Making Space for Emotional Processing in Early Writers

I began teaching students how to write stories through my work in college admissions advising. With each incoming cohort of students, we immediately began the work of personal statements and supplemental prompts. Every fall, I met one-on-one with students as they tried to condense the most important parts of themselves into 650 words. And, every year, without fail, I saw the same pattern. About half of my students dove straight into the most dramatic or most painful moment of their lives.

They wrote about losing a parent, their battle with depression, an experience with assault—the list goes on. Their ideas revolved around the belief that, in order to be good, a story must be shocking. The other half wrote nothing, produced no ideas at all. They were arrested by the idea of writing about themselves, convinced their lives weren’t interesting enough to be worth telling. They had no big tragedies, nothing to shock an admissions officer into accepting them to their dream school. Or maybe they did, but the thought of putting those experiences into words felt unbearable.

At first, I thought this was just a quirk of the college application process. The idea that a single essay could have a large impact on the next four years of one’s life can send their mind to dark places. But then when I enrolled in a fiction workshop during my junior year of college, I found myself in the exact same position. Faced with a blank page and the expectation to write something meaningful, something that the fourteen students around me would pass their judgement upon, I felt split between two options: write a terribly devastating story or write nothing at all.

Even though we were all meant to submit fiction, the same problem prevailed throughout the stories we workshopped. Protagonists were killed and revived for shock factor; arguments were elevated to screaming matches; antagonists committed the ultimate acts of betrayal. The most dramatic stories seemed to produce the strongest reactions in their readers. Trauma became currency, and by the second round of workshops, we were all spent.

I would continue to encounter this problem in many different presentations, regardless of age, skill level, or genre. Maybe this shouldn’t have been so surprising. For years, it has felt like grief and trauma are more in our faces than ever before. Social media offers unlimited access to the suffering and pain of strangers all over the world. Wars unfold in real time on our screens; pandemics steal millions from the world too soon; and political decisions shape and reshape the futures we thought we had control over.

And people write about what they know, especially when they’re just starting out. It’s no wonder that so much pain erupts in stories. But if writing is one of the few places where we feel we can control pain and suffering, then why don’t we teach students how to do it well?

As I began developing a curriculum that teaches students how to engage with tender experiences, I asked myself: How can we help students write their emotions without feeling like they have to perform them? How can we create an environment where the ones who are ready to process their grief on the page can do so safely, while also making space for those who aren’t there yet? How can we teach writing in a way that validates all experiences without reinforcing the idea that only the most shocking stories are worth telling?

Brainstorming

The first way we can work toward solving this problem is by developing robust curricula and activities to help students brainstorm ideas for their work. If we don’t teach students how to come up with ideas, they will likely default to one of the two ideas discussed above.

Students need to see that they have more to contribute to the world of storytelling than just their hardest moments. But, often, they don’t believe that. They assume they have no good ideas, or worse, that someone else’s story will always be more interesting than their own.

One of the first activities I use to combat this is the Four-Square Brain Dump. It’s a simple, low-stakes exercise, but one that often unlocks surprising ideas. I have students divide a blank page into four squares. Each section gets a different label, but I don’t tell them until right before they begin working on that section:

1. People (family, friends, teachers, mentors, rivals, anyone significant in your life, real or fake)
2. Places (your childhood home, a grocery store, a city you visited, a city you want to visit)
3. Memories (moments in your life that you can remember, happy, sad, funny, infuriating, etc.)
4. Things You Know a Lot About (hobbies, skills, obsessions, facts they could teach someone else—this one usually takes them by surprise, but it’s essential!)

Then, for five minutes per square, they brain-dump as much as they can, filling the page with anything and everything that comes to mind. There are no wrong answers. The only rule is that their pencil must keep moving at all times. I like to tell them, “You have to write faster than the little devil on your shoulder can tell you the idea is stupid.”

After twenty minutes, their brains are thoroughly dumped, and their papers are filled with ideas, some good, some bad, but I only ask them to circle three that they’d be interested in exploring deeper. Of course, they can circle more, but three is the absolute minimum.

With at least three prompts to give them a starting place, we begin exploring where else we can find inspiration. As we read stories, we begin to develop an understanding that anything can become an idea when one’s mind is tuned into the intrigue around them. Between classes, I encourage students to bring items, pictures, articles, etc. of intrigue. I, then, model how to expand thinking with questions. Who, what, where, when, why, and how can we expand a seemingly boring item into a story?

Beyond “mining” activities (of which there are many), it is also our pedagogical responsibility to teach young writers how to find inspiration beyond the confines of their head. When working with self-proclaimed “new” writers, my first topic is this idea of inspiration. To demonstrate, I pass out notecards, each with a strange headline (or an intriguing sentence from beneath said headlines) written on the card. As students shuffle through the stack, I tell them they are simply looking for a Spark, some line that makes them stop for a moment and think, huh. That’s the card they’re meant to choose. Using that sentence or headline, they will then write whatever comes to them. This can be a continuation of the next sentence, a completely new world in which this headline feels true, or even just a focus on one specific word.

After this activity, I pass out a second set of notecards. This time, I don’t preface it with anything, but the same rules apply: search for a Spark, then write. By the end of this ten-to-fifteen-minute exercise, I explain to them that these are all selections from the Notes app on my iPhone. I then show them the single note I have titled “Collection of Random Ideas” and scroll several times to show them just how many random phrases, headlines, or images I’ve taken down. And just like they shuffled through cards to find one Spark, I shuffle through this note when I’m looking for inspiration.

