The trauma writing pipeline
Or: what if Chat GPT could have childhood trauma?
Current online protest culture dictates that protest signs must be both funny and cute. So it makes sense that the WGA strike has been populated with tweetable placards that are both. My favourite is “writers made you cry at fake Rupert Murdoch dying”. Another viral albeit more controversial example was “Chat GPT doesn’t have childhood trauma”. And then: “The idea that ‘childhood trauma’ means you have a unique and useful insight into the human condition, and that it is somehow a prerequisite for ‘good writing’, is one of the most horrid americanisms”, one person tweeted, which sums up my view on the trauma writing pipeline more succinctly than this newsletter.
Look: I’m not being a scab. I have a problem with the sentiment of the sign, not the sentiment of the strike. I don’t think that the idea of trauma somehow turning you into a great and tortured artist is a particularly American one, nor is it a particularly new one; it’s existed for centuries and has now become a meme in itself, as anyone who studied English Literature at uni and encountered boys who smoked too much without inhaling and hated their mothers and thought they were Kerouac and Bukowski can attest to. But it’s definitely one that has thrived and found new life on the internet and with each new era of online writing.
I used to work at a website that published a lot of personal stories. In the mid-2010s, first person essays made up much of the post XOJane internet industrial complex, so you couldn’t really avoid it. Everyone wanted to write about themselves. In the heady days of the pivot to Facebook traffic model, before the heady days of the pivot to video traffic model, we thought we were entitled to write about ourselves, and that everyone else wanted to read it. This isn’t to say that there aren’t incredible personal essays on the internet, but the proliferation of the genre was exhausting and oppressive. As a writer it meant mining your past for horrible shit and then sending off indiscriminate emails about it to people who wouldn’t reply to you. As an editor it meant receiving pitches every day that felt more akin to therapy confessions or diary entries. There was an expectation for writers – particularly if they were young women – to perform trauma, almost, to make it bigger and more bombastic and more likely to get responses from pitch emails and to hit traffic targets. As an editor it put me in the difficult position, too, of having to tell these writers on more than one occasion that we couldn’t publish their trauma story, because the particular brand of trauma they were describing had already been plastered over the internet or the website that day or week or month. Someone they’d never met telling them their pain wasn’t new or interesting enough to make art (or content) from.
I feel weird about the expectation that trauma becomes art in the first place. I’ve listened to people complain to me about not experiencing anything bad in their lives, about being comfortable, because it meant they didn’t have a chance to turn discomfort into art or writing. I’ve also been asked why I haven’t turned more of my own trauma into writing. I’ve definitely thought about this. I’ve written about having cancer before, I think relatively sparingly (although I have recently talked about it in this newsletter). Telling a story over and over again is not interesting to me. I find it much more interesting to take the idea of pain or ‘trauma’ as a sort of jumping off point and use it to explore other things, like the broken reality of health insurance or munchausens-by-internet. But it’s true I could write about it more. I could make a harrowing experience more lucrative. I could make money off it. I’m not sure though, that this makes pain any more easy to digest. Chasing an invoice for a couple of hundred pounds that you made from advertising your terrible past to strangers on the internet is not exactly a cathartic experience.
In The Subtle Art of Not Giving a Fuck, a new Netflix documentary based on the book of the same name by Mark Manson, one of the opening sections leans heavily into this idea. TRAUMATIC SHIT appears in huge orange block capitals over the screen while the writer explains bad things that happened to him and how he changed those bad things into art, and then book money, and then Netflix book adaptation money... presumably. I actually gave up watching after this. But good for him. I don’t have any problem with people who make money off bad things, if they feel good about it. Or okay about it. But I don’t like the expectation that pain itself always leads to creation, and especially not the expectation that pain leads to good art. Not everyone gets a Netflix adaptation. Sometimes bad things just happen. And pressing on bruises to make them creatively useful might not make you feel better. I think it actually makes the pain worse. Sometimes pain is just pain.
But we’re expected to monetise our pain, to make it useful, and as a result of that expectation, if we can’t do that it hurts all the more. The trauma reveal has become a content trope in itself, one that we expect to crop up at some point in the career of every public figure. A cancelled person, a disgraced amoral politician, a celebrity that’s simply fallen out of favour only needs a big reveal to right their reputation again. Something so bad it’s untouchable and impossible to argue with, and maybe even explains away their cancellable behaviour in the first place. Something so horrible it tells us why they are they way they are. If that sounds cynical or callous then it’s only because it’s become so accepted to mine our personal traumas for art and public consumption that it’s impossible not to see it cynically. Does sharing our private, horrible pasts with the internet mean that our bad, sad experiences aren’t valid? No, of course it doesn’t. Does commodifying them mean we’re more suspicious about the idea of personal trauma as a clean slate tool? Yes, of course it does.
Outside of not being interested in it, I have always been reticent to talk about my personal traumas in writing. When I was younger I was worried it would define me, revealing something harrowing on the internet, releasing it to the churn of digital journalism where it might be forgotten by the end of the week and yet I’d have to sit with it. I feel weird about the people caught in the crossfires of this style of personal essay too; if I write about my childhood, what impact does that have on my parents or my siblings or my friends or the people they know and bump into in Tescos? If I write about my past relationships, what affect does that have on the men I am writing about, even if we don’t speak anymore, even if they remember it all differently? (In the latter case, the affect it has is that it annoys them and makes them think you are Twitter’s answer to Alex Forrest; I have experienced this.)
I know not everyone feels like this. There is an argument, a valid one, that speaking your truth gives power to that truth, on any level; that revealing trauma in writing makes people feel like they aren’t alone. There’s a more depressing truth too, in that for young women, personal essay writing and leaving your secrets to the mercy of an anonymous online audience is often one of the only ways you can access the industry at the beginning of your career. Chanté Joseph spoke about this on the Guardian podcast last week. “Particularly as a Black woman so much of your entry into journalism is writing about your personal trauma”, she said, discussing whether there’s been a gradual decline in journalism in the UK. “So as a result I think there was a huge sacrifice in terms of learning how to report, or journalism as a skill, as opposed to: here are my opinions, everybody read and engage with them.”
A friend of mine who just finished their first book was talking to me about this expectation recently, and how it seems to especially affect female writers. There’s an assumption that everything you write comes from reality. That all fiction is autofiction and all ideas come from some deep seated trauma, something fundamentally just a bit off with you that you must turn into art in order to excise yourself and become a better person. The reality is though, that there are plenty of good writers who have never experienced life-altering pain nor resurrected it for content. They live boring lives. “My life has been so uneventful”, Sally Rooney once told The Moth. “Get up, write a bit, look at Twitter, you know, eat, sleep. I don’t like the idea that because I’ve written a book I have some kind of insight into the workings of the world or the inner psyche, because I don’t.”
And in the same way there are plenty of people with horrible pasts who just get up and exist in the present without mining their horrible pasts for content. Fundamentally, I just think people deserve to be paid fairly without having to talk about their childhoods.
This week I read
What If You Could Do It All Over? (from 2020, but still)
The Transit of Venus by Shirley Hazzard
This week I wrote