The Perils of Revision: Telling a Tale of Abuse

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I believe there is truth, black-and-white, good vs. evil truth. There's wrong and there's right. But the telling of it is often gray. That telling and its perilous navigation would be the purview of us writers.

Once upon a time, my YA novel, HOW WENDY REDBIRD DANCING SURVIVED THE DARK AGES OF NOUGHT, dealt with sexual abuse in the protagonist's past. A 16 year-old girl, Wendy, is a survivor fighting to make sense of this horrible wrong, four years later.

In this current draft, the abuse happens in real time. My agent and I have discussed reasons for this rewrite--that YA readers if not many adult ones need current, suspenseful events to care about a character. Watching a character fighting to survive now is more compelling than hearing about the aftermath. The Hunger Games wouldn't pack the same punch if Katniss told us how it all went down there in the woods when she's sitting here in the present quite safe. A narrative frame such as that can lift you out of the action and remind you too much that you're reading a story.

Author C. Hope Clark explores the plusses of making your reader uncomfortable--leaving your reader with a feeling of exhaustion. Conventional wisdom says in crafting your character's plot, make something bad happen to your character, and just when you think, It can't get worse--make it worse.

I'm following this advice. But these scenes of abuse, as you can imagine, are not easy to write. "Don't go there" comes to mind. There is no joy writing scenes of murder, torture, or rape. And in this political climate where politicians use phrases like "legitimate rape," it feels especially dangerous to turn the camera on a young girl being abused, a girl who is not sure she can call it that.

We live in a world where people across cultures ask if she was asking for it. Where questions of power seem to place a hot lamp on women's unstoppable powers of seduction and apparently well-fortified reproductive organs. I don't want to write scenes where young girls wonder if I'm asking if she was asking for it. I also don't want to write scenes that predators would endorse.

But that's the challenge of my job. Writers have to stand in limbo of shadowy, questionable gray. This horror happens and many people survive it. It's an important story to tell and being afraid to tell it is part of the trauma people experience.

It's not just politicians that motivate me to write this tale. I also feel sure I must do it when I see women snapping up the wildly popular Fifty Shades of Grey. What a strange light that shadowy work shines on our gender roles, desires, and the rules of power as they still play out. This wonderful rant by Britt Hayes makes me sure I am writing something that will challenge the crazy that's made Grey's author a multimillionaire. But I can't say I'm enjoying the ride.

This revision is not fun, but it must be done. Now the veil is lifted on my worry that this writing is not going to do anyone any good, but yet something in me says, Go on, show how it goes, and maybe in the telling something pure and clear will emerge and maybe I and someone else could be able to see for miles.

As our students go back to school and search the hallways for friendly faces, and as they meet their teachers for the first time, there are some who will be hiding massive secrets. They will have horror to survive each week that no one knows. They could return home daily to Jerry Sanduskys and Mary Kay LeTourneaus and other tortured souls who call themselves parents, mentors, authorities in a child's life. I write this book for all the youth who seek a trustworthy adult and find that trust abused; who didn't know where the adult was headed with that first touch; who can't speak for all the fears that choke them silent. I hope my book tells some to find a trustworthy soul they can tell and others--unknowing spectators--that survivors walk among them.

Back to the page. The way is foggy and often the page looks dim. But the purpose is sure like an arrow and somehow, I'll emerge with something on the other side. Whether this is a YA novel remains to be seen, but I will file its genre under "GRAY" right now: adult themes, lived by youth. I'll let librarians and booksellers work that one out.

Writing Prompts

• Which books did you read in school or have you taught that deal with complex, traumatic events such as rape, incest, or abuse? How do you approach these works as a reader, a writer, or as a teacher? Do you call out these events as what they are, and speak of them? 
• What works do you think are wrong for a high school classroom? Why?
• What is gray about the telling of these things? How do authors make these issues gray, and in so doing, do both wrong and right to the subject and survivors?
• How do you use journals and storytelling to help people explore issues that are highly sensitive? (Consult The Why and How of Writing Prompts for some assistance.)

