Ep. 50: Writing with, around, and through Trauma

In this episode of Around the Writers Table, we delve into the complex relationship between trauma and writing. Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, share our insights on how trauma influences our storytelling, emphasizing the importance of focusing on recovery rather than the trauma itself.

We discuss the nuances of writing about personal experiences, the difference between cathartic writing and memoir, and the significance of creating a supportive environment for writers tackling difficult subjects. The conversation also touched on the societal tendency to romanticize trauma and the need for writers to be aware of their emotional states while engaging with such sensitive material. Join us as we explore the healing power of storytelling and the ways writers can navigate their emotional landscapes while crafting their narratives!

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Ep. 50: Writing with, around, and through Trauma

Dave Hogan, Gina’s Pop
00:00:02
Welcome to Around the Writer’s Table, a podcast focusing on the crossroads of creativity, craft, and conscious living for writers of all ages and backgrounds. Your hosts are Gina, Melody, and KimBoo, three close friends and women of a certain age, who bring to the table their eclectic backgrounds and unique perspectives on the trials, tribulations, and the joys of writing. So pull up a chair and get comfortable here around the writer’s table.

00:00:42
Gina Hogan Edwards
Hello, listeners. Welcome back to another episode of Around the Writer’s Table. I’m Gina Hogan Edwards, here with my co-hosts today, Melody and KimBoo. And we’ve got a great topic for you. We’re going to dive deep into something that hopefully writers will find useful in their writing process, but first, we’re going to do a few introductions. As I said, my name is Gina. I’m a retreat leader, an editor, a creativity coach, and I write historical fiction. I mostly write on Gina’s Quill on Substack, which is about to get a little bit of a facelift. So if you check in today, be sure and check in in about a week or two, and you’ll see something slightly different, hopefully better. So let’s talk to my co-hosts here. How’re you ladies doing today?

00:01:29
KimBoo York
Yeah, I’m still working on coffee. 

Gina
Aren’t we always?

KimBoo
Always, KimBoo with the coffee. I am KimBoo York. I’m a novelist, both fiction, and I also write nonfiction. I’m also a productivity coach for authors. I love writing. I love talking about writing—obviously, because we’ve got this here podcast—and helping other writers write. I also run the 1 Million Words Club, which is a membership community on discord to help writers with accountability and creative progress. I am, yeah. So, Melody, your turn. Go.

00:02:08
Melody, A Scout
Okay. Welcome back, listeners. My name is Melody, A Scout, and I help my clients find their sense of home by restoring balance and harmony to their lives through plant spirit medicine and my book, Soul of the Seasons: Creating Balance, Resilience, and Connection by Tapping the Wisdom of the Natural World, available at most major online bookstores. And I am the plant lady. I love everything about plants. I love making them, I love growing them. I love making medicines from them. I’m also a plant spirit medicine healer. So, welcome back.

00:02:48
Gina
Good to see you, ladies. So we have a deep topic to go into today. We’re going to be talking about—

00:02:57
KimBoo
It’s going to be fun, Gina.

00:02:59
Gina
Yeah, of course it is. Of course it is. Our topic today is writing about trauma. So the first thing I’d like to do is to talk a little bit about the definition of trauma. But I also want to say that we are not therapists, and we are coming at this topic from the perspective of writers and editors and human beings, and so if you feel like you need any help, do please consult a professional. So this definition of trauma is one that I found, that I found particularly useful. It was in an article that was on Jane Friedman’s blog, which, KimBoo, you have an article that recently came up on her blog. She’s a great resource.

00:03:48
KimBoo
It did. Yeah.

00:03:51
Gina
So this was an article by Lisa Hall Wilson (correction: Lisa Cooper Ellison). And the way she describes trauma is any event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope, causes feelings of helplessness, and diminishes the ability to feel a full range of emotions. Anything can be traumatic depending on the individual and what they can cope with. I’ve never liked this idea of trauma: Little T. Trauma: Big T. Because trauma is trauma. 

A person experiencing any sort of emotional distress resulting from some event in their lives that just overwhelms their capacity to emotionally digest it is what we’re talking about when we talk about trauma. Is there anything you ladies would like to add to that definition or any feelings that you have about the definitions you’ve seen about trauma?

00:04:51
Melody
I’ll add that a definition, well, a clarification I would say I got from a therapist sometimes is it’s not necessarily a big event. It can be, but it also can be a series of small events that cumulatively create a pattern of distress in the individual—feelings of overwhelm, inability to cope. So it’s not so much the actual event, but how has that played out in your life?

