A tender kind of alchemy

Reflections on writing, anger and the short story

by Madeehah Reza

TW: Discussion of abuse, harassment

A story first takes place inside you, as a seedling of an idea or a great vivid rush of a character. It grows into something that will breathe by itself, conscious and alive. This creation of a story is a magical thing to witness, and it is this flame of magic that fuels writers to seek out stories from our nebulous subconscious. But sometimes, in most unfortunate circumstances, that fire no longer burns.

This happened to me, quite plainly, because of abuse. The details are not as important as the fact that part of this abuse was directed towards my writing. Writing has always been a kingdom to claim as my own, but abuse became the disaster that fractured the foundations of this sacred land. It was a small thing in the grand scheme of what I experienced, barely a few words, but the damage was done. My kingdom broke down in front of me, its solid ground crumbling like dust under my feet. I could no longer write because I would always relate it back to how it had been twisted; I was disgusted by my own words. I cannot fully describe the depth of sadness I felt when I couldn’t bring myself to write, to do something that felt as natural as breathing.

The abuse occurred at my job some time ago. Naturally I found it difficult to continue working, so I chose to take a career break and pursue a Masters in Creative Writing. There’s some debate as to the value of studying creative writing academically, but I don’t believe anyone needs formal training to be a writer. Whether an MA or MFA in Creative Writing is right for you can only be decided by you. I’ve often wondered why I decided to take such a tangent because at the time I found it difficult to write even a paragraph, so traumatised was my mind. My professional background also has nothing to do with writing or creativity. Two years later, it was suggested to me that I sought out the Masters due to anger. Anger that someone treated me this way; anger that no one listened to me; anger that I had no control over protecting myself. Anger that I could not find a way to even express this anger. But my anger saved me. My anger saved my writing.

~

For the length of our known history, humans have used writing to document, portray and express how trauma affects our lives. The role of language and creativity can play an important role in healing trauma, as Roxane Gay writes in her essay Writing into the Wound,

There can be solace in saying, ‘This is what happened to me. This is how I have been shaped by what happened to me. This is who I am because of or despite what happened to me.’

I hesitated to discuss my personal life in my final dissertation as I thought the essay was an academic meditation on the craft of creative writing. Eventually I realised that the very trauma I tried to suppress underpinned my creative process throughout the entire course. It wrapped itself around the narratives I wrote, choked my creative choices, punctured sharp holes in my prose. I often submitted work past deadlines as what I wrote about was too close to home which left my mind hollow, my neurons unable to piece together words on a page.

I chose to write a collection of short stories about difficult emotions, each with an element of fantasy. It wasn’t so much an intentional decision as, due to my mental health, I didn’t have the focus needed to write a novel. Short stories provided a relief for me, a way to still connect with the act of writing but not commit myself to a single story. Since then, I have come to realise that short stories require as much of a writer’s focus and commitment as a novel—perhaps even more so, as there are several of them. They’re like children that surround you, demanding your attention to bring out the best of them. There was a challenge in maintaining their uniqueness—the narrator’s voice, the rhythm of the prose, the flow of the plot—without allowing them to bleed into one another. They were no longer just streams of my consciousness but attentive, aware entities in themselves.

My initial stories were stifled, suffocated by fear and subdued into passivity. I used several techniques subconsciously to create a false distance between my own experiences and my work: writing in the second person point of view, a lack of agency from the characters and use of the passive voice.

My first two short stories were based on experiences of harassment and abuse. The writing was passive, in both prose and plot. Things were happening to the protagonists rather than them being active in the story. This was a reflection of my state of mind at the time: still in shock, still trying to piece together what had happened a year prior. I was a passive observer in my own life, and so were my characters. But the antidote to passivity is energy. In George Saunders' book, A Swim in the Pond in the Rain, he relates how causation leads to the transfer of energy:

We’ve said that a story is a system for the transfer of energy. Energy made in the early pages gets transferred along through the story, passed from section to section, like a bucket of water headed for a fire, and the hope is that not a drop gets lost.

This action, this energy that Saunders describes, was missing from my stories. I was missing a spark, a sense of life. But how do you write energy? How do you summon the essence of a story when you lack that which you need to create it?

~

In the final story I wrote for my portfolio, I explored the emotion that scared me the most: anger. I discovered what I was most scared about in this simple five letter word: that anger provided me a reason to hold a space I believed I could not occupy. In those two years I slowly discerned the truth about my anger from what I thought anger was. Anger is not rage, nor is it violence, nor abuse. Anger, in its purest form, is action. It is energy.

