This is a shortie. Relief! I hear you say. It has been a funny week, and so you get something (your Pride-focused exploratory writing challenge), but I’m not go…

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This one is easy. I mean, who doesn’t like a rant! Okay, many people don’t actually like a rant; I can think of my dear Nanna (dad’s mum), the sweetest of all humans, who I …

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This is Week 2 of our mid-summer Writing Challenge on the Seven Deadly Sins. For Week 1, scroll to the bottom of this post about Lust. Find earlier Writing Challenges here.

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Creating a Finished Piece of Writing

We’re in the penultimate week of the Writing Home Challenge. If you’re still with me, hooray! And if you’ve not been keeping u…

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Home, of course, isn’t really about houses at all. Despite my interest in “home” as a located place (indeed, places) the real essence of home is a feeling.

…

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Fictional houses

A “house” dream. A big old b…

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We write memoir for many reasons. Maybe we have a story to tell. Maybe we want…

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After a week’s breather, here we are: launching the second six weeks of the Writing Home Challenge. As you can see from this week’s piece, I’ve been doing my homework (yeah, I know). Here’s how I approached writing it, and some ideas for developing your own pieces from the freewriting you’ve done. Even if you already have something you’re happy with, you might find a way of reapproaching it that pleases you even more. So let’s get cracking.

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Where we are

We are in Week 6 of the Writing Home challenge, and if you’ve been taking part, you should have some freewriting and other notes generated by the exercises in …

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How do we grow? First, we suffer.

We are born these bright, brilliant, curious beings, full of love and wonder, and from almost the first moment, we get bashed about by life. Hopefully, not literally, although yes, babies get battered. Many of those don’t survive, or survive with profound damage.

But even very loving, well-meaning parents can hurt our little baby hearts. They leave us to cry to “sleep train” us, implanting a fear of abandonment. They leave us hungry to train us into their routines. Sometimes, they drop us. Sometimes, they forget us. As we get older and sleep less, they might get stressed and shout at us. There seems to be no way around it. In the words of Philip Larkin,

They fuck you up, your Mum and Dad,
They may not mean to, but they do

My husband and I thought we were doing a stand-out job with my fourth child, our daughter. We raised her by the continuum concept. I breastfed her on demand until long past her baby teeth, long past when she had the words to ask for it. We practised co-sleeping until she was six. She never cried as a baby, and people constantly commented on this; on how contented she was. We were looking forward to meeting the first non-fucked-up adult human we knew.

But we fucked up. Of course, we did. We were so invested in her being this “super happy child” (our badge of great parenting, give us a medal!) that we dealt poorly with the sudden onset of tantrums aged eight, as her epilepsy medication propelled her into an early puberty (and let’s not look, for now, at the underlying causes of her epilepsy!). Plus, we sent her to school for a couple of years, and you can be sure if the parents are properly messing up a child, school will do it for you; the fucked up teachers, the fucked up other kids.

As my husband said to me when we found out she was self-harming in her teens, “I feel like we made this beautiful sandcastle, and then we put it outside, and the world stamped on it.”

So the point is, we can’t get away with not suffering. And I’ve come to believe that it is actually important that we suffer because it is part of our developmental process. The more we suffer, the more potential we have to grow in profound ways as human beings. Look at those inspirational people who have gone through enormous hardships and now inspire others to overcome perceived limitations. Look, for example, at Nick Vujicic.

I say, potential for growth because, of course, we can get stuck in our suffering. I was stuck in mine for decades (ages 9 to 36). But when we find the will and put in the time to start healing it, that growth begins. Post-traumatic growth is a well-known phenomenon.

But as I’ve written before, trauma isn’t just the big stuff. The small ‘t’ traumas shape us profoundly, all through our childhoods and beyond. The slaps and the put-downs. The insults and injustices. And it is this — small ‘t’ trauma (rather than diving into the stuff that scares us the most) — where we are going today.

Polling Your Thoughts

Last week’s poll asked you to tell me how many childhood homes you had. The snapshot (at 57 replies) surprised me: exactly a third of you (33%) said four or more. That “constantly moving” percentage definitely got me thinking. Me, I had two in the UK and two temporary ones in the US (my Dad’s sabbatical year at Berkeley), but I don’t think the number would matter so much if that second UK home hadn’t not felt like my home at all (it was very much my stepfather’s domain, and we four kids from the first marriage didn’t feel very welcome there).