00:05:27
Gina
Yeah.

00:05:29
KimBoo
Yeah. That kind of plays into what I was thinking is that one differentiation that I saw that made a big difference for me is trauma is not the event. Trauma is our internal reaction to the event. Because what can be— And that kind of gets back to your big t, little t ridiculousness. It’s not necessarily that one event is always traumatic, although there are certain events that are almost universally traumatic, but what can be traumatic to one person might not be traumatic to the other because of their background, because of their history, because of prior instances of abuse, or, you know, stuff like that. So we can identify traumatic events, but it’s not about ranking them or making a hierarchy of them. It’s because trauma is an internal reaction. It’s specific to us.

00:06:21
Gina
And we’re talking about this topic particularly in terms of how it shows up in our writing. And so I write mostly fiction. And you ladies have a different experience than I do in terms of writing about trauma in relation to the nonfiction that you’ve both published already and have been working on. And so I’m going to come at this a little bit from an editor’s perspective, because many of the clients that I have worked with have been writing memoir or personal development books that have reflected upon some event in their life that they consider to be traumatic. And so I’ve seen a range of coping skills, a range of ability to engage with the material or not through that process of getting the words on the page. 

That’s one of the reasons why I wanted to talk about this. I also just interviewed Pat Spears, wrote a new novel called Hotel Impala, and in that novel, she deals with homelessness and mental illness. So she was deeply in the mind space of how to convey the trauma that the characters were experiencing through those events in her fiction. One resource that I want to point authors to, because we’re going to talk a little bit more about writing trauma, a little more leaning toward the nonfiction, you know, memoir arena. But in terms of writing fiction, one really good resource that I have found is online. It is written by the two women—I don’t have their first names, but Puglisi and Ackerman are their last names, and they wrote a book that a lot of writers already know about called The Emotion Thesaurus.

00:08:20
KimBoo
I love that thing. That’s an amazing resource. Yes. So good.

00:08:23
Gina
It is really, really helpful, and that can be helpful when you’re writing about trauma. But also, they have a website now called the emotional wound database.

00:08:33
KimBoo
What?

00:08:34
Gina
Yes, I ran across it by accident, actually, and I’ll put a link to it in the show notes. But if you are writing about trauma, in fiction especially—but it would be helpful for nonfiction as well—I think this is a really good resource for writers.

So let’s talk about how writers experience the process of getting words on the page when they’re writing about trauma. And I’m gonna turn this over to both of you in just a moment, but I want to share what I’ve seen from an editor’s standpoint. 

It’s really important, I think, for writers to know when they’re ready to write about trauma. I’ve worked with writers who knew that they were ready to tell the story that they needed to tell, and they were very clear about why they wanted to tell it, and so they were able to put their toes in, pick their pen up, and go to it. I have also worked with writers and witnessed writers who have gotten into the process and then realized either they weren’t ready or maybe there were things that they still needed to process about that trauma that wouldn’t allow them yet to share about it in the way that they wanted to share. This can be distressing when you know that you’ve got something that you want to share and yet you’re just not quite ready to do that. 

So that has been something that I have seen from an editor’s standpoint. I do write a little bit about trauma in my fiction, and I realize that I tend to avoid the emotions that the characters are feeling because of that trauma. And I think that that’s probably one thing that’s really slowed me down in my writing. So anything you guys want to say about that in terms of fiction?

00:10:33
Melody
I don’t know any fiction that does not include trauma. I just don’t, don’t. I mean, it’s a whole part of the hero’s journey, heroine’s journey, is overcoming adversity, and how do you have adversity without some very dramatic trauma? As my friend and fellow writer Melanie Annis was talking about recently, and that is the point in the story where you know things will never be the same again, which is another definition of trauma for me. 

In working on my current novel, historical novel, main character deals with and faces a lot of trauma, a lot of trauma right out of the gate. And so I think my challenge… trauma has never, I’ve never shied away from it, either in my reading or my writing. But you do have to be careful, I think, in balancing that trauma with passages that allow the reader to digest and absorb those dramatic things.

00:11:57
KimBoo
Yeah, yeah.

00:11:58
Gina
We talked a little bit about that when we were going through the revision process of your book, Soul of the Seasons, is, you gotta give the reader a little breather. It can’t be boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom, boom relentlessly.

00:12:14
Melody
Which I am known for. And I need to remember that as a writer, too, because it was so challenging to write that book personally. Probably why it took me nine years to write it.

