Creative Digest #13: On the Representation of Trauma in Fiction; Managing Time; Why Write or, Fail Better
The latest edition of our departmental Substack looks at the representation of trauma in novel writing, managing the timings of a Creative Writing MA, and some thoughts on reading and writing.
Welcome to the thirteenth edition of Creative Digest, the Substack from the Creative Writing team at City, University of London, where we teach on undergrad and postgrad degrees in the School of Communication and Creativity. We hope you enjoy it.
Upcoming events:
Wednesday 12th March, 5.30pm: Postgraduate online taster session — Jonathan Gibbs considers Sally Rooney’s Counter-Intuitive Construction. Register for your free place here
Wednesday 23 April, 5.00pm: Postgraduate online taster session — This taster seminar looks at the American writer Maggie Nelson’s phenomenally successful, genre-defying memoir The Argonauts. Register for your free place here
On the Representation of Trauma in Fiction
by Deepa Anappara
A subject I think about often is the representation of trauma in fiction, not least because the characters who feature in my writing have lived through or are going through traumatic events. Each time I encounter a story in which trauma functions as a tool to map a character’s emotional growth, or generate narrative suspense or pace, I am reminded that trauma can also have the opposite impact: it can leave a person feeling stuck in a particular moment.
Then, there are the ethical questions around writing trauma, which I grappled with as I wrote my first novel about the disappearances of children in an impoverished North Indian settlement, a story based on events that unfolded in real life. I was keenly aware that many parents were waiting for answers about their missing children, and hoping they would return, and it seemed not only wrong but also unethical to weave a fictional narrative around their grief.
I am not sure there are easy answers to these questions, but in her essay ‘On Trauma,’ published in Letters to a Writer of Colour (Vintage, 2023) that I co-edited, Ingrid Rojas Contreras writes that a story of trauma in itself isn’t the danger. ‘The same material can feel gratuitous and exploitative… or human and powerful, depending on who’s narrating it and how, and this is craft, and this is lived experience. It’s all in the telling,’ she writes. Rojas Contreras suggests noting who is centred in the story. Often, it is not the character or their experience, but the reader who wants an ‘identity-experience safari’. Moving away from such demands, sometimes made by the publishing industry, and creating a space in the text for silences, for gaps and fragments, may instead suggest a story’s structure and ‘offer a truer way of telling,’ Rojas Contreras writes.
On similar lines, the novelist Cecile Pin recently spoke to my students about her first novel, Wandering Souls, which traces the stories of three young Vietnamese siblings arriving in Thatcher’s Britain. While based on her own family history – her mother was one of the Vietnamese boat people – Cecile Pin seemed to suggest that transposing that story to Britain instead of France, where her mother settled, gave her the permission to write the novel in a way that also allowed her to respect her family’s privacy. Within the novel too, we find a character negotiating questions about how the story should be told and how much space to give to moments of joy even as we see the characters return again and again to a particularly traumatic moment. Cecile Pin’s narrative choices not only remind the reader of the experience of trauma but also that the character is much more than the traumatic experience that occurred to them.
When it came to my own novel, I found that it helped to set it in a fictional, unnamed city. While it didn’t erase my fears of stepping on the grief experienced by families, it at least gave me the distance I needed to explore the trauma through the eyes of my characters.
Managing Time
By Jonathan Gibbs
It’s always an interesting moment in an MA degree when you stand in front of your cohort and tell them that they’re halfway through the programme. You can see the panic as it flashes across their faces. Not for all of them – the part-time students sit back in their chairs, suddenly relaxed; likewise the students signed up for our two-year MFA Creative Writing. But for the full-time students on a one-year MA degree course (Creative Writing, or Creative Writing and Publishing) it can come as a real shock. They thought they were just settling in, finding their feet, learning how to learn, in this context – which can be a switch to a purely creative subject, or a return to academic life after a number of years – and suddenly I’m pointing out the finish line, still six months away, but visible on the horizon all the same.
Students on the one-year course are now halfway through their second term of taught modules, but they also take a class with me that’s intended to help them prepare for their Creative Writing Dissertation, which will be their focus from Easter until they submit at the start of September. Another thing that they don’t like me telling them, in this class, is that if they’re trying to write a book, or a collection of stories or essays, then frankly they’re going about it entirely the wrong way.
This is me being flippant, of course. The point I’m trying to make is that a large-scale creative project – a novel, for example – works best when it is allowed to develop organically. The writer gives their ideas time to evolve, for connections to grow, for themes to emerge, for plot points to occur. The writing is an exploratory process. Anne Lamott has a wonderfully vibrant, spooky image for this, in Bird by Bird, of the conscious writer standing in the dark holding a lantern while ‘the kid’ (their unconscious self) does the digging:
“What is the kid digging for? The stuff. Details and clues and images, invention, fresh ideas, an intuitive understanding of people. I tell you, the holder of the lantern doesn’t even know what the kid is digging for half the time – but she knows gold when she sees it.”