Survival Tips, Part 2: 10 Ways to Get Yourself Writing

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1. Support your local independent coffeehouse. Go where the coffee is rich, fresh, and just roasted; go where the owners take personal care of their customers. Promise yourself that for every $3 you spend, you will write 300 words.
2. Get mad at someone. Don't worry, someone will irritate you soon. Once he or she obliges you, write a rant or piece of fiction in honor of the irritant, and also for revenge. Then if you've gotten the angst out of your system, send that person a mental blessing. Say, Art has set me free. (Even if you don't yet feel that way.)
3. Set a deadline with a friend. Ask someone to swap writing with you within a certain time period. Make it short; over 3 days means you have way too much time to procrastinate.
4. Go look at a gravestone and ask yourself if you really want to die with that great idea still unwritten.
5. Play Prompt Roulette. Pick up any book of prompts you shelved with great intentions and grab one off a page. Here's the catch; it has to connect to the project you're avoiding. I dare you. Your writerly mind is creative enough to forge some kind of ridiculous connection. Do it!
6. Ask 5 people you see every day if they ever dreamed of writing a book or if they've got one in mind or maybe one even in progress. See what interesting poll results you get, especially in answer to, "What would your book be about?" See just how many (4 out of 5 if not 5) have not yet started. Vow to yourself to break the trend and write 500 words in rebellion to everyone's fruitless dreaming.
7. Surf the TV (I recommend the E Channel or some celebrity-ridden site) and see if you can find at least one talent-less individual who has a book on the shelves. (This shouldn't take long.) Vow to write your passion with craft and excellence, even if you feel your talent is very raw and unformed. Vow to pursue craft. Then go craft at least 100 words, and spend no fewer than 30 minutes on this. Hone, polish, revise. Tell yourself you've redeemed the world somewhat by adding craft instead of drivel. Set a date to return to this page. 
8. Make a mix tape. It should be the soundtrack of the piece you are writing. For example, it could be your main character's Top 10 or it could be the mood mix for your poem. It could be the collection of anthems to get your essay or column written. Spend loving, meticulous time getting this mix just right and in the perfect sequence. Then play it at the perfect volume and staple your derriere to the chair.
9. Ask a person who loves you to tell you why you need to write and then go do what they say. 
10. Make a list of 10 things you are grateful for or 10 things you adore. Think about how these things matter and how one or more of them might relate to your passion for the written word and uplifting theme and transcendent magic of books. 

Of course, you can be a bit more focused and methodical about attacking your writer's block by checking out Gretchen Rubin's "Having Trouble Getting Yourself to Write? 9 Tips" post. I think my favorite is #8 with that great piece of advice from Virginia Woolf.

Don't forget three other tips for writing survival. Do whatever it takes.

And the 15-minutes-a-day plan Rubin mentions has been the only way writing's getting done right now. There's a time for productivity and a time to be lost. And while you're lost, if you show up to the page for even 15 minutes, then my, that's something.

The Why and How of Writing Prompts

This blog offers writing prompts each month, ones for teachers and students. I also include several journal prompts in my three books, The Compassionate Classroom (with Jane Dalton); Teaching Romeo and Juliet (with Delia DeCourcy and Robin Follet); and Teaching Julius Caesar. I provide these because teachers need and request them. I've always assumed we know why writing prompts are worth the time, but that's not always true. It's good to revisit why they matter in the classroom.

Still ringing in my ears is the only parent complaint I've ever heard on the subject. "What's this touchy-feely stuff? What's this got to do with academics?" While I did convince this parent I wasn't wasting his child's time, the complaint gets to a misinformed opinion--that writing prompts are a flights-of-fancy indulgence we can't make time for. I figure it may also help teachers to have this argument in their back pocket should parents, administrators, or pacing guides approach.

(This image found at Darton College's Writing Lab site.)

Why You Should Use Writing Prompts in Your Classroom

-- Writing prompts are great dress rehearsals for deeper thinking, the critical analysis required by most literary interpretation, argumentation, and research.