00:12:33
Gina
Yeah. So we’re going to talk a little bit more about your book and the emotions and trauma. But, KimBoo, do you have anything to add in terms of fiction writing and trauma?

00:12:45
KimBoo
No.

00:12:47
Gina
Okay.

00:12:51
KimBoo
I do. I think what we’ve already spoken of kind of covers a lot of what I would, I guess, warn writers about, because you’re reliving the trauma based on the characters that you’re writing. Right. And so having space for that, not just for your readers, but also for yourselves, is a critical component. I think that there is a lot of tendency to—oh, gosh, I’m going to say something that might be a little inciting—but there is a tendency in our society, in our culture, and especially in our movies and our books, to romanticize trauma. And we can fall into that very easily, I think, which just develops into a feedback loop, a negative feedback loop. We need the space to understand the implications of trauma and how far-reaching it can be in our lives as well as our characters’ lives.

00:14:04
Gina
Excellent point. Excellent point.

00:14:07
Melody
Yeah. So not only romanticizing trauma, aka violence, but also normalizing it.

00:14:18
KimBoo
Yeah, yeah, yeah.

00:14:21
Melody
And that has its own set of problems because then we come to, like, desensitize ourself from it and minimize it.

00:14:29
KimBoo
Yeah, yeah. Desensitization.

00:14:33
Gina
That’s one end of the spectrum in terms of, you know, the relentless trauma showing up in your fiction. And there’s also then the other end of the spectrum, which I alluded to in terms of me taking so long to write my characters, is because we want to be comfortable. We really don’t like to get into that space of having to think deeply about hard things, and so sometimes we can not develop our characters’ emotions fully enough for the events to be believable or plausible. So there’s sort of this balancing act, right? How much do you introduce and how much of the characters’ emotions do you show, and how well do you depict them? And do you, as the writer, feel ready to delve into that?

00:15:32
Melody
Oh, that’s a big question.

00:15:33
Gina
Yeah. I have a couple of questions for you ladies that all kind of revolve around that readiness to give the listeners some background about your own writing. I’d like each of you to share a little bit about how trauma has played a part in your writing. Where does it show up in your writing? How has it become a part of your writing? KimBoo, would you like to go first?

00:15:59
KimBoo
Sure. I think it’s interesting because what I’ve noticed, it’s not that I don’t put my characters through traumatic situations like Astra in Escape from Ice Mountain, which I’m starting to serialize on my blog, the Scriptorium, or actually the Bibliotheca, which is the new fiction blog that I’ve started. The first whole book is a massive trauma situation of her home being attacked and her having to go on the run. So that’s the adventure side of it. I mean, I had to put her in that situation to start the story, right? But historically speaking, for me as a writer, what’s interesting is that the way that trauma shows up in my stories is usually in the past tense, because trauma doesn’t interest me. I’m not interested in how you got traumatized, whether it was the death of someone you loved, a major accident. That just doesn’t interest me at all, the circumstances leading up to it. What I find interesting to write about and what I realized after a while, after, I think it was my third book when I finally realized it, was that what I’m interested in is in the trauma recovery. What do you do after the trauma? 

For instance, one of my most popular books is The Protector, which is a queer thriller romance novel, and in it, one of the characters is a widower. His trauma happened several years before the book opens. And there’s lots of stuff that goes on in the book, and it’s dramatic and there’s a bad guy and all that sort of thing. But his personal trauma happened in the past tense, and that continued through on other books that I’ve written, that the major trauma these characters have gone through is in the past tense. So that was interesting for me to realize and interesting for me to realize as a writer, because it made me come to a clear understanding of the kinds of stories I want to tell. A lot of people really like writing about the trauma, the war, the fight, the loss, the illness, the accident. I like writing about what happens after that.

00:18:11
Gina
I love that. That’s so hopeful, too. I envy you in being that clear about the approach that you want to take with trauma in your writing. So that’s the fiction side of it. Can you tell us a little bit about the nonfiction that you’ve written?

00:18:31
KimBoo
Okay, well, I’m sure we’re talking about Grieving Futures: Surviving the Death of My Parents. I was orphaned as a young adult in my early to mid twenties, and my parents had both had long histories of alcoholism and mental illnesses, so there was a lot of trauma to go around. I mean, you want some trauma? My father was an Air Force officer who survived three wars. Right? So we got trauma. And what I’ve realized, in fact, I just wrote, I was working on a blog post about this. In writing, I have come to realize for me that there’s a difference between catharsis, a cathartic writing, and a memoir. 