An archaeology degree doesn’t help you excavate, preserve and research a Roman villa in a year. It teaches you how to do it. It teaches you the process, and it teaches you patience. Likewise, a Creative Writing MA isn’t a ‘write-a-novel-in-a-year’ course. It’s a course that teaches you how to write that novel, or those stories, or that book, in your – or its – own good time. And part of that teaching involves pushing students through that creative process in a necessarily rushed, impatient, non-organic way, so they can understand how it works.
The Dissertation preparation classes involve all sorts of fun, messy exercises to help students develop their themes, explore their characters and settings, and plan out potential plot structures. It can seem artificial, but its direct results – the creative work that ends up in the 12-15,000-word dissertation, produced under the supervision of one of the programme teaching team, or one of our regular writing mentors – are only part of the deal. Of equal use is the reflective learning that helps our students to become writers with a critical understanding of their own creative processes. Who, perhaps, can direct the lantern where it’s needed, and point the kid towards the richest seams in the ground they’re digging.
Why Write or, Fail Better
By Joe Thomas
First, try to be something, anything, else. A movie star/astronaut. A movie star/ missionary. A movie star/kindergarten teacher. President of the World. Fail miserably. It is best if you fail at an early age - say, 14. Early, critical disillusionment is necessary.
From ‘How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?’ By Lorrie Moore
Teaching our industry module Working as a Writer, we’re often reminded of Samuel Beckett’s famous line: ‘Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try Again. Fail again. Fail better.’ Zadie Smith borrowed the phrase ‘Fail Better’ for an essay of hers about reading and writing that is hard to find online, but well worth a read if you can. If you decide to pursue a career in most things, the line feels pertinent. If you decide to set off down a path of research, in academia or other forms, if you decide you want to write, or act, or perform, if you’re looking to engage with something new and for its own – and your – sake, then the line is a comfort. In her essay, Smith describes the novel as the ‘dramatisation of belief.’ She writes:
To me, Nabokov's brain is shaped like a helter-skelter. George Eliot's is like one of those pans for sifting gold. Austen's resembles one of the glass flowers you find in Harvard's Natural History Museum. Each has strengths and weaknesses, as I apply them to the test of my own sensibility. I can slide down Nabokov, but not slowly, and not fully under my own control. I can find what's precious with Eliot, but only hidden among mundane grey stones of some weight. Austen makes me alive to the Beautiful and the Proportional, but the final result has no scent and is cold to the touch… Fiction confronts you with the awesome fact that you are not the only real thing in this world.
So why write? For me, the question I like to start with is why read?
Novels – the reading of them and the writing of them – educate the parts of us that feel. Fail better, as Smith writes:
What a strange business we are in, we writers, we critics, we readers! Writing failures, reading failures, studying failures, reviewing them. Imagine a science institute that spent its time on the inventions that never actually do what they say on the tin, like diet pills, or hair restorers or Icarus's wings. Yet it is literature in its imperfect aspect that I find most beautiful and most human. That writing and reading should be such difficult arts reminds us of how frequently our own subjectivity fails us. We do not know people as we think we know them. The world is not only as we say it is. “Without failure, no ethics,” said Simone de Beauvoir. And I believe that.
James Ellroy, in typically provocative, grandstanding fashion, once remarked that all he ever wanted was ‘to write great books, lead a big life, know God, and commune with women of great substance’. This is a whimsical and bounteous proposition. At the heart of it, though, is the work. These books won’t read/write/study themselves, after all…
Thanks for reading! Do get in touch if you have any questions or comments. If you want to find out more about the programmes offering Creative Writing teaching at City, University of London, then do explore here:
You can find details of open days and evenings, and taster sessions, here
Contributing writers:
Deepa Anappara is the author of Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line and co-editor of the essay collection Letters to a Writer of Colour. Her next novel, The Last of Earth, will be published in 2025. She is a Lecturer in Creative Writing.
Jonathan Gibbs is the author of Randall, The Large Door and Spring Journal. He is Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing at City, and is currently writing a book on the non-academic or ‘literary’ essay.
Joe Thomas is a Senior Lecturer in Creative Writing and is the author of White Riot, Red Menace, Brazilian Psycho, Bent and other novels.
Department news:
Joe Thomas’ latest novel, Red Menace, was selected as one of the Best Books of 2024, and was a crime fiction pick of the year in the Irish Times. Details here and here. The French translation of Joe’s novel Playboy is published on 4 April as Brazilian Playboy.
Jonathan Gibbs’ novel Randall, first published in the UK by Galley Beggar is now available in the US, from Tivoli Books