Fiction As a Form of Healing Hope? Boy Howdy!

On Thursday I read an online Writer’s Digest article one week after it was posted on 9/11. Not only was “The Healing Power of Fiction: Turning Pain into Prose,” by author and peace negotiator Somia Sadiq, well-timed after a difficult two weeks, it also stood out as perhaps the most profound and validating piece ever offered by this magazine.

Validating because, Sadiq’s article addresses the healing power of fiction for both writers, and readers, offering a pointed pushback (at least for me) for those folks who’ve complained about issue-oriented fiction and how they just want to be “entertained” and “not think about all that.” An oft heard—and frankly off-putting in its own right—refrain going back to 2019 when I began the re-draft of my first Other Worldly novel, Alienable Rights, before publishing it in early 2020.

Yet the article most resonated for me as an author who initially struggled with the reality that I was, in fact, turning pain into prose at one of the two worst, and most perilous, times in my life.

As Sadiq noted, “Fiction, it turns out, is one of the most powerful ways we can turn pain into something we can actually carry. It doesn’t erase the trauma. It doesn’t offer tidy resolutions. But it does transform what feels unspeakable into something that can be shared, read, and understood. That act alone can be profoundly healing. For the writer, and the reader.”

It’s true, because the trauma is still there to be dealt with, as I was unfortunately repeatedly reminded of these past two weeks, even after publishing six more novels in my series. But it is because I wrote Feeling Alienated, Aliens Abound, and Being Alien during the two-year Covid pandemic, that I was able to begin healing from past trauma. Even while feeling isolated, devastated, and afraid by world events, including the domestic terrorist insurrection at the US Capitol on Jan 6, 2021. In short, it was writing—and rereading each book as I began the next—that helped me survive, literally.

Sadiq further imparts, “Across cultures, stories have always been part of how we heal…These stories weren’t just entertainment. They were tools for survival. A way of carrying memory forward when it was too dangerous or raw to share in its purest form…Fiction, in many ways, is a contemporary extension of that tradition.”

My only regret is much of my pain was too dangerous and raw to share fully, and with full honesty as to the severity of being in a nightmare relationship with an abusive narcissistic sociopath, when I wrote Alienable Rights. Indeed, even as I have revamped that first work for a potential publishing reboot, it is still difficult to fully convey how bad it truly was.

Yet, all along, my hope has been that in sharing whatever I could to better address that fear and pain through protagonist Rowan Layne as she gradually begins to recognize her need to heal from trauma in Alienable Rights and books beyond—especially including the most recent Aliens Watch published earlier this year—it will ultimately be worth it if I can offer an uplifting message to women readers who might know this pain, and the self-flagellating guilt that comes with it, all too well.

Because, as Sadiq said, “Fiction has the ability to rehearse healing in us, alongside attempting it in our real lives…Of course trauma isn’t just personal. It’s also collective…And fiction has a way of carrying these wounds into public view without reducing them to statistics or headlines.”

Boy howdy, as Rowan Layne would say. Although I do include quite a few snarky headlines in my Other Worldly novels.

Sadiq concluded, “Imagine building our capacity to not just be able to heal from our own grief, but that of others?…Not everyone has access to therapy. But most people have access to stories.”

With that reference to access, I’m sharing some news that I wasn’t quite ready to divulge in last week’s post. Last Sunday, two months after blogging about the United Kingdom subsidiary of Harper Collins I stumbled upon this summer, which actively seeks fiction authors without agents, I submitted a revised Alienable Rights to One More Chapter. This upon discovering that they reopened for submissions the first week in September, and after painstakingly drafting the dreaded synopsis required for said submission, along with the challenge of a “pitch” comprising a mere three lines.

It may be a longshot submitting an already published novel that launched an ongoing series back in 2020, but you miss 100 percent of all shots you don’t make the effort to take. And I’m sincerely proud of myself for getting it done and giving it a go. Here’s hoping this might just be a way for the story of Rowan Layne to gain greater access to women of the world. For healing, and hopefully for some much-needed laughs. After all, it is said that tomorrow’s autumnal equinox can bring a period of profound change.