On Wednesdays, I share posts, fables, songs, poems, quotations, TEDx Talks, cartoons, and books that have inspired and motivated me on my writing journey. I hope these posts will give writers, artists, and other creatives a mid-week boost.
In a recent post on Writers Unboxed, author and coach Kathleen McCleary shared excellent advice for dealing with writer’s block. Here’s an excerpt from that post:
Charles Dickens started writing an autobiography when he was 33 and already famous for writing Oliver Twist and A Christmas Carol. He found writing truthfully about the dark years of his childhood to be so painful that he abandoned his autobiography and instead, at 37, started writing David Copperfield. In it he explored all the memories that were too much to process in reality: working in a factory as a child while his father was in prison, attending school with a sadistic headmaster, his relationship with his wife. It was his favorite of all his books.
Nora Ephron wrote her first novel, Heartburn, after discovering that her husband was cheating on her while she was pregnant with their second child. The main character at one point says she tells stories “Because if I tell the story, I control the version. Because if I tell the story, I can make you laugh, and I would rather have you laugh at me than feel sorry for me. Because if I tell the story, it doesn’t hurt as much. Because if I tell the story, I can get on with it.”
So, what are some ways to write yourself whole? You know better than I do, but here are a few ways to get started:
◆ Write the childhood you wish you’d had.
◆ Write the thing you wish you’d said.
◆ Write the ending you wanted or want for your marriage, career, friendship, life.
◆ Write who you’d be if you’d chosen to take that flight to San Francisco for a job instead of staying in D.C., or whatever that pivotal life decision was.
◆ Write who you’d be if you’d said “yes” instead of “no.”
◆ Write the Band-aid for the hole in your heart and psyche that haunt you.
◆ Write your secret. Write your deepest longing. Write your starkest truth.
◆ Write in a different voice than you’ve ever written before.
Do this not in journals or memoir but in fiction, in telling stories that give you the distance to have a better understanding of and more compassion for the person experiencing those things, making those choices, failing and flailing.
The English critic G. K. Chesterton wrote about his experience of reading David Copperfield, “[Dickens] has created creatures who cling to us and tyrannize over us, creatures whom we would not forget if we could, creatures whom we could not forget if we would, creatures who are more actual than the man who made them.” In other words, creatures who are whole, who restore us, the readers to wholeness, as well as the author who created them. I’d say that’s a pretty fine thing to do.
My latest mystery book took me back in time and out of my comfort zone. Conflagration! is a historical mystery set in Montreal in 1734. It raises issues about slavery in Canada – and introduces us to a justice system that is distinctly different from 2024. 
Paul Guerin is an Irishman. He was born in September 1946 in Castletownroche, a small townland village in County Cork, Eire.
Joanne Guidoccio 