Member-only story
Trauma Writing: A Beginner’s Guide
Sometimes stories take us to difficult places.
Some of the most powerful works of literature are the ones that take us to the darkest corners of our worlds and our minds. But consider the Yiddish saying, “Anything can be survived if it’s part of a story.” As the characters we honor in nonfiction—or create in fiction—cope with trauma, readers can access their own pain and find healing.
We’re all continually working on our own deepest issues. Most of us have experienced trauma in our lives, and if we haven’t — well, we will. Especially after we’ve navigated the year and world of 2020, our space may feel very battered and wounded; it’s time for literature to reflect it back, to find the words to express it, and to set readers on the road to healing. We can develop resilience through the arts so we are better equipped to understand our own traumas … and face future ones.
Most people think trauma literature is about trauma. In fact, trauma literature is at least as much about the problematics of storytelling as it is about actual traumatic events. It’s about the difficulty of representing the truth of an experience so horribly extraordinary that it cannot be contained within the human mind, let alone within the borders of a page. It’s about, in the words of trauma scholar Dori Laub, the simultaneous “imperative to tell” and “impossibility…
