Learning How to Bleed, or How Hemingway Tricked Us All into Living a BDSM Nightmare
FADE IN:
A TORTURED ARTIST (definitely male, probably white) clacks away at his Underwood typewriter, fourth scotch in-hand, pouring a fresh emotional wound onto the page, happy—nay, grateful—to suffer for his art. The orchestra swells, manipulating us into believing this is the most romantic fucking image we’ve ever seen.
Writers, we are not okay.
Am I the only one who finds it a wee bit unhealthy we are expected to lay bare our most intimate struggles just to force a bunch of strangers to feel something? No wonder we’re all neurotic, socially awkward co-dependents.
I blame Hemingway.
We like our literary figures like we like our coffee: dark, bitter, and spiked with booze. All the greats were smoking-hot messes who met untimely ends, leaving us with parting wisdom akin to “Let your art knife you in the face:"
“Writing a book is a horrible, exhausting struggle, like a long bout of some painful illness. One would never undertake such a thing if one were not driven by some demon whom one can neither resist nor understand.” –George Orwell (46, tuberculosis)
“Don't loaf and invite inspiration; light out after it with a club.” –Jack London (40, overdose)
“The nerve which controls the pen winds itself about every fibre of our being, threads the heart, pierces the liver.” –Virginia Woolf (59, suicide)
“Let my lusts be my ruin, then, since all else is fake and a mockery.” –Hart Crane (32, suicide)
“Poetry is a tyrannical discipline.” – Sylvia Plath (30, suicide)
“There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” –Ernest Hemingway (61, suicide)
The only thing that should make you more miserable than writing is not writing:
“Until the dark thumb of fate presses me to the dust and says ‘you are nothing’, I will be a writer.” –Hunter S. Thompson (67, suicide)
“It’s simple. You either get it down on paper, or you jump off a bridge.” –Charles Bukowski (73, leukemia)
“If you have any young friends who aspire to become writers, the second greatest favor you can do for them is to present them with copies of The Elements of Style. The first greatest, of course, is to shoot them now, while they’re still happy.” –Dorothy Parker (73, heart attack after multiple suicide attempts)
“And after all what do I really know about it except that you've got to stick to it with the energy of a benny addict.” –Jack Kerouac (47, cirrhosis)
“Writing is a deeper sleep than death. Just as one wouldn't pull a corpse from its grave, I can't be dragged from my desk at night.” –Franz Kafka (40, tuberculosis)
“If I do not write to empty my mind, I go mad.” –Lord Byron (36, sepsis)
We’ve amassed an entire culture around self-flagellation, a mythology that “real” writers either conquer their demons or die trying. It’s normal to think of the creative process as a bloodletting. After all, making art is hard, and knowing we are suffering alongside others makes us feel like we’re members of a sexy underground masochists club.
But if the entire point of writing is to wade through The Swamp of Personal Crisis and emerge with renewed hope, weren’t those guys doing it wrong? Who says metaphorically brutalizing yourself gives you some sort of magical insight into the human condition? Is it really sustainable to treat your craft like a high-stakes hostage situation?
The idea of bleeding on the page is not so romantic when you consider the very real toll on the person behind the words. Violent typewriter-based hyperbole aside, there is the added expectation that you dredge up your private ghosts for the sake of authenticity. (You can only write authentically about grief if you’ve grieved. You can only write authentically about war if you’ve lived it.) But your brain doesn’t know the difference between past and present. If you’re not careful digging around in there, you can accidentally trigger yourself, which can lead to lasting psychological harm.
Despite the many perks of being in Sexy Masochists Anonymous, that seems unnecessary, no?
Writers walk a dangerous tightrope between the therapeutic benefits and the destructive consequences of working in a medium that is meant to be consumed. The catharsis of turning our pain into art is matched only by the raw terror of sending it out into the world. When others judge our work, they are, by extension, judging us.
We cope with the pressure in strange ways. We compartmentalize which memories are okay to explore. We center flawless “model victim” characters in unrealistic revenge fantasies. We fill our stories with empty plot points and avoid letting anything bad happen to our characters at all. At worse, we re-traumatize ourselves trying to move people.
I know a lot about trauma. My day job is the college equivalent of The Principal’s Office. I’m part social worker, part counselor, part judge. I do a lot of spiritually taxing stuff, but my most difficult role is as a Title IX investigator. That means I have the extremely un-fun responsibility of interviewing alleged victims and perpetrators of sexual assault, domestic violence, and abuse.
I am also a survivor.
I sit in my trauma every day. I am no closer to genius because of it. Get bent, Hemingway.
It’s difficult to explain what being triggered feels like. Basically, if you haven’t fully processed your trauma, your body will make you deal with it. It’s just like overworking yourself and crashing. Your prefrontal cortex, or your “thinking” brain, shuts down while your limbic system reacts to the event as if it’s happening in real time.
Think: reverse flashback with stellar production value.
Why is this a big deal? Because going full lizard brain is not great for productivity. When you’re in survival mode, your imagination physically cannot function. All that effort to confront your monsters in order to bloom creatively is actually counterintuitive. And it’s doing a number on your adrenal glands.
It also shows up in your writing.
When you’re triggered, you get stuck on the concrete details of what happened. Your brain is in broken-record mode because it’s trying to make sense of things. In that headspace, you may think a more specific description makes a stronger impact, but it doesn’t. It’s just … specific. Plus, it puts secondary trauma on the reader, and I don’t want to carry your baggage any more than I want to carry my own, pal.
Readers relate to the abstract why. We learn by making connections between novel concepts and things we already know. If the reader has never been through the thing you’re describing, no amount of gory detail is going to help. Those synapses are only going to fire if you can make them recall a similar experience from their own lives—a universal emotion. And you can’t tap into that without full use of your brain parts.
So, how do you ensure that you are ready to get vulnerable without doing damage?
Popping the lid on buried burdens is not the only way to go. Many forms of trauma therapy involve avoiding the subject entirely. It’s a pretty sweet mind hack. You can apply these same strategies to your writing.
- Somatic response: Instead of writing about The Bad Thing, frame it as something entirely separate from you. How might an astronaut floating alone through space represent loss? How can a washed up rock band illustrate a toxic family dynamic? “Write what you know” doesn’t mean literally only write what you’ve experienced. It means filter foreign experiences through those you know well. It’s the on-paper equivalent to method acting.
- Cognitive processing: I once attended a panel where a showrunner said something akin to “tap scar tissue, not an open wound.” You need enough distance from the ordeal that you can see how it connects to greater themes, how it fits into the spectrum of human experience. You have to reach a certain level of objectivity to see it as fuel for your art and not a piece of your identity. If you still feel the need to defend your story from all feedback, you likely have more processing to do. Healing isn’t a straight path; it’s a spiral staircase. Have an honest conversation with yourself about where you’re at.
- Prolonged exposure: I was finally able to write about my assault when I realized it was holding me back from writing sincerely about love, about friendships, and about taking risks. It took me ten years to see that my attitude had been skewed by a single incident, and to admit that I didn’t like it. What I wrote wasn’t very good, but it was an act of creative control over an experience that had previously controlled me. Your trauma responses are only helpful for a period of time. Assess whether they are still protecting you or hindering your growth.
Believe it or not, trauma can be positive. You can become less inhibited in pursuing your goals, more altruistic and empathetic, you can develop stronger coping mechanisms, higher confidence, and become better at expressing yourself creatively.
When you learn to tell your story effectively, you can also help someone else gain clarity on their own pain. Just remember to put on your own oxygen mask before you try to help someone else.
Writing is hard, but it’s not worth dying for.
*Feature Image: Cristina Bernazzani (Adobe)
