Encased

This is a transcript of Episode 1: Encased from The Divine Dissatisfaction Podcast. Click here to listen to the episode.

Here where I live in southwestern Ontario, we have, not often, but definitely more often than we used to, these periods of freezing rain. And on those mornings, I take my dog to the park, and we walk on the grass, which feels safer since the sidewalks are just a sheet of ice.

As we walk, I hear the crunch of frozen grass beneath my feet. I hear, too, the ice-covered tree branches cracking overhead as they try to sway in the wind.

Once someone had left a sweatshirt on a picnic table and ice had formed, solidifying the folds, making that carelessly tossed fluid shape into something harder. And the sleeves, which hung down over the side of the table had these sharp tentacles of ice coming out where hands should have been.

Sometimes when I'm walking on the ice-covered grass, there's that split second terror of my foot slipping or the surface breaking, that very particular sensation of the earth seeming to give way—what you believed to be solid, not holding you as you trusted it would.

On a recent walk like this, I paused and took more time to look at the trees.

The way each spiky pine needle was enclosed and blunted. I also noticed a few persistent oak leaves, just a handful left clinging to the tree, each one seemingly dripping ice.

Finally, I stopped in front of a maple and marvelled at a small, vibrant red bud covered in about a centimeter of ice. I could see the bud so clearly, but I couldn't touch it, encased as it was in this protective layer of ice.

It made me think of those moments in our writing when we have a sense of the core, the idea or theme or life event that sits at the heart of our work that we can't quite get to. You might know what it is, we might sit down already intending to write about that very particular moment of conflict or transformation.

We might be able to see it just as clearly as I could see that red maple bud, but also like that encased bud, we can't actually touch what we see as the heart of that particular piece. We can't let ourselves. At least not in the earlier stages of a project. We have to keep whatever it is at the core, encased in that protective shell.

Or maybe it's ourselves, we're keeping encased.

Or maybe it's a bit of both.

I'm aware of this tendency in my own writing in early drafts to write around certain moments or to not go into them as deeply as I know is necessary. And I'll often see a similar thing with writers I work with: an avoidance or a quickly writing past the key moment of conflict in a story.

In Writing Fiction: A Guide to Narrative Craft, Janet Burroway writes of how many writers "avoid writing crisis scenes in early drafts." The tendency many of us have to avoid intense conflict or discomfort in real life can create a similar type of avoidance when we have to write conflict driven or highly emotional scenes. And so often we end up writing summary rather than actually being in scene, or we write the bare bones of the scene rather than the heart of it.

As Janet Burroway discusses, writing those crisis moments requires the writer to "fully imagine that scene" and to put themselves in it. It's not just about understanding what happens on a plot level. As Burroway writes, it's about the writer "emotionally experiencing it moment by moment."

What makes the crisis scene engaging and satisfying from the reader's perspective is the work the writer has put into immersing the reader–but first themselves–fully in the scene and the emotional experience of what's happening.

The writer stays with the discomfort and the strong emotions that come out of the imagined, but still deeply felt conflict of the scene. And it's through doing that work, describing the emotions they are allowing themselves to feel, experiencing the sensations of fear, anger, terror, frustration, grief in their bodies, that writers are able to create the most visceral and affecting experiences for readers.

That kind of work asks a tremendous amount of us as writers.

And so while writing around a key moment or about it in a surface way is an issue that needs to be addressed at some stage, I've come to think about that distance, that kind of protective encasement, as actually being a necessary part of my process.

I have to be ready. I have to ready myself to do that work.

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So how do you actually do that—support and care for yourself and make yourself ready to write more emotionally challenging scenes?

First—and we've already touched on this—is reminding yourself that this process is going to take as long as it needs to take.

So often we bring that productivity mindset to our writing, when really our writing exists in an entirely different relationship to time.

And think about each draft as a deepening, that you're working in layers, and that each time you come back to that scene, you can possibly just go one thin layer deeper into it.

Remember too, that you can do writing that is just for you. No one needs to see it until you feel ready, and maybe you are able in your first draft, especially if you're writing memoir, to get down onto the page, a lot of your pain and grief and anger about a particular event.

But from there, you'll be able to step back, to have some distance, to observe and be a witness to the experience. So you are still the person who experienced the trauma you're writing about, or those difficult moments of conflict or intense emotion that are informing the fiction you're writing, so it feels truly embodied for your characters- you're still that person or using those moments, but you are also using your craft as a writer to shape, form, make connections, and create meaning for your readers. To write, as Rema Ziman talks about in a talk on vulnerability, from the scar, not the wound.

Something else that can be helpful is giving yourself time and mental space. Make sure you're leaving space to move into the writing and also out of it so you're not rushing this process, so you're leaving yourself actual time, but also not trying to go into a highly emotional or conflict full scene on a day when you're feeling pressure of certain other deadlines or responsibilities.

I find to really be in the experience of the moment I want to stay in it once I've started, so I will try and set aside like a four- or five-hour block on a weekend day when I know I want to work on one of these scenes.

If that feels overwhelming, another way to approach it is to tell yourself you only have to do a minimum amount of time. So rather than committing to hours, it might be kinder to yourself to say, "Okay, I'm gonna set a timer for 15 minutes and that's all I need to spend on this scene today". And then you know there's an end point, and then you have the choice once the timer goes off, whether you want to stay in that space and write more, or if you want to leave it for that day.