Grieving Futures was cathartic for me, it was therapeutic, and I don’t want to impugn that, to say that that’s a lesser style of nonfiction. I think it was important. It’s a very powerful piece. I do not want to go back to cathartic writing. I want to write memoir. And so to me, the difference would be a cathartic memoir is one that’s written for the writer. I needed to get that out. I needed to explain to people what happened to me. A memoir is telling the story for the readers. I want the reader to understand the kind of parents, the kind of people that my parents were. So the memoir, the book that I’m working on now, The Empty Bowl, is sort of a bookend. It’s not a sequel. It’s a bookend piece to Grieving Futures, where I want to try to explain that these really broken people who died tragically were complex and interesting, and I love them and I hate them and I miss them and I mourn for them. And that’s what I want the readers to take away.

00:20:32
Gina
There is definitely a difference between the cathartic writing and the writing that we share. I’m going to bookmark your comments about cathartic writing because I want to come back to them. We’ll circle back to that later with another question that I’ve got. But, Melody, I want to give you a chance to tell us a little bit about how trauma has shown up in the writing that you’ve done or maybe is becoming part of your writing. You mentioned a little bit about that in your fiction, but I also want to hear about that in terms of the book that you’ve already published, Soul of the Seasons.

00:21:10
Melody
Hmm. Yeah. When you were just talking about it, KimBoo made me realize I had made a conscious decision during writing Soul of the Seasons, my nonfiction book, I did put some personal stories that contain trauma, but they were really mostly about me. There’s a chapter on Harvest, the season of abundance and nurturing and being nurturing and motherhood. Took me over a year to write that chapter because of my complicated and traumatic relationship with my mother, who was still living at the time I published it, and I consciously made the decision not to include that. I had no desire at all to write something that would be hurtful to her, but also, to me, I felt like I didn’t want that to overtake the story of the seasons, which to me was the more important message I needed to get out. So I did consciously choose. I included stories about my mother, but I did not go into the more detailed and the narcissism and the betrayal and abandonment I felt from a child and all that. That may be in another book now that Mom has passed, but I chose not to do that in that book.

00:22:55
Gina
So for readers who may not be familiar with your book yet, tell them a little bit about what the topic is in terms of the seasons. And I want to clarify that Melody and I worked together on that book. I was her editor. You use personal stories to illustrate a lot of the aspects of the things that you talked about in that book. And so it’s not memoir. It’s more of a personal development book. But you did use personal stories, which is definitely different than a memoir. So give the readers some perspective about what that book is about so they’ll understand what I mean by that.

00:23:36
Melody
Sure, I trained, gosh, it’s been over ten years ago that I trained as a plant spirit medicine healer. I read a little book called Plant Spirit Medicine by Eliot Cowan that just shifted and moved me and talked about the interconnectedness of the whole world and our relationship with the natural world and how important that is for us to respect and honor it, but also learn from it. So one of the basic tenets of plant spirit medicine comes from a practice called five element medicine, a part of traditional Chinese medicine. It’s all about creating balance and harmony. I wanted to bring in ways for people to recognize when they were in balance and harmony and when they were not, and some tips on how to restore balance and harmony in your life, which is, to me, core to healing.

00:24:43
Gina
And each of the seasons is equated with particular emotions, right?

00:24:50
Melody
Yes. Each one has a core emotion. It’s associated with what’s called an element of wood, fire, air, metal, and water. And they each have their own internal organ systems and their energetic organ systems. It’s fairly complex. It was developed over about 2,300 years by some Chinese sages. So to me, it’s fascinating because it helped me understand some of the dynamics of life and then also my interaction with life and what happens. It’s powerful. It isn’t a quick read for most people.

00:25:41
KimBoo
No, it’s not. It’s deep.

00:25:45
Melody
Yeah. Friends who’ve had it, they’re like, “Okay. I’m working on a paragraph right now.” Yeah.

00:25:52
Gina
So, yeah, I’m really curious about, from both of you, having seen writers, on one hand, being ready and just diving in, and then some writers really struggling with the process of writing as they’re still working through their trauma or revisiting aspects of the trauma. I’m curious from both of you, how did you know that you are ready when you wrote about trauma? Or I know you know, KimBoo, you have this memoir that’s coming out, too. So how do you, how do you make yourself ready when you’re writing about trauma? What are the things that you do?

00:26:38
KimBoo
Ready?

Gina
A lot of snickers are going on.