For this week’s poll, I am asking something a little more personal, something in response to one of last week’s comments: how scared you are of writing parts of your past? I want to focus on this in our optional EFT tapping session next week, and I think it’s useful to start feeling our way into the dark corners — while not scaring ourselves too much.

Humans are understandably and appropriately self-protective beasts, and if this starts looking scary, I know you might run away, and I don’t want that. So there will be no pushing or forcing here. Just a gentle exploration, beginning with bringing to light your awareness of fear around writing your past. And then, if you like, you can join me in some EFT tapping next week in a live Zoom session, so we can bring that fear level down to the point that you might feel safer on that issue, maybe opening up the possibility to write about it and start healing some hard-to-reach areas.

I used to run a weekend course called Write the Damn Book, where we did exactly this, pinpointing what was getting in the way of our writing and removing the barriers via EFT. Next week, in a one-hour live session on Zoom, I’ll show you how to do this whenever you come up against a wall in your writing.

I’d love to work with you on real-life issues, so if you’d like to attend and be one of the people I work with, let me know: send me a private message (email is best), and we can talk through what’s involved. I’ll be recording it for anyone who can’t attend live.

The link to register for the call is at the end of this post.

But first, let’s get a sense (for you as much as for me) of where your fear (if any) might lie by answering this poll:

Structure going forward

As you know, I am experimenting in this Challenge with the best way to be responsive to your needs. My plan from the outset was that our 12 weeks would fall into two halves, with each of those halves comprising four weeks of prompts, followed by two weeks of reflection and writing development. This is week four, so we are about to head into the development fortnight, where posts (still on Tuesdays) will be paid subscribers only, for privacy reasons, with no extra content for free subscribers.

But for the second six weeks, I’m going to try something a little different. In an effort to stop sending so much into your inbox (I know we all need less of that), I am going to combine the second six weeks with my Friday posts.

The first half of each Friday post will be a short personal essay on the theme of the Writing Home challenge: an example of something crafted from the prompts, and this will be free for all to read. The second half of each Friday post will be paywalled and purely for members of the Writing Home challenge, with prompts and exercises to help you make the most out of this life-writing adventure.

So, expect two more Tuesday posts (one, the live Zoom next week), and then we will move the whole caboodle onto Fridays. Hopefully, this will be a pleasing structure for all of us.

Now, let’s dive in!

[This part is just for the paid community for privacy reasons, and because these gorgeous people help pay my mortgage so I don’t become homeless as well as jobless, but if you’re a free subscriber, I hope you found this post interesting and/or useful even in its curtailed form; feel free to like it!]

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Home means many things, but we can be fairly sure of one thing: it is place. Usually, a building of some sort or a space in a building, though it can also be a vehicle, a tent, or other temporary shelter.

The home or homes we have lived in make their mark on us. And this week, if you’re game, you can find out some of the ways those spaces have shaped you.

If you’re chiefly writing to gain insights into yourself, perhaps seeking to heal past wounds, describing the place(s) you lived can feel refreshingly neutral. And yet, you probably already know that your wounds are especially attached to particular locations. If what we’re talking about is a ‘Big T’ trauma, don’t imaginatively go to that space just yet. If this is you, choose, in the writing exercise, to go first to the parts of ‘home’ that felt relatively safe.

If you’re writing a memoir, you might take this as a setting/location exercise. It’s vital for readers to have a concrete place to place the protagonist (you). I’m reminded of the striking beginning of J.M.Coetzee’s Boyhood:

That third-person narrative viewpoint, by the way, is a fantastic trick if you need to distance yourself from your childhood. If there’s trauma in your past, you can try using she/he/they instead of “I” when you (free)write. It will give you a bit of breathing space. We are not the same person we were when we were eight or fifteen. I mentioned the poetic sequence in Material, ‘Driving Without Lights,’ in my Friday post. All third person. It was far too painful to call that person “I” when I wrote those poems a few years later.

