Writing can Hurt

by Veronica Zundel        

I’ve not been able to find it again, but someone wrote a post here recently on how much spending time at your desk writing can actually hurt physically.  It reminded me of this wonderful quote from an Anglo-Saxon scribe:

‘Only try to do it yourself and you will learn how arduous is the writer’s task. It dims your eyes, makes your back ache, and knits your chest and belly together. It is a terrible ordeal for the whole body.’ (Prior Petrus, early C10th).

And he was only transcribing the words of others, not having to find his own! But he did have to write by hand, beautifully, with only a quill pen, a sort of lectern and a hard stool – no ergonomic keyboard or adjustable chair with lumbar support.

Anyway, reading that post started me thinking about how writing can hurt in other ways – especially when what we are writing is very personal. About six years ago I started a memoir of my late brother, who killed himself in 1975 after nine years of mental illness. Inevitably this brought in my family’s Holocaust-related history, and all the legacy of sorrow and emotional deprivation that continues as trauma in the second and even third generations. The first half of the book was going to cover this history, his illness and death, and the second explore the lasting impact on my life.

Oddly enough, the first half was easy to write. Perhaps because much of it was about our culturally rich and apparently happy childhood, and since I was on a roll describing that, it wasn’t too hard to draft the first account of when things went wrong. However I then laid the book aside in order to start an MA in Writing Poetry, which took me three years instead of the prescribed two, as I was diagnosed with breast cancer for the second time and had to defer the course. Since I finished, I have been trying for several months to make a new start on the memoir,  but I’ve found it almost impossible to apply myself to it.

Part of the reason is that so much else has been happening in my life: I’ve been buying a car, applying for Austrian citizenship under a scheme for the descendants of Holocaust survivors and refugees, trying to discover if I have a whole extended family in Israel descended from my mother’s birth family (she was adopted), and all the daily domestic tasks. But I think there’s also another barrier: writing about personal grief just hurts. It’s been difficult enough living it; do I have to write about it too?

Dylan Thomas said it was easy to be a poet: ‘you just open a vein and write’. Ah, but who among us has the courage to open our own veins, to bear the pain of writing in our blood? We count the cost of being a writer in terms of the lack of income, the isolation, the failure of others to understand our lifestyle – but do we count the emotional cost? I’m not surprised that so many writers have had therapy;  many writers are writers precisely because they lack that extra skin that fends off the ‘slings and arrows’ of life, because they are able to, and need to, access the deepest parts of themselves. Even if we are writing fiction rather than memoir, we have to explore our own psyche to understand the inner lives and motivations of our characters, and what we find there may not be all sugar and spice.

So what do we do to support each other in that process? Writers’ groups and writing buddies can help, but they mostly focus on what we are writing and how it is going. Perhaps we need to open up more to each other about the very real pain that writing can sometimes uncover, and affirm to each other that we are genuinely called to walk this stony road, so that what we produce can be healing to readers going through the same struggles and losses. A writers’ therapy group? I have no idea if such things exist, but it wouldn’t be a bad idea.

Veronica is supposed to be retired, but writers never really retire. She writes notes for BRF’s ‘New Daylight’ Bible notes, a column for Woman Alive magazine, and blogs at https://reversedstandard.com/ and https://www.princeodoemena.com/account/articles/view (The Thinking Faith Project).