Writing the Worst of Times
How do you write about the worst time in your life without losing the reader because the story is too bleak? How do you balance light and dark, joy and heartache? The answer? It's not easy.
“We’re each of us alone, to be sure. What can you do but hold your hand out in the dark?” —Ursula K. Le Guin
I.
The first time I attempted to write about my life was for my senior seminar in nonfiction during my last semester in the University of Pittsburgh’s writing program. A seminar, in Pitt’s academic vernacular, was really just a semester-long writing workshop, and mine started in the fall of 2001. It was a requirement to graduate, but also one of the classes I had been looking forward to. Not only because it signaled that the end of college was a semester away, but because, after nearly four years in the writing program, I finally felt better prepared to produce good writing. Or at least, what I hoped would be good writing.1
My professor for the workshop was Patsy Sims, a southern writer who had originally made a name for herself as a journalist for the Philadelphia Inquirer, the San Francisco Chronicle, and the New Orleans States-Item, and for her immersive look at the Ku Klux Klan in her 1978 book, aptly titled The Klan. By the time she was my professor, her tenure at the university was coming to a close, and she would soon go on to direct Goucher College's creative nonfiction program for the next thirteen years.
That semester, Sims assigned two longform writing projects. The first, a journalistic piece of narrative nonfiction, required the greatest time commitment. We were asked to choose a subject—usually a person—to write about by immersing ourselves in their world for several months. I chose to shadow a bagpipe player named Patrick Regan who, at the time, was the first student pursuing a Masters Degree in bagpiping at Carnegie Mellon University. He was also a father of four, who, in-between giving bagpipe lessons in his dining room, was renovating a large Victorian home in Pittsburgh’s Observatory Hill neighborhood. I held sheetrock in place and handed him joint compound while he talked to me from atop a ladder in an attic he had recently gutted to the studs. I accompanied him to recording sessions while he talked with audio engineers about how best to capture the tone of a bagpipe. I sat nearby while he gave lessons to a revolving door of students, young and old. It was a fascinating if not difficult exercise in learning how to observe and record a person’s life before turning it into what you hope will be a good piece of writing.
The second writing project was a personal essay. Right away, I thought I knew what I wanted to write about: dropping out of high school in the middle of junior year and the events that precipitated that decision. I even had the opening scene in mind. I would recreate a hardcore show in Mississaugua, Ontario, at a club called Stardust Billiards, where my band Slowpoke shared a bill with Chokehold, Grade, and Sun Still Burns. I would be on stage, guitar feedback humming, about to play the final chords of a song that always set the crowd in a frenzy. That moment of euphoria would frame the story, help to toggle between the present and the past in a meaningful way. What I didn’t realize at that time, however, was that my seemingly simple idea was not at all simple.
How do you write about the worst time in your life without losing the reader because the story is too bleak? How do you balance light and dark, joy and heartache? How do you articulate deep emotional suffering without becoming too melodramatic or getting mired in sadness? How do you trust your own memory when trauma is known to impair recollection? In other words, how do you keep the story honest and true while always moving forward?
II.
In 2013, I joined the first cohort of writers in the Staunton Farm Foundation’s Writing Away the Stigma Fellowship, a partnership with the Creative Nonfiction Foundation.
As someone who has lived with severe clinical depression and obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD) since I was a teenager, I carried my diagnosis as a burden for a long time. I was embarrassed by it. I felt shame about it. I kept it to myself like some kind of horrible secret. For years I tried to write about it, but I could never translate my experience in a way that felt right. It needed to be visceral, urgent, honest, and most of all, worth reading. But as the distance from my diagnosis grew, and my perspective evolved as I became an adult, went to college, started my career, got married, bought a house, and had two sons, the significance of that story——my story——began to reveal itself.
The Writing Away the Stigma Fellowship came along soon after, validating my experience by allowing me to hear the experiences of the other writers in the workshop, and to carve out time to write the story I couldn't before. And while I hate when the words "brave" and "courageous" are associated with writing candidly about mental health, I have always believed the most important thing you can do as a writer is to be honest with yourself when writing personal history. Write about the lows no matter how poorly it paints you. Write about the highs without hyperbole. Write about your faults and weaknesses no matter how much it might hurt to do so, or how uncomfortable it makes you feel.
For the fellowship I wrote an essay called "White Rabbit," which focused on my diagnosis as a teenager and my relationship with my first serious girlfriend, who, at the time, was struggling with her own mental health crises, helped in no part by the omnipresence of her abusive father. Inspired by the type of personal writing in books like Michael Green's Hurry Down Sunshine, Mary Karr's The Liars' Club, Elizabeth Wurtzel's Prozac Nation, and Jesmyn Ward's Men We Reaped, I wrote, revised, and workshopped "White Rabbit" until it started to resemble the story I had attempted to write so many times before. It's by no means a perfect essay. But at the time it was the necessary nudge I needed to get started. Over a decade later, the memoir I am working on about my life at that time is still a work in progress. But now figuring out that project is more a matter of when, not if.
Endnotes
What I didn’t know was that the hopefulness I felt before that class would be the same sense of hopefulness I still experience each time I sit down to start a new piece of writing. The internal dialogue is always the same: This time I’ll get it right.
That fellowship really changed my writing too. I’m so glad we were in the trenches together and running into you guys was so nice.