Burning Questions Answered
You asked... and I'm answering!
If you’re new to The Rebel MFA Way, welcome! This is an essay in my ongoing “Writing Fiction to Heal in Real Time” series where I deep-dive into my writing fiction to heal method as field work and a case study. To begin, I will be working through my story, The Archive, which you can find more information on here.
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You asked and now I’m answering! Questions keep piling up, so I decided to break from our usual WF2H essay style and spend some time answering a few of the juiciest questions I’ve received.
Do you find that The Archive sometimes “knows” things before you do? Meaning, have you ever written an entry and then later realized it was revealing something about your own emotional process before you consciously understood it?
Yes! Thank you so much for this question because I think this is one of the most underrated aspects of writing fiction to heal. For as much “planning,” “processing,” and “excavating” as we can do within stories and ourselves — there are always going to be aspects of our unconscious that give us what we need before we know we need it! This is especially true if we’re willing to be open about the process and allow whatever comes in.
An example of this is the “Archival Reports” sections. I originally did not have those in mind when I started writing. In fact, when I went to write the next entry, the archival report draft is what came out instead. And I thought… Huh. That’s interesting. In a way, these sections allow me (and Ari) to be a bit less self-aware in the entries (as most people are) and then use the Archival Reports to process and question things.
How do you decide which emotions or experiences to channel into The Archive versus what stays in the essays?
Ooh! This is a great question. I don’t know that I’m consciously deciding this. When I draft the entries for The Archive, I’m very much in a intuitive writing mode. What comes out is what is supposed to come out and I try really hard to listen to the intuitive voice rather than the “rational” voice. So, it’s not so much a decision. However, with the Writing Fiction to Heal in Real Time essays (like this one!), I do have to be a bit more conscious about what I’m writing. The goal of these essays is to show readers what an authentic and raw process looks like — the good, bad and ugly. In order to do that, I need to be able to not only get across the “point” of what I’m sharing but also give examples to “show” rather than tell. The decisions of what material to include is something I need to consider and ultimately, it comes down to one singular point: will this help someone else “get” the point of what I’m sharing. If the answer is yes, then I will include it. If it feels like fluff or extraneous material, then I don’t share it.
Have you noticed a shift in yourself from the beginning of this project to now? Since you’re literally documenting healing through fiction, do you feel different—emotionally, mentally—than when you first started?
You know, it’s still so early in the process for me to see big sweeping shifts — usually they don’t “appear” until the project is finished as it’s easier to look back at the whole and recognize patterns or decisions but it’s much harder to do that IN the moment. That being said, there are some shifts that I’ve noticed.
One of the big ones is something completely unexpected, too. It took me a few weeks of writing The Archive to realize that in my personal life, I’ve been “rationalizing” things that I normally wouldn’t. For example — I’ve been going around my house purging things that seem completely stupid and unnecessary. If it feels like it would be left to “rot” in an apocalypse wasteland — I want it out. And on the flip side — I’ve begun to think about things in terms of survivability and practicality. There are certain “skills” that I feel like I lack in my personal life and I’ve started to intentionally build up them up — cooking, for instance! It was through writing Ari and her food situation that made me understand that if I was in her situation in my real life — I would be screwed.
So, behavior wise, I think The Archive is shifting a lot of things for me. On the healing side though, it will take much longer. It always does and it always will.
Are there moments when The Archive becomes too personal? Have you ever written an entry and thought, “This feels too close to my real life,” and had to step back?
Oh, yes. This is how I feel with every entry, honestly. And the line between reality and fiction is razor thin when it comes to my writing fiction to heal stories. This one in particular is the closet to reality that I’ve come and it’s terrifying. I think the further along I get, the more nuanced and blurrier this will become. In a way, as Ari progresses in her story, she will get “further” away from my reality but emotionally, I think I will have to get even more close to the bone in order to write her with the authenticity she (and me) deserve.
What’s been the hardest part about this dual-layered project? Is it the vulnerability? The discipline of putting out two full pieces a week? The unpredictability of where the story is going?
You know, none of those things have seemed “hard” yet. It’s quite silly, but because so much of what I do is intuitive, I’ve found it more difficult than I thought to “explain” what I’m doing or how my process works. This is also a byproduct of being neurodivergent and always feeling like I have to explain how my brain works the way it does. But also, I’m always second-guessing whether or not what I’m trying to say is worthwhile, or valuable. Even writing this essay, I thought, “do people even care or want to know what questions have been asked and what my answers are?” So I guess the answer to this particular question is… the hardest part is my own self-doubt around it.
What made you choose to write from a first-person journal perspective rather than third-person narrative?
Anyone who has read my previous fiction will know that I prefer first person narratives. It is my “default” though I have written third-person and enjoy the challenge it provides me. However, with writing fiction to heal novels, I find that writing in the first person helps facilitate that healing process even more. The beautiful thing about writing fiction is that it doesn’t have to stay one way. If I weren’t writing this publicly, I may even choose to rewrite it in third person after the first draft is done. But I’ve always known, from the beginning of this project, that I wanted it to be first-person as that is what feels most “real” to me.
What happens when your readers interpret The Archive differently than you intended? Because they have both the fiction and your essays, they might see connections you didn’t even mean to make.
OOOF. This is a big, meaty question. Wow. I guess the first thing I’d like to acknowledge is the reality that once a piece of writing is out in the world, it ceases to be just my interpretation. I may have had a thousand reasons, justifications, interpretations attached to it when I wrote it — but none of those truly matter when a reader finds and interprets it for themselves. This has both positive and negative reverberations. While writing, I may not have intentionally created a scenario that offends or upsets someone, but there could be a reader who takes it that way. There’s not much I can do about that — especially if it wasn’t my intention. Alternatively, I could have written something without much thought or intention and a reader finds meaning and purpose in it. As for the connections someone might make between the essays and the fiction — I’d love to hear about them. Again, I’m writing this story from a place of intuition and a lot of that is subconscious. As writers, we can’t possibly see ALL the different ways we’re infusing our stories with connective tissue. But a reader might be able to. I think that’s really cool.
Why haven’t you written more in depth about the collapse — like what happened, what caused it, etc.?
Fantastic question — although I suspect you won’t like the answer too much. The first reason is that the narratives we shape in a writing fiction to heal novel are meant to serve the writer, not the reader. Both Ari and I have little desire to talk about the varied and complex reasons a society collapses, disintegrates, etc. There are far smarter people than me that can understand and articulate it — but not me. I am sitting here, like many of you, dumbstruck by what is happening in the U.S. I don’t understand it. I don’t understand the politics behind it, even though I try. It doesn’t even matter though, because the point of writing fiction to heal is to tune into the emotional now and figure out how to deal with it. In Ari’s world — thinking about the collapse and how it came to be isn’t going to do her much good nor will it change anything. However, figuring out how to survive now is what will change things for her. Same with me and the writing — yes, I’m curious about how our world is crumbling and falling apart. But my job right now is to write through what I’m feeling now.
Next time…
Next week, I’ll be talking about the absolutely batshit crazy yet beautiful way our stories sometimes know more than we can consciously comprehend… and how that often manifests through our intuition.
NOTE: This was such a fun piece to write! I LOVE answering questions. So please keep them coming. Comment on this post, DM me, or email me and I’ll try to get to it in next week’s essay or beyond!
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To read the backstory to why I’m writing this series:
To read the backstory on why I’m serializing “The Archive,”:
