Writing About Trauma: What We’ve Learned Since 2020

With a little help from our friends

Memoir, a subgenre of creative nonfiction, is often the home of stories of trauma. As I point out in my blog post Writing About Trauma: What Memoir Is and Isn’t, memoir has a bad reputation for being all about trauma. It’s an unfair assessment. Yet, as a memoir writing coach and editor, I do find that the majority of my clients want to write a memoir about emotional pain, loss, grief, addiction, disease, or toxic relationships.

My personal feelings are that people are more motivated to share the negative aspects of their lives (rather than the good times) because those are the experiences they have reflected on and learned from the most. This is true of my own life. I have spent much of the past three and a half years analyzing my failed second marriage. From that failure, from that disappointment and emotional pain, I have learned more about myself than at any other time in my life. I could not have become who I am now—someone I am happy with and proud of—if not for that experience. Maybe there’s a memoir in my own future.

Mass Trauma—It’s a Thing

I’m compelled to write a second time about addressing trauma because I have heard more and read more about trauma in the last two years than the previous twenty combined. And the reason? The pandemic. Globally, COVID has sickened more than 393 million and killed almost 6 million, as of this writing. No one in the world—literally no one—has remained unaffected by COVID’s impact. Subsequently, health experts on TV, radio, podcasts, social media, and in writing have been forced to discuss the worldwide fallout with terms like mass trauma, collective trauma, and traumatic stressor event.

Trauma, once most often the psychologically painful side effect for war veterans, survivors of domestic violence and rape, serious accidents, natural disasters, harassment, witnessing violence, and the like, has driven tens of millions of US citizens to seek mental health counseling and medication for the first time in their lives. Post-traumatic Stress Disorder, PTSD, was first added to the bible of mental health disorders, the DSM (Diagnostic Statistical Manual), in 1980 primarily as a descriptor for the mental health challenges faced by military veterans, particularly those who served in the Middle East. My father served in World War II. He definitely suffered from PTSD, then referred to as combat fatigue or battle shock. Upon returning from Europe in 1945 at the end of the war, he received no treatment and no counseling. And he never fully recovered.

Trauma, whether we like it or not, has become a household word—a mental health problem that knows no boundaries among class or color or gender or ethnicity. However, as I stated at the beginning of this, the dark experiences of our lives tend to be the ones we reflect on and learn from the most.

Therapeutic Journaling Can Help

Have you been journaling during the past two years? I wrote about the mental health benefits of therapeutic journaling a while back. This practice became more popular than ever during the last two years. Have you documented the day-to-day challenges you faced on your own, or as a parent, employee, employer, or caregiver? What lessons from this unprecedented time in our history will we learn and share for our children and future generations to help them navigate the difficult challenges life throws at us?

What have you learned about yourself since early 2020? Is there a memoir about survival, creativity, or transformation in you? Let me know in a comment. And take care.

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.

Write with Purpose Using Indexing

Edit, edit, edit your writing.

The woman whose memoir writing advice I most admire, Marion Roach Smith, recently discussed a technique for self-editing your writing that I love: indexing. Now, this is not the process of creating an alphabetical listing of important words and phrases and the pages you will find them on that appears in the back of an academic or instructional nonfiction book. No, the way Marion describes her form of indexing is this: to read each paragraph of your writing and make a little note or symbol next to it that tells you what the paragraph does, i.e., what purpose it serves in the manuscript.

Does this sound overwhelming to you? Or does it thoroughly confuse you? Or both?

I’m going to try to offer more insight on this technique, but be warned—this process is for those who really want to improve their writing by acknowledging whether each paragraph has a clear purpose. If you can stick it out through an entire manuscript, it will make your writing tight, precise, and far more enjoyable to read.

Most Common Writing Mistake

I edit a lot of manuscripts, some by accomplished authors, most by novice writers. But both groups often make the same mistakes, especially when they are trying to make a point—they overdescribe, overexplain and repeat, repeat, repeat. (See what I did there?) This is an issue with all forms of nonfiction I’ve worked with—political science, economics, business—but it is most often the case with memoir.

Because the memoirs I edit are nine out of ten times written by first-time writers, they want to make darn sure you understand their reason for writing the memoir: trauma, grief, redemption, new insight, physical or mental health challenges, and so on. So, they say the same thing, more or less, repeatedly throughout their writing. If your reader finds themselves thinking, “Yes, I know, I get it, you told me already!” too many times, they won’t bother to finish the book. Or recommend it.

Once you have made a point, assuming you’ve made it clearly, that’s great. Now more on. There is no need to bludgeon your reader with the same point in passage after passage.

