writermag.com • The Writer | 9things with one of those grabber claws
for help. (The entry I wrote the night
my mom got robbed is full of all caps
and underlines; me swearing ven-
geance upon the guys that did it and
then ran away, literal thieves in the
night. Reading it is mortifying.)
This is why, although writing is
great therapy, the writing that exists
in your diary isn’t meant for anyone
else’s consumption but your own
weeping self.
And yet we get work in Tahoma Lit-
erary Review’s open queue that is
clearly written from the position of
someone who’s using their writing to
work their way through an event or
understand a problematic person in
their lives. Sometimes, this work can
take the form of short stories as the
writer tries to put up a wall between
the events that have affected them so
and the creative work they know can
help them and their readers to work
through the issues the event has raised.
Writer and producer Ken Pisani,
whose novel AMP’D was a finalist for
2017’s Thurber Prize for American
Humor, is one of the quickest, most
concise wits I know. If you’re writing
too close to an event that’s really
affected you, Pisani said in a class I
once took from him, you run the risk
of being maudlin.
That kind of treacly sentimentality
is enough to ruin any good that might
come out of a written piece of work.
Time and distance, it’s said over and
over again, heal all. So how can you
know when you’re too close to some-
thing? The two most telling ways I
know aren’t useful until after the fact,
but that’s OK. (If you already have
something written about your trigger-
ing event, then you have something to
start with. And it’s always easier to
work from something, even if nothing
from that first draft ever makes it into
the final draft.)
First: You’re really sensitive to feed-
back. You might feel like you’re ready to
get feedback on a piece of work, but
when you get the feedback, you’re all
jumpy and prickly. This is a surefire
indication that you can’t be objective
about what you’ve written, which means
you probably don’t have enough dis-
tance from the thing you’re writing
about. An acquaintance once asked me
to edit a piece about the very recent
death of her father. It had a lot of holes
in it, which I pointed out. She couldn’t
understand how I could tear down her
work so clinically when she was clearly
writing about something that was dear
to her.
Second: You feel icky when you’re
writing about the event, thing, or per-
son you’re trying to understand. This
is a similar feeling to when you’ve just
experienced something awful, and
you’re trying to write about it. You
relive it as you’re writing about it, so
writing about it feels like accidentally
brushing up against a skinned knee –
ouch! There. That cringe. That just-
before-barfing mouth-watering
sensation. If ever you experience that
while you’re writing something, step
away from it. You need more time
before you can try it again. When
you’ve let enough time go by that you
can poke at your skinned knee and it
has a protective scab over it, then you
can touch it.
OK. Fine. You begrudgingly agree
that you need time. But you need to,
want to write about this thing. It is
burning a hole in your creative pocket.
What do you do?
You compromise. You make some-
thing that’s just creative enough to be
proud of, but just wacky enough that
you balk at sending it in someplace for
consideration. You make something
just for you.
By “you,” of course, I mean “me.”
Here’s the party trick that never fails to
entertain my brain and keep me an
arm’s length from subjecting some
poor editor to my not-ready-for-con-
sumption work. (It also prevents mefrom subjecting myself to inevitable
rejection.)
I make a game of whatever the thing
was. I look for a new way to tell my
story, something totally wacko, like an
essay comprising entirely crossword
puzzle clues, maybe. I write a list of
directions, a recipe. Perhaps the thing
loans itself well to maps. I’ll write that.
Or I’ll write it from an animal’s point
of view.
Whatever the thing ends up being,
it’s definitely not ready for publication.
First drafts never are, right? Or maybe
it’s the bones of something even better
than what I would have originally writ-
ten. Either way, it’s a whole new work,
and that has fed my creative beast, so I
have bought myself a little more time
and distance before the urge to tackle
the thing darkens my door again.
So many times, I’ve slaved away at
something, only to realize that I’m just
not ready to write about the thing. But
I think this is OK: If a thing matters so
much that you just have to write about
it, then it deserves time and room to
breathe and evolve into something that
will see an audience.
Eventually, the mortifiying writing
will become something concrete. You
will have distance enough to see it and
its impact on you with clarity and with
more experience; you will have used
your tools and skills to shape it into
something that can truly help you to
resolve your feelings about the event or
person. The work will sound signifi-
cant when read out loud; look just
right on the page.
And, I bet that your eventual work
will have the added benefit of helping
someone else to navigate their own
thing, too.Yi Shun Lai is the fiction editor and co-owner
of Tahoma Literary Review. Read about her
writing coaching and editing services; her
novel, Not a Self-Help Book: The Misadven-
tures of Marty Wu; and her daily adventures at
thegooddirt.org.