If you’re seeking a craft book to help you probe the mystery of writing, you might take a look at Sue Monk Kidd’s Writing Creativity and Soul, a book that combines the author’s deep understanding of the craft of writing fiction and memoir with many of her insights into the creative process and how writing can help heal your soul.
Kidd, the award-winning author of The Secret Life of Bees, The Book of Longings, The Invention of Wings, and more, shares the story of her longing to write and describes the journey she made to establish a room of her own.
In chapter after chapter, she serves as a knowledgeable guide, showing how she conceives of stories, and leads us step-by-step through the various challenges of creating characters and plots, not to mention delving into the deeper meaning one hopes to imbue in one’s stories
Here’s a sampling of the wisdom that she shares:
A story (of the sort that composes a novel, a short story, a play, and to some extent, a memoir) is not a series of reflections in a character’s head, or a series of random events that happen, or even those two things woven cleverly together. A story is something far more subtle and complex.
Here’s the best definition I can come up with. A story is made-up of (1) a character with a significant want, motive, or problem, (2) who sets out to achieve her or his goal and resolve the problem, (3) and along the way is met by mounting obstacles and antagonistic forces from within and without as she or he chooses, acts, and is acted upon, (4) ultimately leading to a resolution, (5) and to the character substantially changed in the process.
That is pretty much the structure of a classical story. Or at least my version of it. Of course, you can deviate from this to your heart’s content. No rules, remember. I’m one of those readers, however, who loves classic storytelling.
She’ll offer quotes along the way as inspiration for writers to keep writing, just like the quotes that she’s taped to the wall on the stairs leading to her writing room to give her the courage and strength to return to her desk each day so she can keep working on a story.
“You become a writer by writing. There is no other way.” - Margaret Atwood
She shares thoughts on how writing has brought meaning into her life:
The creative act of writing has brought meaning into my life in myriad ways, but it made itself known initially in the experience of flow. I’m referring to the sense of personal fulfillment that comes from giving yourself over to something you feel you can belong to, setting a worthwhile and challenging goal, and then giving that goal your full attention, commitment, and energy. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi identified this process as “optimal experience” or “flow.” It’s “the state in which people are so involved in an activity that nothing else seems to matter,” he wrote. “The experience itself is so enjoyable that people will do it… for the sheer shake of doing it.”
Often when I’m writing, I lose all track of time. I look up and two hours have gone by and it feels like twenty minutes…. The immersion and concentration seem to bring my thoughts, feelings, senses, and intentions together into one unified stream that I experience as deep pleasure, fulfillment, and meaning.
And she shares the challenge of writing on days when “There are times when I’m writing and the words leak out slowly. It’s like wringing water out of a damp washcloth. Other times the words slip into my fingers, raw and unkempt, but alive, and I try to trust them, sensing they’re coming from a deeper place…”
When her husband was diagnosed with multiple myeloma, Kidd found “clarity, resilience, hope, and peace by pouring my thoughts and emotions into a story, poem, essay, book chapter, vignette, letter, or journal passage.”
Giving shape and expression to the narrative that was unfolding sent me into dark masses inside to find the core of what I was really feeling and thinking, to grapple with it, and to return almost always altered. It seems if we can write it, we can understand it. If we can understand it, we can accept it. If we can accept it, we can transform it.”
Isak Dinesen framed it like this: “All sorrows can be born if you put them into a story or tell a story about them.” I sometimes wonder how many of our sufferings are stories aching to be told.
I doubt you’ll find a more compassionate guide to the writing process than Sue Monk Kidd or a more valuable book on the craft of writing than Writing Creativity and Soul, the book she has written to help other writers in their search for meaning and wonder.
If you’d like to read an excerpt from Writing Creativity and Soul, visit Sue Monk Kidd’s website: https://suemonkkidd.com/books/writing-creativity-and-soul/
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