Writing Between the Lines

People like to write about pain. Pain or sacrifice is the currency of your story world, and the more the characters must pay for what they want, the more value the story holds.

One of my favorite quotes of all time comes from Sam at the end of the second Lord of the Rings movie, The Two Towers.

Frodo: I can’t do this, Sam.

Sam: I know. It’s all wrong. By rights we shouldn’t even be here. But we are. It’s like in the great stories, Mr. Frodo. The ones that really mattered. Full of darkness and danger, they were. And sometimes you didn’t want to know the end. Because how could the end be happy? How could the world go back to the way it was when so much bad had happened? But in the end, it’s only a passing thing, this shadow. Even darkness must pass. A new day will come. And when the sun shines it will shine out the clearer. Those were the stories that stayed with you. That meant something, even if you were too small to understand why. But I think, Mr. Frodo, I do understand. I know now. Folk in those stories had lots of chances of turning back, only they didn’t. They kept going. Because they were holding on to something.

Frodo: What are we holding onto, Sam?

Sam: That there’s some good in this world, Mr. Frodo… and it’s worth fighting for.”

It’s so beautiful, and I could rave about it and everything Tolkien wrote, but that would seem a bit immature. And nerdy. But we love that part of the story because it goes deep and rings true. It feels so heroic. It makes us want to fight for good despite all the bad. It is hope in the middle of all the pain. (Read more on that speech here).

Naturally, we want to write something like that too. But something happens—a disconnect of sorts. And what follows is a discouraging statement of truth that will probably make you want to quit writing (or reading this post). Please don’t do either. :)

We cannot write convincingly about what we don’t know.

Ouch.

I don’t like writing that phrase. This isn’t to say we cannot write about a soldier when we’re not a soldier, that we can’t write historical fiction because we didn’t live in that time, that we can’t research or write an adventure set on spaceships and in galaxies. I’m talking about the emotional side, not things that can be researched like PTSD, or anxiety, or mental disorders, or grief (to some level).

I’m talking about things like deep forgiveness. Things like trust after it’s been shattered. Finding hope when there is none. And that stinks, because those are the stories that we all want to write. Unfortunately, some details can’t be found in research. But when someone who has experienced it writes about it, and then someone else who has also experienced it reads about it, the reader can go, “Yes, this is exactly how it is.”

This past June, at the annual writer’s workshop I attend, Allen Arnold said (paraphrased), “We cannot write deeper than we have been; it will ring hollow.”

I don’t like the truth of that statement. But I know it’s true, because my first novel falls short in that way. I tried writing about forgiveness after the villain takes everything from the MC. But honestly, I’ve never been hurt so deeply that I could write about all the overcoming it takes to be able to forgive on the scale that I tried to portray in my novel. So, it’s not—in my opinion—incredibly convincing.

Someone who hasn’t been hurt deeply might say, “Wow, what a neat story.” But someone who actually experienced what I tried to portray could probably tell that I’m faking it.

My second book isn’t much better. Slightly, maybe, but not much. It has potential, it just needs refinement.

So, since most of us don’t have the dramatic emotional experiences that we want to write about, we should just take a baseball bat to our computers, burn our notebooks, snap the pens, and get a job, right?

Nope.

What I’m about to write scares me. Because I’m afraid I don’t believe it fully. I’m afraid to think that I’ll more than likely have to trash some huge things about my first novel. I’m afraid this means I shouldn’t try writing stories bigger than my life. I’m afraid to accept the limits. But maybe the limitations are what free us to write things that will really change people.

What if what you do have is story enough? What if you write about the emotional things you have experienced? We are all human, we all have hurts, secrets, fears, and demons. What if you write about those?

There is a tendency to undermine what we have. We didn’t fight in the Great War like Tolkien did, so we can’t take all those feelings he may have had about the war and give them to our own Sam character. We didn’t spend time in a POW camp with the Bird, so we can’t write about forgiveness like Louie Zamperini’s.

We didn’t, we don’t, we can’t…

We focus on the wrong part. We focus on what we don’t have. We undermine the importance of the Story that God is writing for our lives. We say our Story isn’t grand enough. It’s not important enough. So, we ignore the things we can pull from it.

We say our stuff is too small. Our hurt and lessons from it aren’t “big enough.” We believe our personal stories aren’t important. We compare ourselves to others, and try to write their experiences, their hurt, their healing. And it falls short.

And there’s the other side, too. Maybe we have been scarred and learned from it in big ways. But we are afraid to write about it because that makes us vulnerable. It opens us to judgement from others who might criticize what they think is fiction, but what we have in fact experienced deeply. But everyone who writes vulnerably opens the door to connecting with the reader on a meaningful level, maybe even a healing level.

Watching The Lord of the Rings through the lens of knowing that Tolkien fought through the Great War opened my eyes to how many things he probably pulled from his experience of war.

I have a friend whose bedroom was in the basement. She’s afraid of the dark. And she writes poems. And she’s working on an amazing story about a kid who sleeps in a basement, writes poems, and faces those same fears. And it feels deep, and real, and meaningful. She’s drawing on her experience. She’s not downplaying her demons. She’s writing them, and it’s connecting with people, even if it’s just one person: me.

Don’t write autobiographies about your days of eating the same cereal for over a decade. You shouldn’t necessarily make your MC look exactly like yourself. Maybe cut the inside jokes that don’t add to the story and that no one will get but your family.

Pick the deep things, the emotional things. Write about those. And maybe, you’ll connect with someone who downplays their own struggles and help them realize…someone gets it, their struggles are real. That it’s okay. That there can be healing. Write raw. Write real.

“Every secret of a writer’s soul, every experience of her life, every quality of her mind, is written large in her words.” – Virginia Woolf

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Do you think we should try to write larger than our personal emotional experiences? Why or why not? Share your thoughts in the comments!

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