Indexing—Analyze Purpose

As I said, if you really want to streamline your work, indexing is one way to do it. With good writing, every paragraph should perform a purpose. Here are the thirteen most important paragraph purposes, taken from an article by the Jackson School Writing Center at the University of Washington:

1. Stating: Making an assertion.

2. Supporting: Providing evidence for an assertion.

3. Concurring: Agreeing with another author's assertion.

4. Qualifying: Restricting the meaning of an assertion already made.

5. Negating: Offering reasoning or evidence to demonstrate the falsehood of an assertion.

6. Expanding: Stating more comprehensively an idea or assertion already expressed.

7. Analyzing: Breaking an assertion down into its constituent parts in order to clarify or evaluate it.

8. Describing: Naming one or more features of an object or concept, to help the reader imagine it precisely or understand it fully.

9. Comparing and contrasting: Examining objects alongside each other for the purpose of clarifying their features, evaluating them or noting differences and similarities.

10. Evaluating: Making judgment about something discussed previously

11. Synthesizing: Combining elements of previous paragraphs into a coherent whole; often this includes presenting a new perspective on the subject.

12. Summarizing: Restating the principal idea of an argument or point already introduced.

13. Transitioning: Moving from one aspect of the argument to another by connecting the points for the reader.

Wow, right? The point here is,

every paragraph you write should serve one of these purposes.

After a paragraph serves the #1 purpose (stating, making an assertion, e.g., the allure of underage alcohol drinking entices 20 percent of girls aged 12–13), you then move on to write paragraphs that serve one or more of the other purposes (e.g., supporting, concurring, or expanding). Yes, this can be an exhaustive and time-consuming process. If you have written a statement paragraph and you write another paragraph that simply repeats the statement, or if you can’t identify the paragraph as clearly serving any of the other twelve purposes, delete it or rewrite it to serve a clear purpose.

Is this process easy? It is not. Will it make you a better writer? Yes. Is it worth the time and effort? That is totally up to you.

Write with Purpose

WARNING: GRAPHIC CONTENT. Marion Roach Smith’s sister, published author Margaret Roach, calls a first draft the vomit draft. (I warned you!) That’s some harsh imagery. But the point is, of course, all first drafts stink, no matter who you are. Write, write, write. Get it all out. Throw in everything including the proverbial kitchen sink. But then, edit. Edit as furiously as you wrote, maybe more so. Keep two things in mind as you self-edit and rewrite: your purpose and your ideal reader. My business motto is Every word of every sentence matters. Please feel free to adopt it as your own!

In addition to working as a nonfiction and creative nonfiction editor and writing coach, I am co-author, with Dr. Terri Lyon, of the book Make a Difference with Mental Health Activism: No activism degree required—use your unique skills to change the world. Visit my website page Make a Difference and Dr. Lyon’s activism website Life At The Intersection to learn more about Make a Difference, including how to place bulk orders.

Is It Time to Write Your Memoir?

Having her AHA moment!

By mingling on social media with potential memoirists, I often hear it said that they need to get their stories out to the world; they’ve been through pain, trauma, and loss and they want to share their journeys. Things have been difficult. Life has sucked. Time to write a memoir.

But I want you to ask yourself, why? Why do you want to share your story? If this question seems flippant or insulting, I apologize. Let me explain.

The main point of this article is to help you determine if you are ready—mentally and emotionally—to write a memoir. I have touched on this briefly in two of my blog posts, Writing About Trauma: What Memoir Is and Isn’t and Heal and Grow: The Power of Journaling.

As I said in Writing About Trauma, memoir gets a bad rap as the Trauma Olympics. Death and grief. Physical or sexual abuse. Addiction. Mental illness. Incarceration. These are topics commonly identified as memoir themes. The publishing market is saturated with these kinds of memoir and publishers don’t want anymore.

Every adult has experienced some kind of loss, pain, grief, heartache, or disease. I personally can put a check mark in front of each of these. Having had pain or trauma in your life does not automatically demand that you produce a memoir about it.

Memoir is about transcendence. It’s not about what you went through but what you learned as a result of what you went through.

I can't emphasize this enough! If you are still in the midst of a traumatic experience (an ugly divorce, child custody battle, rehab, disease treatment) or if you are still processing and coming to terms with what you experienced, I contend you are not ready to write this story. Good memoir requires time and distance so you can be as objective and honest as possible about yourself and what you experienced.

I will repeat this quote from my article Writing About Trauma:

The now perspective is what makes memoir different from fiction; you explain how the story shaped you by weaving together the then and now. ~~Cindi Michael, December 2016, Writer’s Digest. Cindi is the author of The Sportscaster’s Daughter: A Memoir.

Memoir writing is not therapy. A memoir is not a therapeutic journal. If you can’t produce a “then and now” perspective, if you are not at a point from which you can reflect on your experience and impart a lesson of growth and revelation for your readers, it’s not time for a memoir. Your readers deserve a payoff—they should read your story and come away with a moral, lesson, revelation, answers to questions, a strategy for them to mirror. If not, what was the point?

Continue to write because writing is a fantastically healing endeavor. Journal. Blog. See a therapist who employs writing as part of the healing regimen. Join a support group and share your writings with group members.

But a memoir? Only when you have your aha moment—a moment of sudden realization, inspiration, insight, recognition, or comprehension—are you finally ready.