KimBoo
Yeah, I don’t.

00:26:44
Melody
I’m just thinking about what a total pantser I am. Ready was not a part of my equation. It was like, oh, this story idea popped in my head. I got really excited about it, and in the middle of writing it, I’m like, holy shit. This is so much bigger. You know? So Gina, you were really good in helping me manage some of that because I constantly overwhelmed myself during the writing of Soul of the Seasons because it’s deep and it’s powerful and it’s beautiful. But you were good in reminding me to take frequent breaks, which was a lifesaver.

00:27:33
Gina
I’ll reframe my question for you then. While you were writing about trauma, what did you do to take care of yourself?

00:27:42
Melody
Yes. Definitely took breaks during the difficult chapter, including mothering that took me a year, I wrote about other things. I jumped ahead to different chapters. I knew I had all the materials I needed to write about it, so I just left it. Writing this book has come from, for me, a source and a power beyond my own little mind in ways I can’t tell you. I reread it again. I’m like, holy crap, who wrote that? It’s just stunning to me, the information that was given to me. And I write in the book about appetite and satisfaction in the chapter on Harvest, which is also about self nourishment. And as much as I love lemon meringue pie, I can’t eat it every day. Too much. Too much of a good thing. And so I needed to make sure I was feeding myself on all levels: intellectually, spiritually, physically, emotionally, and make sure I was getting nurtured on all levels. And I think that has helped me the most.

00:29:04
Gina
That’s excellent, because what I see writers often doing is taking this deep dive and not coming up for air and feeling like they’ve got to plod through it and they’ve got to just keep on going and, you know, there’s life still happening out there while they’re writing and engaging in that life and keeping that balance of all of those aspects that you just mentioned, I think is an excellent point for a practice to support writers as they’re writing about trauma.

00:29:40
Melody
Yeah. Because I’ve seen a number of friends, writer friends, who gave up on their project.

00:29:49
Gina
Yep.

00:29:49
Melody
Because it hit them, however long through, it hit them, how deeply this passage has affected them. Perhaps they hadn’t dealt with some of that trauma that they thought they had. That happens a lot. Oh, it’s in the past. I’ve dealt with that. I’ve done even some therapy on it. But it comes like it’s fresh again, and they may not know how to deal with that, and they put their work away, which is, it’s a loss not only to them, but to their potential readers.

00:30:23
Gina
And I think that happens a lot, unfortunately.

00:30:26
KimBoo
Yeah.

00:30:26
Gina
So, KimBoo, tell us a little bit about readiness.

00:30:32
KimBoo
That’s a good question, because as I talked about, I’m working on the next book and memoir of Grieving Futures, which is The Empty Bowl. And I think my lessons–it’s ironic listening to you talk, because my lessons from writing the Grieving Futures book was that I did none of that. I was not prepared. I just wanted to get it out. I rushed through it. I basically flattened myself in the writing of that book. I was in therapy at the time, which I think was helpful. And one of the reasons I wrote it was, I think as these things came up in therapy, I wanted to process them in a way that was comfortable for me, which is always writing. 

But as I look at writing The Empty Bowl, I’ve realized that there’s steps I need to take to write the story. I want to write one of them, Gina and Melody, as you both know, is that I’ve realized I can’t really write it in my house. I have to write it, I have to be somewhere else. The first chapter or the introduction, I’m not sure what it is, the first section of it that I’ve really written, I wrote at the Story Camp writer’s retreat with you, Gina, and I was beachside. I was in a completely different house. I was surrounded by people. Some I knew, some I didn’t. It was just a separate environment from the household where I am. So that’s one thing I’ve realized, and I think that’s a healthy thing, because I’ve realized that for me to try to write that in my home space feels very, makes it just feel very constricted, like I’m closing myself up in a cave and blocking the door. Whereas if I’m writing it somewhere else, even if it’s just at a coffee shop, I feel like the breeze is on my face and I’m expansive. And I could be inside, deep in the heart of a coffee shop and not on the beach, but it’s still that feeling of, ironically, freedom to be able to explore those things because those emotions aren’t going to trap me. Maybe I’ll move past that as I work more on the book. 

But the other thing is, of course, and I think we’ve mentioned this before, and I just can’t hit it on it enough, which is have a great support system. Have people who will pull you out. Have a therapist if that’s what you need to have at the time or available to have at the time. Have friends who will check on you if they don’t hear from you for a few days. Have writer friends who will say, well, what else? That was a heavy chapter there, friend. What are you doing to lighten it up for a little while or take a break or find something fun to do? And you know that support network, I have learned as I’ve aged—I feel like an old woman now. In my age, I have learned this important lesson, children—which is keep your friends close because they will help you when things get rough.