Polling Your Thoughts

Last week’s poll asked you to characterise your childhood as happy or unhappy. At the time of taking this screenshot, my sample size was a mere 37 people, and the sample is too skewed to apply to the general population (you’re all subscribed to a Substack called How To Evolve, after all!). But wow, it’s very interesting that no one said their childhood started unhappy and became happier. 

Perhaps, once you get kicked off on the wrong foot, it can be difficult to recover your footing before you’re into adulthood. I can see why that would be the case. On the other hand, maybe the four-tenths of you who said your childhood was “difficult to characterise” at least saw some improvement. What will be interesting is whether, if you are taking part in the Writing Home challenge, you find at the end that your childhood is easier/harder to characterise! Mental note to repeat this poll in a few weeks!

For this week’s poll, I am asking how many homes you’ve had. This has a considerable effect on your sense of stability, though, of course, if you have very loving, stable parents, that could easily counteract the effects of moving around a lot. Still, there are the issues of possibly having to adapt to new schools, losing classmates and friends, and making new ones when existing groups are established. Let me know your answer in this poll:

I had two childhood homes that I remember (deleting the two we lived in during our year in the US, which never really earned the label “home”), and they had very different vibes. If you had more than one childhood home, you could choose to consider only the most significant or choose the two that were the most contrasting. If your count is 3+, I’ll still say, for now, stick with two so that you don’t over-burden yourself at this point (although, of course, it’s up to you). So, if you lived in more than one place you remember in your childhood, you might double up on the writing exercises. A compare-and-contrast, especially if you had a happy home and an unhappy home.

Experiment in the Present Tense

I’m going to ask you to write in the present tense. This brings the reader immediacy and intimacy (even if the only reader is going to be us, that is valuable). You might notice I slip into the present tense quite often in my memoir posts for that reason.

Because when we write our lives, this is not something irrelevant that is happening “in the past”. In some very real sense, especially if we haven’t processed our emotions around certain events, this is happening now. In addition, re-running it in the present tense can sometimes allow us access to memories we had blocked off from ourselves. Important details can become vivid.

The present tense really makes the past come alive, which is why so many historical novelists (including Hilary Mantel) have taken to using it. It is why J.M. Coetzee used it (along with the third-person narrative viewpoint) in the passage above. So, I’ll encourage you to use it in this week’s exercise and see how it works for you. You can report back to me in the comments!

[This part is just for the paid community for privacy reasons, and because these gorgeous people help keep me in my precious home, but if you’re a free subscriber, I hope you found this post interesting and/or useful even in its curtailed form; feel free to like it!

Stick around for the Friday essay, which I fear may prove a little explosive, as I tackle something that is getting my goat. I knew I should’ve kept it in the backyard!]

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Why Write Happiness?

“Happiness writes white” is a popular phrase among writers who teach writing. Its usefulness is explained by Salman Rushdie thus:

Without conflict it’s hard to have drama. One of the famous lines about literature [comes from] the French writer Henry de Montherlant [who] said about happiness, that it’s almost impossible to write about. He said, ‘happiness writes in white ink on a white page’—it doesn’t show up. If people are happy, there’s no story.1

A memoir, novel, or screenplay about a happy family (where the happiness is genuine, not wallpapered over dark secrets) isn’t going to grip the reader. Conflict is the engine of every story, and without it, we can’t create narrative drive.

But this doesn’t mean we shouldn’t focus on writing happiness. I can think of at least three good reasons to do so.

Contrast

Happiness is most explosive, vivid and heart-filling when set against its opposite. When a period of suicidal misery ends (as mine did) with unexpectedly falling in love, how vivid those first weeks are. Just the touch of skin means everything when it has been absent. Similarly, the shift into a broken home (through death or divorce) is more keenly felt when set against the bright memories of before. At the same time, very little is golden-then-dismal; there are usually fault lines you can, in retrospect, trace. But it is the contrast of our lives that makes them vivid.

