Writing Workshop: Writing with Compassion
A guest post by Sarah Passingham.
I have been lucky enough to teach two Life Writing courses for people aged 70+ at the National Centre for Writing and developed the following exercise when I realised that I was not alone in finding memory mining painful and at times almost traumatic.
Diving into our past for the purpose of writing memoir can be painful and our first attempts to write can seem chaotic, so the purpose of this exercise is compassion — self-compassion initially, but also compassion for the other characters in your life-writing piece. Once you understand the technique you can use it to take the sting out of other areas of life-writing and for focus.
Part 1
Think of an often-repeated family or workplace anecdote or comment that would make you grit your teeth or curl your toes — and probably still does.
Make a list as quickly as you can — no self-editing — of all the emotions that bubble up when you allow yourself to sink into that memory. Don’t overthink. No more than 30 secs.
Decide on the major issue: misjudged, unfair, untrue, not the whole truth, a vehicle to assume power, or simply unkind to you or others, etc.
Already, by identifying why the event is upsetting you might feel your emotions come down a notch or two.
Next, decide what you would like the reader to take away. What is it that you wish to communicate with your reader and help them understand or relate to? This will help you focus and deal with the ‘so what?’ question.
Part 2
Now, take ownership of the narrative. Rewrite the event in your own words exactly as you see the truth, adding nuance and mitigations if you feel you need to.
You don’t need to be dispassionate — in fact putting your feelings or those of others into the mix can enrich the writing — but try not to apportion blame. If you need distance to achieve this, write it in the third person. If you are someone who feels better when you share, you can use the epistolary format and write a letter where you imagine a sympathetic reader — someone you know, dead or alive — trusted to hear you and not to judge. Or to get closer, try writing in the second person, which can feel very powerful.
Whatever form you choose, and you might experiment with what works best for you, keep it short, 250 ideally, 500 words max.
My class shed some tears during this exercise and when we shared, but all found it to be helpful in making sense of a troubling event and gave them a clear trajectory of where they wanted to go when starting to write.
Sarah Passingham lives on the edge of the Norfolk Broads, a watery landscape that inspires and underpins much of her writing. Her latest book, PUSH: My Father, Polio, and Me was published by Gatehouse Press in 2019. Sarah is a trustee of the SAW Trust for Science, Art and Writing and is a British Polio Fellowship Ambassador. You can read Sarah’s piece, ‘Vicarious’, in Hinterland Issue 15.