When the story becomes your own by Amanda Le Rougetel

LUCY BURDETTE: Do you ever wonder how we find and curate the posts that appear miraculously every day on this blog? Sometimes people ask us to appear, other times we just make stuff up, and sometimes we invite guests who we think will be interesting. A while back when one of our friends, Amanda, posted about a writing group she led with a pal, I asked her to write a post. I hope you find it as interesting as I did, and I know you'll welcome Amanda!

AMANDA LE ROUGETEL: Once a month, I pack an overnight bag and head across town to my friend Deborah’s for a writing retreat. We do more than ‘just’ write — we talk, we eat, and we critique each other’s work. We usually stay up too late, but the morning is rich with good coffee, and more time for writing and talking.

We are both in times of transition in our lives: Deborah is heading towards the third anniversary of her husband’s death and reinventing herself as a lone woman after a loving marriage of 40+ years. I am moving towards retirement sometime in the next five years and wanting to be a capital W writer by the time I get there. For me, this means actually writing (rather than just talking about writing!) and having people read that writing. Whether it’s on a published page or online doesn’t matter to me, but I want my writing to find readers.

Deborah and I trust each other, so our critiques pull no punches: We question word choice, push for greater clarity of thought, and suggest that beginnings, mid-points or endings might be stronger by considering X or Y. Deborah has been focusing on creative memoir, while I’ve been writing creative non-fiction on my blog Five Years a Writer.

After several months of coffee and conversation, we realized that our process was producing not only better writing but also increased clarity about our evolving identities. It seemed that, in paying attention to our writing, we were becoming sharper critics of our lives and more confident agents of personal change.

One day, we decided that we wanted to share our practice with a public audience. So we developed a 4-part workshop titled Writing as a Tool for Transformation, which we offered last fall through the community classroom at our local independent bookstore.

By happenstance, the sixteen participants were all women. By design, they were each facing a self-identified transition of some kind: widowhood, retirement, ending of a relationship, the struggle for identity within motherhood, to name a few. Each was ready to use writing as a way to gain clarity for themselves. In each session, the participants wrote to our prompts, then re-wrote, shifting the form, perspective, audience and, in the final class, even the medium — using images from magazines to encapsulate their new understanding of themselves relative to the transition they were working with.

And clarity came. One woman said she was able, for the first time, to articulate her feelings about the transition she was working with.

Don’t you think that that is exactly the power of words? Whether we write them or we read them, if we engage actively with the meaning they create for us, they open doorways through which our imagination can flow to shape new thoughts and understandings.

For me, active reading of fiction or non-fiction can spark insights into myself, because I live vicariously through the characters and story unfolding on the page, and I contemplate how I might acquit myself in similar circumstances. Would I be as fearless as V. I. Warshawski? As open-hearted as Clare Fergusson? As committed to family as Gemma James? I have never owned a horse, but as a young girl I learned not only about riding from the Jill stories, but also about how to be a self-reliant young person in a world run by adults. From the Sue Barton: Nurse stories I learned that meaningful work could transition beyond formal career to other contexts.

I’ve sorted out many a thorny issue in my life by writing it out. And I’ve come to untold better understandings of myself by engaging with the lives of characters invented by an author. Reading is a pleasure, and when that pleasure produces insight, then it’s not only rewarding but potentially life-changing.

What about you, dear Reds and JRW readers? Do you ever write your way to clarity and insight about a challenge in your life? Do characters in a book lead you to better understanding of yourself?

Amanda Le Rougetel is a lifelong reader and a non-fiction-writer-in-progress. She was introduced to the mystery genre through Mrs. Pollifax, Kinsey Millhone and V. I. Warshawski and is happy that the Reds writers have expanded her reach much more broadly into the field. That she finds herself posting to the Jungle Red Writers blog today as a guest is an enormous thrill and unexpected honor. She posts to her own blog Five Years a Writer less regularly than she would like, but is working to improve her writing routine. She earns her living as a college communication instructor in the heart of the Canadian prairies in Winnipeg, Manitoba.