“Accumulate the Human Within the Human Being”

My husband recently took a trip out of state. My kids went away with grandparents, and I was alone for three days.

“You should just relax,” my husband said before he disappeared into the airport.

Instead, I pretended I was on a writing retreat.

I wrote more and for longer hours than I have in a very long time. And even when I broke for dinner, I felt passion for my stories drawing me back. I had to talk myself out of continuing to write and instead spend an hour reading before bed.

Without any demands on time outside of my own needs (and yes, I forgot to eat a few meals some of the days, so accustomed am I to having kids at home begging me for lunch and reminding me humans need food), I lost myself in my inner worlds.

For me, writing is an obsession.

If I let myself, I would be a workaholic. I have trouble pulling myself away from my work because it’s an obsession. It’s also much more than that.

But before I get into that, I must acknowledge: I know writing is not an obsession for everybody. It takes hard work and dedication to show up to the page every day. Many might even consider me lucky——though anything taken to the extreme can be problematic.

My interest in writing goes deep. It started early, when I was very young and fell in love with stories. I loved the way stories could take me away from the world I inhabited. I couldn’t wait to bury myself in a book and spend time in other places, with other people, living lives I’d probably never live myself. And it didn’t take long for me to decide I wanted to create those places and people and lives in the stories I’d write.

I consider what I do my purpose. Telling stories is what I was made to do.

Many of us feel that way. Maybe even most of us. Why else would we come back to the relentless blank page?

But there’s something else I’ve noticed in my years of pursuing this dream, and it’s this:

Writing does the most work on us. It changes us for the better.

Writing centers us.

When I write, I become a calmer person. I make sense of my chaotic world. I dream and imagine and explore. I quiet all the worries and anxieties that pursue me. Writing is my stillness and my solitude. It allows me to take a breath, reconnect with myself, and remember all the good that’s in my life (and there’s so much!).

I remember a woman laughing at me, way back at the beginning of my writing career, when I confessed to a room full of people that writing made me a better mother. My children were very young at the time. And so needy. Writing, I felt, helped me balance that neediness with seeing to my own needs, thereby making me a better mother.

The woman made a beeline for me after the event was done. She said, “If you want to write and work, fine. But call it what it is—you just want to write and work. It doesn’t make you a better mother.”

I was taken aback, because how could she know? The days I managed to write a little I was more patient with my kids. I didn’t snap at them unnecessarily. I had space to breathe and manage the chaos without crumbling. I was more resilient.

Didn’t that make me a better mother? (Yes. It did. Only we are able to accurately report our own realities, so don’t get hung up on what others try to make your reality—that’s what I would tell that young mother writer if I could go back to that day.)

Writing changes us in so many ways. By the end of every book I write, I am changed in some way—sometimes small ways, sometimes very large ways. My view of the world and my life has shifted. I have put myself into the shoes of other people—characters like and unlike me. I have thought about the way they react to setbacks and the emotions they feel and the wounds they carry. I have shaped my own words and experiences into something tangible. How can a person not be changed by that?

Writing does the most work on us.

Writing teaches us more about ourselves.

We can’t help but put something of ourselves into our books and compositions. In one way or another. We take a microscope to our characters, who have some of our own flaws and strengths, or we hold up that microscope to a segment of our own life for a personal essay or turn it outward and craft a poem about growing up female in a world like this one. Whatever we choose to write, it has a piece of us in it. Which means we explore (and learn) our feelings about certain situations or we remember fragments of our history or we imagine what we’d do if put in this particular situation at this particular time.

Self-knowledge is beneficial for relationships and for our own psychological well-being.

Writing proves we have what it takes to do . . . well, anything.

When we stick with something as long as it takes to finish a book—or even a full-fledged essay—we learn that we can do hard things. We can endure hard things.

Difficulties come for all of us in life. Writing and finishing our compositions, books, chapbooks, poems, one chapter after another, hones our resilience and makes us more comfortable with the uncomfortable. We learn that we’re stronger and more resilient and focused and dedicated and faithful and determined than we even knew.

Writing helps us recognize our power.

Writers have always had the power to change hearts and minds and opinions. To shape the world. But it’s not until we write that we truly recognize the force of that power. The pen is powerful, and as authors, we have the power to change others’ thinking—and even our own.

During my most recent season of school visits, I talked to some elementary students about writing poetry. I shared some of my own silly poetry. A few days later a mom of a third grader who’d listened to my talk found me on social media and told me her son had started writing poetry. “I don’t know what you said to those kids,” she wrote, “but he has not stopped writing poetry since your visit.”

That’s the kind of power we hold in our hands. Even silly poetry can change hearts and minds—make people fall in love with words.

Writing gives us space to commit and follow through.

We live in a nothing-lasts-forever, many-commitments world. Sometimes I make promises to my kids that don’t work out because I’m overextended. Sometimes not following through can become an unintentional and unfortunate habit. We’re just so tired.

Writing is a place we can practice commitment and consistency, ritual and routine. It can help us build good habits and teach us how to follow through, even when it’s uncomfortable and hard.

Writing helps us make sense of our experiences.

Fiction can help us make sense of our world, but writing about ourselves in personal essays, memoir, and poetry has even greater potential for understanding and clarity. Writing can give us the emotional distance to examine our lives and make the nebulous a little clearer. We can refine and clarify our thoughts and positions and beliefs and opinions by working them out on the page. And that can impact our relationships and communication and even our own views of ourselves—all for the better.

Writing can heal old wounds.

I’ve been reading the memoirs of people who have gone through divorce, others who have struggled with disordered eating like me, others who have experienced multiple childhood traumas. When we write about these experiences, we reduce their power over us. We take another step toward healing. And we don’t even have to write about our hurts in true stories; fiction can sometimes be the best place to explore old wounds—and write your way into healing.

(A note: There is no rule that says you have to share these writings with other people. Writing about past traumas in a journal that never goes beyond your own bookshelf is just as effective at healing old wounds. Writing has a powerful healing effect.)

Writing gives us a community and a home.

When we write, we can’t help but connect with others—readers and other writers. That’s the nature of communication. It fosters connection. And connection can change everything—including us.

Writing strengthens our empathy.

Just like reading a book develops empathy, so, too, does writing a book. We imagine the experiences of other people in an even greater capacity than reading. We have a character’s voice in our heads. We know their choices and motivations and the wounds they carry. We love them. (Even when we’re writing about the “characters” in personal essays and memoirs, we’re extending our empathy to a cast of characters.)

Maybe that spills out into the world.

Maybe if we were all writers we’d have a much kinder, compassionate world.

Svetlana Alexievich, a Belarusian journalist and essayist, once said, “What can art accomplish? The purpose of art is to accumulate the human within the human being.”

We become more human and more connected to one another as we write.

Maybe I love writing so much because it does the most work on me. And I, for one, need that work.

How has writing changed you over the years? What have you learned about yourself through your writing? What is the most important benefit writing has brought to your life?

Rachel Toalson

Rachel Toalson writes lots of books. For lots of people–kids, teens, adults, fiction lovers, poetry lovers, essay lovers. People who adore realistic stories or magical realism or fantasy or tales that keep them up at night or make them laugh out loud. She writes the books she most wants to read, which is the best way to entertain herself and her kids and get a little peace and quiet in her excessively loud home. She’s the author of the middle grade books, The Colors of the Rain, which won the Arnold Adoff Poetry Honor Award in 2018, The Woods, and The First Magnificent Summer, among many others. She lives in San Antonio, Texas, with her husband and six children.

www.racheltoalson.com/