-- Writing prompts tap into what I call the Big Ideas--the concepts and abstract topics that need fleshing out in an essay. In the low-stakes dress rehearsal area that is a journal, students can discover what they think as they see what they writeSo Romeo and Juliet is about the Big Idea of Love; that claim is no thesis statement yet. Do you believe in true love? Love at first sight? Platonic love where there's once been lust? What is more important--the love of family or romantic partners? It's these interesting questions that come from journaling on a Big Idea.

-- Students need to make affective, personal connections with the literature before they can delve deeper into analysis. Why are we reading this? radiates from every student pore, every adolescent 'tude entering your classroom. When students write journals on prompts that at first glance seem to be all about them, that thinking leads to better, deeper conversations when you put the lit front and center. Big Ideas are always relevant to students' lives: Love, Justice, Jealousy, Revolution, Change...

-- Writing prompts tap into metacognition, sparking reflection about the writing process. They allow students to mull over the complex stages of thinking that lead to a finished draft and develop a perspective on their own writing strengths, weaknesses, and methods.

-- Writing prompts allow creative forays into personal, imaginative writing such as short stories, novels, poetry, even lists--every genre and type--that again, serve as great dress rehearsals if not companions to the academic writing we teach. Some schools assign creative writing before assigning literary analysis. If a student can develop a character, create a narrative thread, or craft a symbol in personal writing, isn't it that much easier for students to approach literature where they must analyze character traits, track a plot's trajectory, or explicate the connotations of an image?

-- Writing prompts help our kids access difficult texts, from Twain to Shakespeare to Swift. Old school becomes new school when our kids realize that these authors grappled with very modern problems and timeless emotions. In some ways, not much has changed with humanity, and journaling can get our kids seeing that.


How You Should Use Writing Prompts

How do we integrate this type of writing practice into the average class period, burdened as it is with other reading and writing tasks and the demands of pacing guides and standardized tests?

-- Opening & Focusing Activity. When students hit the door certain days, they can see their first task--that writing prompt on the board--to focus their thinking. Allow 7-10 minutes. This can be followed by a pair-share or a brief class discussion where students share thoughts. You might collect these journals randomly.

-- Anchoring Activity. This is a go-to assignment when students finish a task early in order to prepare for the two uses described below. Journal prompts can be listed alongside other tasks that students can pick up for ten or twenty minutes and return to at any time. They are particularly helpful when you have a range of abilities in your classroom and are trying to conduct mini-lessons with tiered groups, conference with students, and interact with several students within a class period.

-- Essay Preparation. These journals allow students to explore and experiment with a range of essay prompts before making a final selection. Students can contemplate the entire work just read and call up evidence in a more casual writing foray to see if they have enough ideas, supporting examples, and passion about the topic to commit to it. Assign at least two of these before students conference with you or before they identify their choice. This task also allows you to offer more than one or two essay prompts and give students a wider choice.

-- Pre-Socratic Seminar. Planning on an intensive discussion? Writing on the discussion topics before speaking aloud is important rehearsal for more retiring students as well as those who speak extemporaneously and fearlessly.

-- Homework. Journal writing on Big Ideas or creative writing prompts offer great homework options. Students are more likely to be alone and more reflective, and, after a busy school day, their minds are freer, rambling, and needing open expression rather than serious drill assignments.

There are many other places to integrate prompts; these are just a few of the most obvious times to integrate them.

Other General Tips:

-- If you use hard-copy composition books, allow students to fold over pages of their journal that they don't want you to read. I always say, "Please don't fold over every page; I've got to read something." This offer does make the journal the student's domain first and foremost and encourage ownership.

-- Don't spend a lot of time grading journals but do focus on whether students have done one or two of the following: offered specific and rich examples or discovered some interesting insight or interpretation. I usually give 10 out of 10 points, with one or two points deducted for poor effort. We know a half-baked journal when we see it.

-- Tell students that if they do tackle tough subject matter, such as personal dilemmas or crises, that you will feel compelled to assist them by referring them to a school counselor. If students hint at eating disorders, abuse, and other trauma in their lives, it's impossible to turn our heads.

The best reason for assigning writing prompts is getting to know your students better. I've formed better relationships and understandings with my students because of what they have shared with me in their journals.