It’s often at this point in the activity where I will scroll to a specific section and read out what I find to be the most useless of the Sparks in that note which is “How many licks to finish a dumdum without chewing?” I explain that while this will likely never make it into the stories I plan to write, it’s more indicative of the active ear I have tuned to my inner thoughts. What would have once been a passing pondering is now immortalized in this electronic form. And while many of those immortalizations are seemingly useless, I’m now trained to listen a bit more closely to those passing thoughts. One of them is bound to be useful eventually. The goal here is less about giving students a very intimate glimpse into my mind, and more about teaching them the necessary skill of observation, which will allow them to find meaning in small things as much as they find meaning within extremity.

Brainstorming can give students the option to write beyond their personal experiences, but telling students that personal stories are off-limits would invalidate one of the most natural impulses behind writing. For many people, writing is a means of processing emotion or experiences. But, at the same time, we can’t ignore the pitfalls of allowing young writers to mine their trauma without any guidance. When students feel that their personal pain is the only thing worth writing about or when they relive difficult experiences without the right support, it can lead to exhaustion rather than catharsis for both the reader and the writer.

And this is how distillation and transplantation were born!

Distillation

This method came to me as I began to question my own writing process. Often, the act of brainstorming for me can look like digging through memories I feel I’d like to write about. As an early writer, I’d simply select a memory and begin to dramatize it, changing names and exaggerating dialogue from a moment of extremity in my life. Now, that memory becomes just the starting point.

The next bit is the most time-intensive, but usually the most rewarding. I begin to question why that memory is sticking out to me. Among other questions, I ask myself: Where is the emotional strength of this moment? What’s the climax of this memory? What would an outsider find to be the most interesting moment?

For example, let’s say the memory is the time I tried to catch a bus. As it pulled up to me, I stood from the bench, stepped toward the curb, even made eye contact with the driver. The bus whizzed right past me, and I was left confused as I slowly sat back on the bench.

The most poignant moment here seems to be the shock and confusion that overcame me just as I realized the bus would not be stopping. It’s not quite yet the emotional heart I’m looking for (more like the emotional torso), but I’ve narrowed my search a bit. In my mind, perhaps I’ll turn the camera inward, trying to imagine what my face might have looked like as the bus blew past me or how my heart sped up for just a moment. I’ll also start feeling around in some fourth dimension: What was the context of this moment? Why is this a difficult experience for someone like me?

By asking these questions, I recall that I was in a foreign country for the first time in my life. Weeks prior, I had read a Reddit post about how annoying and stupid American tourists were. I had just spent two weeks avoiding taking the bus because I was certain I’d miss some sort of unspoken social cue and make a fool of myself.

And now, we’re closer to the emotional heart. Sure, there was shock and confusion, but these are sort of everyday emotions, the kinds that live in hundreds of stories and feel a bit too familiar to be surprising. With a little more investigation, I’ve discovered this feeling of knowing you’re going to look like a fool and being right about it. I’ve discovered the feeling of isolation that comes from a lack of understanding. I’ve discovered the feeling of abandonment and betrayal.

Each of these feelings is a story of its own. Sometimes I’m lucky enough to find three, four, or seven different hearts inside a memory, but all you need is one.

I, then, pluck the heart of my choosing from the memory and place it carefully in the metaphorical cooler box where it will live until it finds its transplantee.

Transplantation

With an emotional heart in tow, it’s time to find a place to put it. It can be tempting to drop it right back into the memory you started with, addressing the moment with a newfound sense of understanding and direction. There is absolutely nothing wrong with this option, especially with the silly example that I just used. There is inherently less trauma or extremity to be found there. For moments that require little processing, the return to the original memory would be fine (so long as you are writing nonfiction). However, for some of those more emotionally raw moments, it can be safer and easier to process an emotion in a different scenario. For example, I might use that feeling of isolation to write a story about a woman who hears her neighbor’s life through the walls of her high-rise apartment.

The key here is to ensure that you are distanced enough from the memory you began with, especially if that memory is a traumatic one. Our goal is to produce stories that are addressing the underlying intrigue that bubbled the memory to the surface, while also creating art that is moldable, revisable, and readable from an objective standpoint.

If I use my distilled emotion to write about a woman starting a new job, I might want to avoid having her miss the carpool to the bar after work. It addresses that emotion, but it’s much too similar to my bus memory. Instead, maybe I write about a man who returns to his hometown after years away and finds that even the corner store he once frequented has changed owners, the cashier no longer recognizes him, and the street names feel unfamiliar.

The therapeutic aspect comes in at this point. I like to think of it like trying to clip a dog’s nails while distracting them with a spoon of peanut butter, so they’ll sit still long enough to do so. Rather than looking right at the clippers as they close in on their nails, their mind and senses are occupied with something else. The clipping is still happening, but there’s a distance now.

Transplantation is the peanut butter spoon. While picking apart the nuances of those difficult, unnamable emotions, we’re allowing the beginning stages of processing to occur. We are holding that emotion to the light and turning it 70 degrees or so, looking at it from a different—and hopefully less scary—angle.

Safer Storytelling

When I think back to those conflicted early storytellers, I now realize that they were simply missing the tools. Brainstorming, distillation, and transplantation is just one option to hold in their toolbox, giving them an approach that values their smallest curiosities and quietest memories just as much as their deepest grief. By creating classroom practices that emphasize processing over performance, we show students that writing is not only about what they produce but also about how they engage with their own experiences.

In a cultural moment where public life is saturated with narratives of pain, teaching students to work with emotion in thoughtful, measured ways feels all the more urgent.