You may have taken time away from writing while preparing for the holidays, but now’s the time to jump back in to reach your writing goals. This week’s article from the Writing It Real archives first appeared in 2006. If offers support for taking the place of writing in your life seriously and a writing exercise to help you start the year off “write.”

To Those Who Write the Words of Their Personal Experience,

It isn’t an easy path to write from personal experience. There are no guarantees that editors will want to publish what we have to say and no guarantees that we will successfully find a way to say it, publication or not. What is guaranteed is that committing words to the page and revising our writing until it successfully makes contact with others changes our lives in unexpected directions.

Writing takes courage and affirmations about writing help us value our personal writing and acquire this courage. After a Writing It Real writers’ conference during which participants shared fresh work and enjoyed time to help one another craft their early starts, I wrote these:

Acknowledging

That we write because we feel the need,

That we write because we want to reflect on the meaning in our experience,

That we write because we want to get something down for others to read after we are gone,

That we write because we are alive and writing makes us more alive,

That we write because it is a form of play,

That we write because it brings us into contact with other writers whose minds and hearts we resonate with,

That we write because it makes us the people we want to be

makes writing a gift we cannot refuse to accept. 

Sharing our writing with trusted readers and learning to hear what our writing wants to discover, we not only grow our poems, our essays, and our stories but we grow ourselves, creating a path toward self-actualization.

Even recognizing this, it is sometimes hard for us to truly honor our writing as essential. Although we are surrounded with media that seems to value intimacy — TV talk shows about relationships and overcoming addiction and Dr. Phil-style experts everywhere — when it comes to writing about our own truths and memories, which production companies have not asked us to write, we may on our worst days, deem our experience inconsequential. “Why would anything I have to say be that important?” we ask, keeping ourselves from the page and the work of writing draft after draft to discover meaning and preserve experience.

But our lives are not the same without commitment to the page. This is because writing from personal experience means finding out how things are in our individual human hearts and minds and telling at least one reader, who is you. Hearing what you have to say, and, if you share it, hearing others hear you saying something important to you creates intimacy, something without which, despite our culture’s easy access to loads of distracting stimulation, none of us feels fully human.

In Wikipedia, you will find this in the definition of emotional intimacy: “frequently involves individuals discussing their feelings and emotions with each other in order to gain understanding and offer mutual support. It is necessary for human beings to have this form of intimacy on a regular basis for them to develop and maintain good mental health.”

We write to express and nurture this intimacy and to honor our humanity, our sense that loving ourselves, our human condition, nature and the others in our world is important–something neither money nor publication can buy.

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In Al Gore’s An Inconvenient Truth, there is an animation of a frog that leaps into hot water. If the water is boiling when he leaps in, he leaps right out. If it isn’t boiling when he jumps in but heats up to boiling gradually, he just sits there not noticing the increasing heat until it is too late. Gore’s point is that gradual change is not noticeable as crisis. By not addressing issues contributing to global warming and stalling despite pictures of melting glaciers and graphs of constantly increasing ocean and earth temperatures, we are waiting to be killed by our environment rather than leaping into action to save ourselves.

As writers, we cannot afford not to notice that by writing our lives’ truths we are jumping out of a system that tries to continually mold our wishes and thinking and will kill our hearts and minds if we sit there and let it. Gore lost the election for President, but he did not lose his voice — the film is testament to his passion for understanding the effects of CO2 emissions on this planet and to educating others.

This morning, I used a prompt I sometimes rely on to get my writing going. It is this: write down the first line of a book and write your own thoughts starting with that line. This time, the line I used was “Politeness fades” from the poem “After Long Silence” in Jane Hirshfield’s book, After.

In my freewrite, I repeated the short phrase at the opening of sentences and then created a title:

To the Group Where I Live That Wants to Make Us Cut Down Trees to Increase Water Views

Politeness fades when I remember that most of the trees that can clean CO2 from the air are in the northern hemisphere, growing on the largest landmasses above the equator.

Politeness fades when I hear two of you laughing in the street as you watch heavy equipment uproot spruce trees planted and tended on a corner lot to provide birds and squirrels a habitat.

Politeness fades when I am asked to fell trees in the ravine portion of my property so one person can see a water tower on Protection Island that served homesteaders no longer there because of lack of water.

Politeness fades when I think of the high clay bluffs here and the tree roots that keep rainwater from dangerously soaking the ground.

Politeness fades when I think of you declaring trees unfit to be part of your view after you’ve moved in your retirement to lands where eagles nest.

Politeness fades when I tell you that I have grandsons who will be not be half as old as you are now when there are no more glaciers and the sea has risen 20 feet and it is hotter where we want to live than humans can bear.

Politeness fades after I visit the reservation of a local Native American tribe and view an image of Thunderbird, named for the sound of its enormous wings beating, carrying out vengeance upon foolish monsters, a servant of the Great Spirit.

Politeness fades as I enter the battlefield, planting trees, planting trees, planting.

Try using this first line of Hirshfield’s “After Long Silence” to help you get what you are thinking about and feeling onto the page. Or use the first line of a book you are reading and see what leaps of association come to you to write.

Writing to know one’s heart and mind is an act of strength and commitment — an act that makes the writer and ideally the reader open to reality both inside and out, an act that creates resistance to manipulation and falsehoods. When you find the truth in your personal experience, you have radar for the untruths others perpetuate and the denial that allows them to do so.

Those of you who write from personal experience are my heroes because you are building the character of a better world, with each writing endeavor, each reaching toward the truth inside your experience.

Yours,

Sheila