00:33:33
Melody
Especially your writer friends, because they understand like no one else can.

00:33:37
KimBoo
Absolutely.

00:33:41
Gina
Being in a different environment is an interesting topic for me because I have found in my writing in general, I always do better, tend to get more words on the page when I switch up my environment rather than writing at home. But I think it’s important, especially when you’re writing about trauma, to feel like you’re in a place of safety.

00:34:02
KimBoo
Yes, that is important, very much so. At Story Camp, you were there, it was a safe house in a way, you know, right there on the beach. It was a very safe environment. I don’t think I would be able to do that if I was in the middle of an airport or something like that. That would not, that’s not what I’m talking about now.

00:34:23
Gina
Yeah, yeah, yeah. Definitely. So choosing the place wisely when you change your environment to do that writing. So as we wrap up this conversation, I want us to—

00:34:35
Melody
Wait! I had one more question I thought about on the way to do this, and I wondered if each of you could give me some feedback on it. How do you know… Gina talked about Inner Disquiet in the creativity cycle, and I’d urge our listeners to go back and re-listen to those. We’ll put those episodes in the show notes as well. How would you tell the difference between Inner Disquiet and being triggered by trauma during the writing process?

00:35:10
KimBoo
Yeah, Gina, that’s a good question. That’s a very good question.

00:35:17
Gina
Oh, that’s a really good question. KimBoo, do you want to babble about anything while I ponder on that?

00:35:24
KimBoo
Let me just fill some empty space here. Yeah. I’m honestly not sure that you’ll know 100% until you trip over that. Maybe. I’m not sure that’s something you can really know until you walk into that room and find out. I would like to think that maybe after doing it a few times, you’d learn the warning signs, but, yeah. The difference between just Inner Disquiet, something poking at you and bothering you, versus a trauma reaction being triggered by something that’s upsetting you, I don’t know.

00:36:02
Gina
So I see Inner Disquiet as being that space of the individual wanting to write and yet they are not writing. And the reason for that not writing, the reasons can be varied, and I don’t think the reason really matters. I think that whether it’s making excuses that you’ve got too many things to do, or that you don’t have your desk set up right, or that you are writing about trauma and you’re not ready to write about trauma, and yet you want to be writing about it, it’s all the Inner Disquiet. I think it’s all the same.

00:36:43
KimBoo
Interesting. Okay.

00:36:46
Melody
I think that that’s valid. And my comment would be, I don’t know if it makes a difference if it is or not. You still have to delve into that Inner Disquiet. I mean, I felt like from early on, Inner Disquiet was always part of my healing from trauma process.

00:37:11
KimBoo
Interesting.

00:37:12
Melody
Personally.

00:37:13
KimBoo
Yeah.

00:37:15
Melody
I always had this period where I would just feel unsettled, agitated. Had one recently. Know what I did about it? I cut my hair off.

00:37:28
KimBoo
A classic. That’s a classic. Oh, no, no your hair is shorter.

00:37:34
Gina
Can’t write? Go get a hair haircut.

00:37:39
Melody
Well, one of my favorite teachers said, change one thing in your life and things will shift. I can get up into my head too much in overthinking. What if it’s this and would I do this and what if I didn’t do that, and if you ask internally—some people call that prayer—but even asking internally, what do I need to see about this? And then just release it to see what comes back to you. I would say over time, if you’re not able to move past it and do the things you want to do, the writing you want to do, then maybe time to talk to a therapist about it. Certainly rely on your writer friends and ask, you know, “I’m going through this and this is what’s happening to me.” And gain some of their knowledge and wisdom about it.

00:38:44
Gina
The stage that usually comes after Inner Disquiet is Releasing, and Releasing might be releasing your resistance to getting help so that you can move forward. Oh, yeah. And not to make light of trauma, but releasing could be releasing all of your hair. Changing the one thing so that you can just move on in whatever way that is. Whatever.

00:39:18
Melody
Well, it’s true. It does not have to be another trauma to release your trauma. I just want to say that.

00:39:26
KimBoo
Yeah.

00:39:26
Gina
Yes. It doesn’t have to be something of magnitude.

00:39:30
Melody
Well, and maybe I’ve grown and learned over the years, but when I’m truly ready to release it, it may be intense, but it doesn’t last long.

