Recently, I have been hearing more and more about how writing about your pain can help you overcome it. I definitely believe this. I believe that I have written my way into coping with my parents divorce, estrangement from my mother, the death of friends, and many other events that I just couldn't find any other way to express my feelings about. I do believe, however, that you can write about something without actually working through it. In the same way, there is a key to making the pain of your life into good fiction. It is not a coincidence that the two go hand in hand. By turning your pain into good fiction, you can actually make writing about it a worthwhile experience for you.
We have all been in workshops or classes where they give you writing exercises where you have to write about past events. Often these events are ones where we have felt great pain. I think that we are tempted to write only about how horrible the event was when performing these exercises. This is a trap. I don't really think people are into reading about how much something hurt you. For example, I can write the following lines about my parents divorce.
My mother divorced my dad when I was eight. I had no idea that they had any problems, so it was a real shock to me. It changed my life. I went from being a relatively happy child, to one that was more content being in her room clutching pillows and crying. I hated my mother for it.
Or
My parents were divorced when I was eight. At the time, I didn't know that they had any problems. I do remember them shutting themselves in their room for hours. Once, I tried to listen in on them with a glass cup like I had seem the kids do on The Bloodhound Gang on PBS. My grandmother pulled me away before I heard anything.
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