The act of writing is inherently vulnerable, but this becomes doubly true as we dive into the hard stuff—those painful, messy, and heavy feelings and experiences. These things can be difficult to write about for many reasons. It could be that the subject is deeply personal or private, exploring something that carries immense emotional weight for us. It can be hard because we want, so deeply, to write a piece that does justice to an important topic like grief, shame, trauma, and oppression.
At Glossy Planet, we look for work that responds to what is going on in the world and reflects on topics of incredible weight and significance. Since October, our challenges have asked you to submit pieces that speak to structural violence, climate collapse, surveillance states, government oppression, political corruption, disinformation, capitalism, and the cycle of war. We very much ask you to write the hard things.
Writing reflects the human experience, and that includes heavy and painful subjects. But how do we cope when those hard things overwhelm or immobilize us? What techniques can help us to navigate difficult themes?
1. Begin with distance
As a writing technique, narrative closeness creates a sense of immediacy and evokes intense empathy in the reader, but it can also be an emotionally tough place to start from as a writer. Distance is a great tool that can be easily applied in a few ways:
- Create space in time by using future or past tense rather than the present tense. When we write in the present, we psychologically situate ourselves in that moment—instead, place yourself in the position of looking forward or backward.
- Create space using point of view: write in the third- or second-person rather than first person. Let an imaginary person experience the hard thing.
- Create space between yourself and the interior worlds, experiences, and knowledge of the narrator or characters in your piece. Write like an observer or journalist, keep things highly factual and focus on external details and images. This is sometimes referred to as “psychic distance.”
Writing with more distance turns down emotional intensity, which helps if you get stuck or overwhelmed with difficult themes. Once you’ve got a first draft of that scene, image, poem, or story, you can go back and make changes to verb tense, point of view, and level of detail. What’s important is that the bones are there for you to build on now.
2. Change perspective entirely
This approach isn’t just about creating temporary distance to help you get through your first draft. Instead, this technique defines the piece because you’re writing from an entirely different point of view.
The key is that the perspective should be unfamiliar, absent from the story or poem, or entirely imaginary. This technique is formally known as prosopopoeia, and Sylvia Plath’s poem “Mirror” is a great example of it in action!
Here are some ideas to get you started:
- Write a poem from the perspective of a family pet.
- Write a scene from the perspective of an abstract concept, such as Sin or Death (John Milton does this in Paradise Lost).
- Write from the perspective of an inanimate object in your home.
3. Use omission and avoidance
Although the self-help industry has led us to believe otherwise, sometimes a little avoidance is exactly what you need. If writing about certain topics feels overwhelming or traumatizing, but you still want to engage with the themes, try a more indirect approach. Omitting something can be a highly effective way to write about it.
There’s an assumption that a piece about a difficult subject needs to be visceral or highly detailed to truly do it justice. But it can be just as powerful to circle closer and closer to that difficult thing without ever fully laying it bare for the reader. Hard things exist in the matrix of daily life; even amongst the destruction of war are mundane acts of living.
These familiar details hold more meaning than we often give them credit for. For example, in Czeslaw Milosz’s “A Song on the End of World”, the reader is given zero details about the destruction at the center of the poem. They’re left to imagine it by themselves. The effect is haunting and holds huge emotional weight without ever detailing the violence.
4. Don a shell
When you’re writing hard things, it can be helpful to have a structure to organize your narrative or poem within. I’d recommend trying hermit-crab poems, essays, or stories which involve using a non-literary shell to house your writing.
This technique provides you with a template that supports you as you write: many structural decisions will come pre-defined, and you can begin with a scaffold instead of that daunting blank page.
To fully understand the possibility and wonder of the hermit-crab, I’m of the opinion that examples are key:
“Are You Allowed to Criticize Simone Biles?: A Decision Tree” by Carlos Greaves
“an instagram frittata” by Samantha Irby
“We Regret to Inform You” by Brenda Miller
“A Lexicon of Palestinian Boyhood” by L.F. Khouri
Here are some shells to get you started:
- an email
- a spreadsheet
- a recipe
- a contract
- a manual
- an obituary
- a set of instructions
- a Dungeons & Dragons character sheet
- a grocery list
- a text conversation
- a dictionary definition
- a medical form
Check out part two of this series next month for more ideas on how to write hard things!
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