Oh boy. There are so many ways to write our way out of trouble! Writing should be recommended by all therapists and court-appointed for anyone who even gets a traffic ticket.
I’ll talk about writing our way out of writing trouble in a moment, but first let’s look at the many ways that writing can save our time, money, and sanity.
IN LIFE
Journaling can lead me out of almost any confusion and solve almost any problem I encounter. “Why would he say such a thing?!” Three pages later, I often have a brutal, and then perhaps a more compassionate, understanding of why he might have said such an awful thing–as well as a fairly accurate (if much briefer) analysis of my own part in it.
Sometimes when I’m truly down under, and I don’t mean Australia, I’ll write down the meanest, most venal thoughts and temptations swirling around in my mind. Once they’re down on paper, or safely ensconced in a Word file, they are somehow out of me. When I’ve “said them out loud,” they seem to lose their power.
Writing Chasing Grace: A Novel of Odd Redemption saved me tens of thousands of dollars in therapy. Leading my protagonist through thirty years of looking for grace, healing, love, and wholeness in all the wrong places was a tiny big exhausting, but it was also extraordinarily healing.
My solution for almost any life problem is to write about it, but can you “write out” a problem with writing itself? Yes!
IN WRITING
I sit down to write and instead of feeling the “ping” or the “swing” of the Zone, I feel the “ding.” Uh oh.
What to do? Go for a walk, do the breakfast dishes, or sort some socks? Maybe. Sometimes just walking away from my desk and coming back even five minutes later gives me a whole new way of looking at what I’m writing. If I keep these little forays to under five minutes, they often work. If I let them extend much beyond fifteen minutes, I start double-dipping—adding guilt to the writing difficulty, so that I have two problems instead of one.
Another solution is just to keep writing, remembering Annie Lamott’s admonition to write “shitty first drafts.” If I do this, one of two things usually happens:
- I write some bad stuff, and then suddenly a solution appears. My inner Catholic schoolgirl argues that I’ve been rewarded for good behavior, for sticking with it. My Advaita Vendata Hindu self argues that I’ve earned good karma. Who knows? All I care about is that I’ve moved through the “ding” into the “ping” and “swing” of the Zone.
- I write some bad stuff, and have something to edit the next day instead of having to start from scratch—and on top of that, beating myself up for having abandoned the project the day before.
Life and writing will always offer challenges. That’s why we love them. We may moan and groan, scream and cry, but deep in our hearts we know that embracing what they serve up, and finding within us whatever we need to meet those challenges, is the making of us.
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