Along those lines, you could also make a promise to yourself before you begin this work. A commitment that if, it is too difficult, if it's not resistance, if it is actually that you're struggling to be present with the emotions and the conflict in the experience that you're describing, that you will stop and then try again later.

The part of you that's going to be more vulnerable in this experience needs to know it can trust the other parts won't force you to continue if it's too difficult or if you are in some way re-traumatizing yourself or trying to write about emotions or conflicts you're not quite ready to explore or hold yet.

Next, think about your rituals. We often talk about a ritual in terms of beginning or triggering your writing practice. It can be really useful to have a particular tea that you make or a candle you light, or maybe you start with some breath work or a small meditation, maybe you even do some movement or shaking, which helps you move from one state towards the other. And once that's repeated, once it is a ritual and a regular part of your practice, it's sort of a trigger to your brain so you can move into the writing much more quickly.

That opening ritual is very important when you're doing this kind of work because again, it's helping you transition into this separate space where there is perhaps more possibility of, once you've spent some time in this world and you know the story and you can trust yourself and trust the story, that you can go to that kind of deeper place and hold those bigger emotions or more of the conflict. You can sort of sit in the discomfort of that.

I think it's equally important when doing this kind of work to have some type of closing ritual, a signal to yourself that you are leaving this work behind for now, so that you are not actively in that same emotional conflict-ridden state that you needed to be when you were writing those crisis moments.

In some sense, the writing, I think is always with you, when you leave the space, it's still there at the back of your mind working away, but you also need to go back and somehow function in the world. So if you can find some symbolic gesture of closing the door, no matter how small, whether that's blowing out a candle, you lit when you started, maybe it's a short meditation, a practice of writing a few lines in a process journal, which is what I typically do, have some type of ritual that allows you to transition out of the space you've been in and release what you've had to hold when writing that difficult scene.

Give yourself a few moments of grace as you emerge from that difficult, necessary work.

I talked earlier about how sometimes we go into a piece knowing what the difficult thing that we're going to be writing about is—part of our reason for creating the piece is that we want to write about that particular moment, that particular experience that was challenging, perhaps traumatic for us, as well as transformational, and that formed us in a significant way.

Other times, and this is most often the case for me, we don't know when we start a new project exactly what we're writing about or what within ourselves we're going to be confronting when we do this work.

There's a way in which that understanding of what the writing is actually going to ask of you comes later in the project once you're more invested in or committed to the piece.

Because if we did know at the beginning, maybe we'd never start.

When I began writing my short story "Count Your Blessings," which is about a woman who bricks herself into her apartment to become a modern-day anchoress, I didn't understand that it was going to be about my own experiences with anxiety and depression.

When I started my one woman play The Salvation Business, which is about a faith healer and Pentecostal preacher, I didn't really have the sense that it was going to be a metaphor to explore a crisis of faith I was experiencing in my own creative process.

With the novel I'm currently writing, I did know fairly early on that it was about sacrifice and duty, which are things I often write about, but I was about a year and a half into the writing before I had this moment of realizing, " Oh, it's about caregiving," and it hit me in an entirely new way. I could see then the novel was a place to hold what I had been and still am wrestling with in my own life around caregiving and the complexities of what it means to be a caregiver.

Even when I started writing this particular piece, I didn't really anticipate how thinking about encasement and that kind of protective shell would bring up all of this processing I'm still doing about the pandemic and the keeping of ourselves apart and isolated and protected, and also the grief and loss that we're still carrying, and what it means to start opening up those experiences rather than letting them continue to stay so tightly enclosed, to acknowledge the truth that something that was absolutely necessary to our survival at one stage no longer serves us.

When we finally understand what it is we're really writing about, there's still perhaps a sense of choice—that once you understand what it is, you can decide if you do or don't want to continue writing the piece.

I find, though, that those moments feel more like a recognition than a choice. It's like the writing has, in its own way, been guiding me to something that was absolutely necessary for me to work through, and to do that working through on the page, since that is the way I tend to best process things.

I recognize in those moments that the writing is always taking me exactly where I most need to go.

In an interview Colum McCann said, as a writer, "you should do what is most difficult for you." And that is something I also believe, that the things I most need to write about are the most difficult for me.

I have this term I use when thinking about my own work. In every piece I'm writing about what I call impossible necessities. Those moments where we say, I can't, and yet we also understand the absolute necessity of doing that thing we think we can't do.

I feel like the phrase also speaks to my own creative process and the way in which I hold myself encased, but that at some stage I have to let go of the can't, to shed those protective layers and write the things, it feels impossible, but also necessary to say.

Often, after the freezing rain, there is sun and the ice glistens. It can be a magical sight. It also begins to thaw.

Thawing, as defined by the Cambridge Dictionary, means to cause to change from a solid frozen state to a liquid or soft one.

Here in the Northern hemisphere, as we begin that transition from winter to spring, I've been craving that same kind of thawing, that softening, a coming back to life, a release from confinement, and a sense of being more fully in touch with the world and with my creative work—whatever, impossible, but also necessary thing it is asking of me.