Creating Self-Understanding Despite Fears of Revealing Your Own Shortcomings and True Experience

Before we see what writers have said on the issue of fear about revealing oneself through writing, try this exercise:

1. Select four or so pieces of your writing. Look for nouns that you used more than you knew you did. Circle these words where they occur. My words today are capture, writing, meaning, fears and alive.
2. If you had to make those five words fit into one category, what would that category be? Be imaginative – you might come up with lyric phrases to name the categories, phrases such as “above and below,” “still and moving,” “possessed by others and free of others,” “without words but with music.” Use whatever category names that come. For instance, I think that the nouns I found – capture, writing, meaning, fears and alive – fit the category “steps to living.”
3. Next, write five one-sentence statements about what it means to you that you can see this category in your writing. Again, write what comes to you and write with confidence that what you say is worth saying even if you don’t quite understand what you are saying.

I am thinking of my words as steps in living:

Writing: When I write I am not sure if I am working toward creating a paved driveway or one made of gravel.
Fear: If I can carry on though I am afraid to carry on, I have not overcome my fear but I have learned to live with it.
Capture: I think that the same image might convey different glimpses of meaning each time I use it.
Meaning: Meaning is elusive but if I experience it somatically, it seems permanent.
Alive: I am both the camera and the finger on the shutter.

4. Now write five questions for yourself about your use of these words in your writing. Here are my five questions stemming from my category named “steps to living.”

Is fear a step backwards or a step forward?
How is writing like living?
How is writing different than living?
Why do I sometimes cringe when I discover what I mean?
If I think therefore I am, what am I if I write?

Here is what a student I’ve been working with did with this exercise:

Words
competition
collaboration
politics
future
civilization

Category
“building the right future”

Statements
I am concerned that our civilization is in jeopardy and this is weighing heavily on me.
I feel estranged from my own family and estranged from much of the country.
I feel helpless, heartbroken, depressed.
I’ve lost hope that things will get better.
I feel as though humans have reached a limit in our development.

Questions
Am I missing something? Maybe I’m not seeing the whole picture.
Are the dual estrangements amplifying each other?
Why haven’t I dealt with the family component of my dilemma in my writing?
Is there some homework I could be doing, some knowledge or expertise I don’t have that I should be building to cope with these feelings?
Am I writing for my own benefit or because I think/hope others will benefit?

****

After you have written the five statements and the five questions, choose one question or statement and explore its meaning in writing. Then choose another of the questions or statements and attempt to write more. Do this for as many as interest you. Your writing will draw on your personal experience, your reading, and your self-reflection and, as many writers say, your words will be smarter than you think you are.

In personal writing, or as some are calling it “expressive writing,” we write to find out what we think. I know that I am not sure what I think until I explore it through writing. My daughter, who is an academic, told me that in her field, you ask a question and offer the answer and then show how you got that answer. In creative writing, you explore your experience by writing until you know your question and then you continue to explore your experience until you find an answer. You are not reporting on research already accomplished. You are taking yourself and your readers on the journey to finding the question you have from your personal experience and to recognizing an answer you find through the act of relating that experience.

And relating the experience can be fearful—because you may not want to relive it, because you might be afraid of what others will think of you for having had the experience, because some might be angry at you for telling about it, and because you may fear you aren’t up to offering the experience in your writing and therefore judge your writing as pedestrian.

What have other writers said on the topic?

In an article for a writers on writing series, Joyce Carol Oates urges writers not to give up. She says she has always kept on going, that she can not afford to give up. In an interview for the Paris Review she said:

I have forced myself to begin writing when I’ve been exhausted, when I’ve felt my soul as thin as a playing card, when nothing has seemed worth enduring for another five minutes. . .and somehow the activity of writing changes everything. Or appears to do so.

Memoirist Sue William Silverman writes in an essay for Numero Cinque titled “The Courage to Write: Five Reasons Why It Is Important to Write Memoir,” that writing memoir helps us overcome fear:

But never give up! This sounds obvious, but the only way I know to work through difficult material is to do just that—write straight through it—focusing on one word at a time. Learn to sit in the dark places. To skirt an issue, to sidestep it, is to remain in an emotionally vague or unfeeling place.

Once the words are down on paper, you’ll feel as if a great weight, the weight of the past, has been lifted—not just off your shoulders—but from your psyche. Now, the past barely haunts me. It’s as if I extracted it, and now it dwells between the covers of a book. I feel lighter, freer, as if I can truly breathe.

It is always good to find that whatever you feel as a writer, other writers feel it, too.

Ralph Keyes, the author of The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear, mentions E. B. White’s lifelong nervousness about Manhattan where he lived and about writing, which he practiced. Keyes informs us that the characters and their issues in White’s children’s book Charlotte’s Web sprang from EB White’s own fears. Keyes writes that in the book Wilbur the pig is as scared of dying as White himself. He also quotes this statement of White’s, “I admire anyone who has the guts to write anything at all.”

As writers, we know that having the guts is healing. Even scientists are offering support for us writers saying this. If you type “courage to write,” “writing to heal” or “why writing is important” into your browser, you will find lots more links for reading that supports the need to write and the benefits of doing so.

When you feel fear about writing because it may reveal shortcomings or experiences that others might be judgmental or upset about, read about the value of writing and then write and write some more.