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Inspirations

Writing Yourself

Signing Off

Celia Hunt explores the unconscious and turns your life into literature.

To conclude this column I want to say why autobiographical creative writing can be beneficial, both for learning about your self and for developing as a writer.

In spite of the postmodern notion that you have multiple selves and can move easily from one identity to another as simply as changing your clothes, at different stages in your life you will probably tend towards one or two dominant identities: the good daughter, for example, or the caring mother, or the dynamic career woman. And society’s powerful narratives and discourses will encourage this tendency by privileging certain self-concepts over others. In other words you will tend to become your dominant self-concepts, and the parts of your personality that don’t fit into them will be sidelined. If they are repressed altogether, you might become ill because, deprived of space and expression, these parts of you may start to rage beneath the surface and even subtly sabotage your ability to function well in everyday life.

Engaging with yourself through creative writing is a way of sidestepping your dominant self-concepts and engaging with how these other parts of you feel. You might have noticed, if you’ve been following this column, that the first few writing exercises were all about engaging with feeling – through freewriting, rhythm and metaphor. Before you learned to speak, you would have engaged with your carers – assuming you were fortunate enough to have caring adults in your early life – through babbling, gesture, rhythm and bodily feeling. French thinker Julia Kristeva calls this the ‘Semiotic’ realm of experience, where meanings are fluid and not yet fixed, and contrasts it to the Symbolic realm of experience, where meanings can easily become fixed in a society’s particular way of speaking and thinking. In Kristeva’s view creative writing can re-connect you to the Semiotic, the felt experience of yourself, and subvert your tendency to become fixed in the narratives and discourses of everyday life. It allows you to re-make personal meaning between your own ‘feel’ and the language and thinking processes that define you, and to be more open and ‘in process.’

The remaining exercises required you to create dialogues with people, places and voices which are part of your inner world. This was to encourage you to keep your inner space open and to bring greater movement into your psyche. If there is space and movement in the psyche, there is the possibility of bringing more of your felt self into play. And having greater inner freedom is of course vital for engaging in creative writing and developing your writing voice. As psychotherapist Christopher Bollas says, unconscious processes are not just about keeping uncomfortable material at bay, as Freud suggested, but are inherently creative too, if you can give them the space and the freedom they need. Hopefully this two-fold approach worked well for you.

CELIA HUNT runs the MA in Creative Writing and Personal Development at Sussex University and is author of Therapeutic Dimensions of Autobiography in Creative Writing (Jessica Kingsley, 2000) and Writing: Self and Reflexivity (with Fiona Sampson, forthcoming, Palgrave Macmillan)

REFERENCES:

Julia Kristeva, Revolution in Poetic Language, 1984

Christopher Bollas, Being a Character, 1993         

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From Issue 34 ◊ Jul/Aug/Sep 2007

Caution:

The exercises in this feature can access memories and feelings that may be challenging or painful. Before you start, do ensure you have supportive friends or family members to talk to if need be.