or whatever, and I followed up with a relaxing trip to another country.
I returned to my writing with objectivity, but always with an increased empathy for veterans and anger for the present situation that they find themselves in with the federal government’s continued dwindling of their benefits they once earned in service to their country.
I will never look at another veteran in the same way again. The men and women who shared their stories will always be a part of me. They have become my extended family by bringing me into their world. They have enriched my life in a way I would never have believed before I took on this project and for that I am forever grateful.
Mary’s response makes me wonder. Can we create human psyches on the page that impact us as deeply as we are affected by coming to know other living human beings?
We can certainly learn empathy through our characters. Empathy with ourselves as well as with others. And empathy, whether it comes through contact with other beings or through our own creations, always transforms.