Balance

Nothing is all bad. Indeed, as Shakespeare said, “There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. I can think of nothing less appealing than a ‘misery memoir’. Picking out the bright spots is vital for balance, and if we mean to publish, this will offer some gulps of oxygen to our readers. And let’s face it, ourselves. Writing about the tough stuff can be emotionally draining, and we don’t want it to subsume us. Which brings me to…

Wellbeing

We get more of what we focus on. So focusing on what we love about life and on good memories is something of an antidote if you find yourself writing about dark times. This is a matter of metaphysical awareness and good sense. Yes, writing about our dysfunctional or traumatic pasts can bring both insights and relief, but we don’t want to draw more of the same towards us.

I have experienced this more than once. When I was writing a thinly veiled version of myself in an unpublished novel, things I put my protagonist through began to happen to me. You know the film Stranger Than Fiction? It started to feel like I was playing both the Emma Thompson and Will Ferrell characters simultaneously. What my protagonist was going through wasn’t fun, and I decided I’d better turn her life around fast!

More recently, while I was writing about my abusive first marriage last year, several male acquaintances started trying to manipulate me into doing their bidding! These ‘echoes’ of my past reminded me yet again, to be mindful of my focus.

So it is good to ensure that when you are writing darkness, you also write about joyful things and ideally, instil a solid gratitude practice to keep your past in its place.

Polling Your Thoughts

Last week’s poll asked your chief reason for joining the Writing Home challenge. Thank you for your responses! I’ve noted the results. It helps me to know that nearly two-thirds of you (65%) are here for writing-related help. I’ll make sure you get plenty of what you’re after.

To the third of you here for insights/healing, let me just say you’re very important to me, and this comes with the territory! Put 11th Feb 6 pm GMT (noon CST) in your calendar to join me live for some EFT tapping. I’ll send the registration link to paid members via email.

Now to this week’s poll:

What Was Your Childhood Happiness Pattern?

“Home” isn’t only about childhood homes, of course, but this week, that will be our focus. Our early years are called our “formative years” for a reason, and by exploring them, we can get a better handle on what shaped us, and insights into our subsequent patterns. We’re writing about childhood happiness this week, and before we do, I’d love for you to participate in this poll.

Happiness Writing Inspiration

In the poetry workshops I’ve run over the years, I’ve often set a “happy poem” homework. Poets get very used to writing from unhappiness since poetry answers that ache very well. So, writing about happiness stretches our muscles, pushing us gently out of our comfort zone. For a recent model of a “current life” happiness poem, I might use Jack Underwood’s ‘Happiness’. Note how the final line carries a shadow of that contrast I mentioned above.

But the poem I have favoured as a model for two decades is this one by Thomas Lux.

Refridgerator, 1957

More like a vault -- you pull the handle out
and on the shelves: not a lot,
and what there is (a boiled potato
in a bag, a chicken carcass
under foil) looking dispirited,
drained, mugged. This is not
a place to go in hope or hunger.
But, just to the right of the middle
of the middle door shelf, on fire, a lit-from-within red,
heart red, sexual red, wet neon red,
shining red in their liquid, exotic,
aloof, slumming
in such company: a jar
of maraschino cherries. Three-quarters
full, fiery globes, like strippers
at a church social. Maraschino cherries, maraschino,
the only foreign word I knew. Not once
did I see these cherries employed: not
in a drink, nor on top
of a glob of ice cream,
or just pop one in your mouth. Not once.
The same jar there through an entire
childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat,
pocked peas and, see above,
boiled potatoes. Maybe
they came over from the old country,
family heirlooms, or were status symbols
bought with a piece of the first paycheck
from a sweatshop,
which beat the pig farm in Bohemia,
handed down from my grandparents
to my parents
to be someday mine,
then my child's?
They were beautiful
and, if I never ate one,
it was because I knew it might be missed
or because I knew it would not be replaced
and because you do not eat
that which rips your heart with joy.

The sheer joyful exuberance of this poem! I love to read it aloud; it lifts me every time. Try it! And spot the contrast: that jar of cherries is alight with joy because of the dullness it is set against, “an entire / childhood of dull dinners -- bald meat, /
pocked peas and … boiled potatoes”, the “chicken carcass … looking drained, dispirited, mugged.” So what can we learn from this poem about how to go about writing happiness?

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Welcome to the Writing Home Challenge!

We humans love stories—stories of resilience, survival, and transformation, stories that give us perspective on our lives. When it comes…

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