Making Meaning with Stories
One of my Writing Fiction to Heal students recently sent me a heartfelt message about her novel and how the healing had extended beyond the pages of her writing and right into her real life. Her excitement about the revelations that had come to her was palpable in her message and it made my heart swell with pride.
“Jade, I think writing fiction to heal is even bigger than what we think it is. I don't exactly know how, but I'm super excited to keep working with it and see what other gems it uncovers. You may have discovered a whole new kind of therapy.”
— Lesley D., Writing Fiction to Heal Student
This student has worked her butt off to get to this place because the truth is — writing fiction to heal isn’t easy. It is worthwhile, though. And the emotional work you do, both on and off the page, builds. Brick by metaphorical brick, you build the foundation of your emotional capacity to heal when you approach the page with honesty and vulnerability. When you are not afraid to experiment or question what you think you know about yourself and your story.
Writing Fiction to Heal mirrors the experiences we face in real life as well. You may start your writing fiction to heal novel thinking you know exactly what and why you want to heal an aspect of your life… but through the work, most writers find themselves being opened up to other emotional and traumatic emotions that they’ve suppressed or pushed away. This is a good thing! This allows you to step back and say, “How curious. What does it mean that this is coming up for me? What might it mean for the story that I’m writing? How has this emotional wound played out in my life before? How do I want it to play out in the present or future?”
As I’ve been digging into more research and resources to add to the revised second edition of Forged in Fire: Writing Fiction to Heal, I’ve found another connection that cements the act of writing as a therapeutic modality… very similarly to what the lovely Lesley stated.
Study after study¹ has shown that the people who believe they’ve “lived a good life” have something in common — they’ve made meaning from their experiences. It doesn’t matter what experiences they’ve encountered, their ability to derive meaning from those experiences contributes to their overall well-being.
This is precisely why Writing Fiction to Heal contains such powerful healing properties — the act of writing your story from a different angle allows you to make meaning from your experiences in a profound way.
Meaning Making Transcends Time
We’ve been doing this kind of therapeutic work our entire lives without realizing it. Think of your earliest memories as a child around fairytales. What were they? Who told them to you? Where did they come from? What did you think of them?
Fairytales, folktales, myths — they are often stories meant to provide some message of meaning within the text. Some are explicit about that message, many are not. But before we had such technological advances or adequate sources of knowledge to teach us the meaning of things — we had story.
My favorite story to illustrate this point is with Bluebeard. If you’re not familiar with the old tale, here’s a very quick synopsis:
Bluebeard is a wealthy and violent man who has been married several times, but no one knows what happened to his previous wives. Because of his blue beard, he is feared and avoided by the local population. Despite his reputation, Bluebeard persuades a neighbor's daughter to marry him. After the wedding, he leaves for business, giving her the keys to all his rooms but forbidding her to enter one particular small room.
Overcome with curiosity, the wife eventually opens the forbidden room. To her horror, she finds the floor covered in blood and the bodies of Bluebeard's previous wives hanging on hooks. She drops the key in her shock, and it becomes stained with blood. Despite her attempts to clean it, the bloodstain remains.
When Bluebeard returns, he notices the blood on the key and realizes she has disobeyed him. He intends to kill her, but she asks for a short time to pray. In this time, she calls for her brothers, who arrive just in time to kill Bluebeard. The wife inherits Bluebeard's fortune, and she uses it to secure good marriages for her sister and to reward her brothers. She also uses the money to find herself a worthy new husband.
The story of Bluebeard is multi-faceted and encourages many different meaning making opportunities. It’s a story that can “hit” you at different points in your life and mean completely different things. That’s also the beauty of a story that transcends time. Today, Bluebeard is just as gnarly a story as it was when it was first told. And we all, regardless of who we are, where we’re from, what we’ve encountered — have felt the “inner predator” in an internal and external way.
These stories also provide us with very tangible examples of duality or paradox which help us, as flesh-and-blood humans, to understand that the world is not as black and white as we think it might be. Using Bluebeard as an example again:
In the story, Bluebeard's wife is tempted by her curiosity to unlock the forbidden room and discover its secrets. And when she does, she learns the horrifying truth. This “crossing of boundaries” is often interpreted as a warning to those who let their curiosity drive their actions. Some have come to say that the “meaning” behind Bluebeards story is to be careful in search of the truth because there could be consequences. Yes…
AND.
The paradox is that after Bluebeard’s wife discovers the truth, she does not cower or accept that she is his next victim. She fights back. The “meaning” she’s made from the truth is that Bluebeard is a nasty man and it empowers her to fight for her life and ultimately, take his.
So the duality here is based on the common factor of curiosity or search for the truth — and as you’ve just seen it can be made to “mean” different things to different people.
Two of my favorite authors who dive into the depths of storytelling for these meaning making nuggets are both insanely popular (and for good reason). Clarissa Pinkola Estés, the author of Women Who Run with the Wolves is known to almost every woman I talk to, yet many of them say they haven’t read it. Rectify that, asap. Read the book. It will change your life and how you view storytelling and meaning making. The second is Sharon Blackie’s If Women Rose Rooted which is also about the power of storytelling and meaning making.
Meaning Making In Writing
Looping this back around to the topic of Writing Fiction to Heal, though, I want to point out that it’s not just fiction that allows this transformation through meaning making. It can happen while you’re journaling. It can happen when you write a blog post or personal essay. It can happen during your memoir.
The point I’m trying to make is that writing, in all its incarnations, is a way for you to look at the roadmap of your life and turn it into meaning making for your soul. Fiction is just one lens that tends to work extremely well in my experience.
So the next time a memory or experience pops up in your life and you feel like it might need addressed, I encourage you to ask yourself: “what meaning am I making of this? What meaning can be made of this?”
You might just surprise yourself with what you discover. And that road of possibility is only the beginning.
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¹Studies and articles about making meaning in life:
https://www.apa.org/monitor/2018/10/cover-search-meaning
https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/10.1146/annurev-psych-072420-122921