00:39:39
KimBoo
Yeah.

00:39:40
Melody
I don’t have to go through a big, long drug out, angst filled. I just have to be ready.

00:39:47
Gina
Yeah. Yeah. So the last thing I want us to do is to see what maybe tips or suggestions that you have to any listeners who may be writing or intend to write about trauma. And one thing that I would say from my work with clients is that I read somewhere recently that oftentimes our trauma is around being seen in a way that we don’t want to be seen, or it is about not being seen at all. And so the writing and the publishing—

Melody
Or both. 

Gina
Or both. The writing and the publishing process, therefore, is fraught with possible triggers, because what is more revealing of oneself than publishing a book and being seen in that way? Right?

00:40:43
KimBoo
Yeah, Gina.

00:40:44
Gina
Yeah. So KimBoo had mentioned catharsis, and I think that it’s important for listeners who want to write about trauma to really consider whether they want to write something—so there’s a difference between writing something to be shared and writing something that you’re writing for yourself as catharsis. So it may be that the writing that you intend to do would serve you better in journal form, something that you’re not going to share with anybody so that you truly can release all of the words onto the page that are going to exemplify and process that trauma in a way that’s totally uninhibited, as opposed to trying to write it for somebody else to read about it. 

Now, it may be you do both. But it may be that just one or the other is the right path for you. And so I think that considering that is a very important thing for writers to do, and it may be, you don’t have to necessarily make that decision right away. You may start the writing and then decide, oh, I’m not going to publish this, I’m just going to journal. Or the other way around, you may start journaling about something and go, oh, I could make this into a book.

But the warning that I want to give you is, don’t be so caught up in the idea of publishing a book and all of the romantic fantasies that go around the idea of being an author and being a published author and maybe being a bestseller to compel you to write about something that you may not be ready to share or just may not want to share. So that’s my tip. So what do you guys have for writers who are writing or want to write about trauma?

00:42:49
Melody
That’s really good, Gina. And what I was thinking and you were talking about that is, in the beginning, this is just the perfect time to be a total pantser. Just get it all out. Just don’t filter it, don’t censor it. Don’t worry about if it’s viable for a book or what your Aunt Betty’s gonna think about it. Just get it all out. Because when I was writing Soul of the Seasons, I had a lot of stuff to stay. lots really important shit, I should say. But after the process, through Gina’s help, but also, I think really during the part where I handed it over to some beta readers and they made comments about some of the passages in there, sounded like I was on my soapbox, and I went through again and realized, yeah, I just needed to get that out. I’m good with that. I don’t have to include that. It takes away from the story instead adds to it. So that was my experience. I also have a drawer with a 350-page novel that will never see the light of day.

00:44:03
KimBoo
I think we all have one of those.

00:44:04
Melody
Because it was just a total purge, what I needed to do.

00:44:14
Gina
What about you, KimBoo?

00:44:17
KimBoo
I think we’ve hit a lot of the things like you were talking about, you can just write something for yourself. We talked about having a good support group around you, especially other writers who understand the trauma of writing about trauma, taking breaks, allowing yourself time in between or time to do other things or write other things. I think for me, the most critical part is for me, and something I caution everybody is to suspend self judgment. If you’re trying to write about trauma, whether it’s for a fictional character or whether it’s nonfiction, like Melody or memoir-ish, like I did with Grieving Futures and what I’m trying to do with The Empty Bowl, it’s very easy to look back and—and I don’t mean be judgmental about your writing, suspend judgment about your writing, because that’s something we should all do at some point in the editing process. But suspend self judgment and moral judgment on your own reactions, because I think you’re going to hit things that you didn’t expect that you were going to hit. 

Whether it’s a small trauma or whether it’s a big trauma—even with losing my parents, which I think people generally have been very supportive of the fact that that’s a big trauma that was pretty major. There were a lot of other elements into it that led into it being a very specific type of trauma for me. And I had a lot of anger and regret about how I dealt with my grief afterwards, which in a lot of ways, I did not deal with my grief, right? And when I was writing Grieving Futures, even though it was cathartic and even though I did want to share it with other people eventually, I was very angry at myself when I realized, when I wrote down my life, when I wrote down what I had been through, and that was unfair to me. I needed to step back and allow myself to feel those things without judgment and without moral approbation or whatever, or ethical. You should have grieved better. You should have recovered faster. You should have. And when you hit those things when you’re writing about them, that’s still true. You’re going to write about something that upsets you. Well, that’s okay. It’s okay to be upset about something that you wrote.

00:46:51
Gina
Yeah.

00:46:51
KimBoo
You know, that’s. That’s fine. You’re not a bad person for writing it, and you’re not a bad person for being upset about it.

00:47:00
Gina
Wow.

00:47:01
Melody
That may have been the healthiest thing for you to do, was to leave it alone for a while. I’m serious. Because this is the way the psyche protects us a lot of times, is to close it down completely at the moment of the trauma, because we cannot emotionally, mentally, or physically process that at the time.

00:47:27
KimBoo
Well, it goes back to the original definition that Gina was reading, which I’m reading it, and it’s an event that overwhelms a person’s ability to cope, causing feelings of helplessness and diminishes the ability to feel a full range of emotions. And that was me for ten years. It’s easy for me to go back and be judgmental about that and especially judgmental about myself as I was writing about it. That was not helpful.

00:47:49
Melody
Mm hmm.

00:47:51
Gina
This is such a loaded topic. I know that we could talk much longer about this.

00:47:57
KimBoo
This is already going to be one of our longer episodes. Yeah.

00:48:01
Gina
Yeah. But I’m really, I love some of the things that we came up with here, and I hope that listeners are able to draw some things from it that can help them in their endeavors toward writing for trauma, because I think there were some really good tips in here. Thank you, ladies, for diving into this not necessarily light and funny topic, but here we are. 

So we’ve got an interview coming up in our next episode. We’re alternating these topics that we dive into with the three of us, and then one of us for the next episode will be interviewing someone. Do we have somebody lined up yet or are we still working on that?

00:48:42
KimBoo
Yeah, Melody. I know that’s next year. Next up. Yeah. Who are we doing? Do you know yet?

00:48:47
Melody
Yeah. I am going to interview my dear writer friend Trish McEnulty.

00:48:57
KimBoo
Awesome.

00:48:57
Melody
About her historical novels. So I am really excited to do that.

00:49:03
KimBoo
That’s fantastic.

00:49:03
Gina
Awesome.

00:49:04
KimBoo
Love it.

00:49:04
Gina
Love it. I’m anxious to hear that one as well. And listeners, we hope that you’ll tune in and catch Melody interviewing Trish.

00:49:13
KimBoo
So. Yes, Absolutely. That’s going to be up. This is our 50th episode, which we didn’t mention. I’m very excited about that. I know, right? We’ve done 50 whole episodes. We’ve gone through the seasons of writing based on Melody’s book. We’ve gone through The Creativity Quest, which is a cycle of phases that Gina discusses. We’ve got so many resources, y’all, in our back catalog. So we really, at this point, I want to invite you, if you made it all the way through this episode, definitely go back and listen to a lot more of us because I think that’s a good use of your time. 

We appreciate everyone joining us on this journey. We look forward to having a lot more discussions along these lines because we really enjoy them. It’s why we started the podcast in the first place. You can catch us on YouTube, you can catch us on all major podcasting apps such as Spotify and Pandora. And I don’t even know what podcasting apps are these days. But wherever you catch us, please give us a thumbs up or a like or heart or what the heck ever they’ve got. Helps us get noticed by the algorithm. And if you go to our website for this episode, you will be able to find the transcript, you’ll be able to find links to all the resources that we discussed here, and we have a feedback form where you can submit questions or comments of things you’d like us to talk about in the future. So thanks y’all for joining us and we look forward to talking with you again soon. Bye.

00:50:43
Gina’s Pop
Thanks for joining us around the writer’s table. Please feel free to suggest a topic or a guest by emailing info@aroundthewriterstable.com. Music provided with gracious permission by Langtry. A link to their music is on our homepage at AroundTheWritersTable.com. Everyone here around the writer’s table wishes you joy in your writing and everyday grace in your living. Take care, until next time.

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Around the Writer's Table and its co-hosts, Gina Hogan Edwards, Melody, A Scout, and Kimboo York own the copyright to all content and transcripts of the Around the Writer's Table podcast, with all rights reserved, including right of publicity. ​​You ​are welcome to share an excerpt from the episode transcript (up to 500 words) in media articles​, such as ​​The New York Times, ​Miami Herald, etc.; in a non-commercial article or blog post (e.g., ​​Medium); and/or on a personal social media account for non-commercial purposes, provided you include proper attribution and link back to the podcast URL. No one is authorized to use the Around the Writer's Table logo, or any portion of the transcripts or other content in and of the podcast to promote themselves.

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