The Story of My Life

by Jessica Costello

In my junior year of college, I enrolled in a creative nonfiction workshop without fully understanding even what the title of the course meant. Back then, I fiercely identified as a fiction writer, and had already completed a draft of a novel. When I wanted to write about real-life people, I disguised them as fictional characters with a couple of borrowed personality traits or lines of dialogue.

I never addressed events in my life directly in my writing. I never pictured myself writing anything close to an essay in which I exposed my own thoughts and feelings about real people and real places, or, least of all, reflected on myself.

How can I be creative, but still tell the truth? Aren’t those goals contradictory?

I flipped through the syllabus to see the topics we would be writing about that semester. The place you call home. A color. A time you were othered. A time you were expected to do something because of your gender. How you reckon with the outside world.

As a straight suburban white girl from central Massachusetts who had been lucky enough to never experience any sexual violence or much discrimination, I felt like I would have nothing to write about. Sure, I’d had my problems, but they were nothing like the struggles of my classmates, several of whom were immigrants, identified as LGBT+, or had experienced serious traumas. I didn’t think my collections of minor rejections and setbacks would contain half as much resonance as their stories did.

 And worse, I’d have to share my work with them.

 Did I mention this was the first real workshop I’d ever taken?

My first piece was about growing up as an only child in a rather isolated house, and how that environment influenced the person I am today. It was raw, personal, and uncomfortable to write, but I realize now that reflecting on my childhood for the sake of the piece forced me to relearn about parts of myself that I had forgotten.

When my turn came to share with the class, I wasn’t comfortable hearing my own voice reading my written words. It was as if I had put my most transformative, vulnerable moments on display. But I knew that getting feedback and notes was not only crucial to improving my writing, but the only way to pass the course, so I opened myself.

With each assignment, the reading got easier. The nerves faded. I listened openly to the subsequent batch of compliments and gentle critiques. The more I was able to reflect on and share my own experiences, the more I realized not every story has to have a major element of revelation or identity discovery. I had only my life to draw on, and no one else ould look at it with my perspective. I mined even the smallest details for emotional resonance.

Beyond that, each person in the room got something different out of my writing, sometimes facets that I hadn’t even anticipated being important. In writing, just as in life, we become interdependent reflections of one another. The sociologist Charles Cooley famously developed the idea that a person’s identity depends on how other people interact with and perceive them. The same is true of the myriad meanings of written prose.

That class also taught me that writing is often more powerful when not dressed up in metaphor. I practiced describing things simply as they are for the most impact. Things are often messy and contradictory, and the best writing reveals more questions than answers.

As time went on, through the process of uncovering my own narrative voice, I was able to look more closely at how my past experiences and relationships with family and friends, and situations that just didn’t work out had shaped me. Through sharing my work, I discovered a new confidence, with which I could process the past and solve the present problems I was writing about.

The practice of giving my raw experiences a shape on the page, letting them move and mix and intertwine, yet still be ordered in the way I wanted them to be seen, gave me an empowering feeling of control over the parallel shape of my life. If I could order words on the page, maybe solutions to the problems I was writing about would become a little clearer. I was even able to see how my novel contained truths I needed to hear.

Ultimately, writing nonfiction changed my metric for determining whether a story was worth telling. Writing a strong personal essay doesn’t require emphasis on all the ways you’ve been wronged. It requires honest reflections on the world and how you interact with it. Today, I am much more comfortable writing about my own life and letting the story I tell shape me. Now I know my life is the most important story I will ever tell.

Jessica Costello is a writer and graduate student based in Massachusetts, seeking representation for her novel. Visit her blog at thecraftedpassion.wordpress.com