Energy drives a story forward by propelling it into being and sustaining its momentum. It’s no coincidence that when I accepted the anger I felt about the abuse I faced, I became proactive in my pursuit of being a writer. My tutor noted this too, commenting that my writing felt ‘very alive and alert for the reader’ and that there was a ‘new writerly pleasure coming through.’ Finally, I was reconnecting with the joy of telling a story.

A short story has fewer words, fewer characters, fewer settings to impress its point to the reader. As Richard Ford states in his article High-wire performers, the ‘fundamental character trait of short stories, other than their shortness, would seem to be audacity’. Short stories need to be bold yet concise, daring yet avoid the superfluous; the writer of short stories needs to be confident in the story being told, and confident in its reader. Being truly angry about something means challenging that situation or experience, and in being challenging you must be bold and daring, confident in your gut feeling.

I chose to write in the fantasy genre. I found it easier to express visceral feelings using speculative fiction rather than being grounded in the depressing reality of the contemporary. But fantasy gave me a distraction from what we seek in a story: to connect with another’s experience. It’s difficult to bond with a story when it loses its grip on reality; that is, the reality of being human. This principle helped redirect my focus and create a real weight to my words, an authenticity and emotional honesty that was previously missing.

My interest in fantasy led me to the world of folktales. In Marina Warner’s book From the Beast to the Blonde she explores the origins of fairy tales and folktales, how these tales were traditionally found in the oral form in gatherings that ‘were the sphere of women, where they presided over the spoken word and its uses.’ This resonated with me in part because of why I wanted to tell these stories: historically, female storytellers often used narrative ‘to bring about a resolution of satisfaction and justice.’ Warner goes on to describe the mood of fairy tales as ‘optative’, which means to describe a 'what if' situation. This could be why I gravitated towards the fairy tale genre; I wanted to imagine a world where the consequences of abuse could be different. What if my abuser was erased from existence? What if the power of my anger could bring about a different conclusion to the ordeal?

I eventually found these optative questions unsatisfying, perhaps because in reality there is rarely a satisfying conclusion for survivors of trauma. It felt cheap to make a fairy tale ending about something that never should have happened. As Gay states about writing on trauma, ‘You want to convey the depth of the terrible, but you don’t want to do it so artfully that the trauma is minimized or overlooked.’

When I sat down to write my final short story for the course, The Laws of Anger (to be published by Vassar Review in 2023), I realised I was trying to shoehorn an element of fantasy that was not genuine. Though fun to write, I removed this element and focused on the characters’ relationships, the subtle gestures between them and the intensity of the emotions portrayed. This created a far more powerful story, possibly the strongest out of all my stories in my portfolio. My tutor noted the integrity of emotional honesty in this final story, which was a breakthrough for me and quite fitting that it came towards the end of the Masters. It was a breakthrough not simply for my creative process but for my personal healing, too; at last, I could be honest with myself about how I felt without dressing it up or creating distance from it.

~

I wrote this journal entry some months before I decided to apply for the Masters:

[...] I don’t want to write creatively, don’t want to put the effort in because if I do then something, some emotion or anxiety or hurt will spill on to the page. And I don’t want that. I want to keep my creativity aside from whatever has happened. I don’t want the stories I build to resemble anything from my life. I feel that, because I write to reflect and to offload, inevitably something will slip up and the two worlds merge, and I don’t want that. But if I can’t write, what else am I doing? I’m obviously more than my words, but I love writing. I feel home in it. It’s my ‘thing’. And in trying to find something to substitute as another ‘thing’, I feel lost. I want to go home.

This journal entry marks the genesis of my ‘emotional dishonesty’; I didn’t want my kingdom of words to be ruined with the ugliness of trauma. Most of these journal entries were no longer than half a page of A5. Not only did I find it difficult to concentrate on writing but it was also painful to acknowledge the truth. It’s strange to see how far I’ve come from those difficult days.

The Masters was more than an academic course. I didn’t pursue it because I wanted a prestigious degree or because I was changing my career (although I was very much on the brink of it). All I sought was safety, warmth and love: a place to heal. A tender kind of alchemy had brewed in between the safe confines of my tutor’s kind feedback and the warm camaraderie of my coursemates that allowed me to build myself back into the writer I once was. I had finally returned home.

The oxymoron equation

Before the waves come