Kept promises are key to novel writing— and to trauma therapy
Building trust with my readers and with my alters has been a similar experience
Reading novels taught me how to write a novel by accident, but secure attachments taught me how to write a novel on purpose.
My undergraduate minor was in Creative Writing, but I didn’t have any guidance on longform work until my fourth year thesis, which became The Pump. Even then, The Pump is a book of interconnected short stories, not a novel. When I graduated school and started writing the very first draft of my debut novel Bird Suit, I realized something:
I was writing based on principals of character and plot that I had absorbed by reading a lot of novels throughout my life, but I didn’t know why I was writing the way I was writing, or how to parse out individual tactics and use them intentionally instead of accidently.
This is, oddly, kind of how we form relationships through adolescence and early adulthood.
Infants and children under the age of ten do this thing where they assume the existing microcosm in their home to be the macrocosm, because to them, their home is the entire world. If the adults in their life provide a stable environment, the child will assume the world to be a stable environment until proven otherwise.
Obviously, intersections of race, gender, class, disability, and sociopolitical climate reveal the instability of the world to the child at faster and slower rates depending on who they are. However, there is a fair amount of literature on traumatic events not being the central indicator towards whether or not a child will develop a trauma-based disorder. PTSD, BPD, CPTSD, and dissociative disorders are not guaranteed when a child undergoes trauma because if the child has a secure attachment to one or more primary caregivers, they are able to process the event in safety, knowing that they are heard, loved, and taken care of.
Secure attachment is: "the healthiest form of attachment. It describes an attachment where a child feels comforted by the presence of their caregiver. Securely attached children feel protected and that they have someone to rely on” (Mary Ainsworth).
The crux of secure attachment is trust, built through learned experience. “When I have cried out in hunger, mom has fed me, which means that I can trust that mom will always feed me when I’m hungry.”
This brings us back to my point above about children taking their personal experience and making it universal. When children experience secure attachment at home, they assume that security to exist outside of home until someone proves that theory false.
They don’t do this intentionally. Instead, they reenact those relationships at home out in the world. They aren’t old enough to understand why they are reenacting, or introspective enough to know what of their relationships at home is positive and what is negative. They are mimicking whatever attachment they first had, over and over, until they can enter into relationships with intentionality. Some people never get past reenactment.
But the problem is that the passive reenactment of the good is not the same as the active creation of the good. Even in the best-case scenario, when a child grows up in a loving home with secure attachment galore, it is not enough to make every subsequent relationship in their life secure. It helps, but it is not enough.
This is where novel-writing and trauma intersect. Learning how to write a novel and learning how to form healthy, meaningful relationships both begin at learning how to make and keep promises.
Secure attachment means trust, and trust means lived experience of knowing that we get something we need when we are supposed to.
Authors need secure attachments with their readers, plain and simple.
I mean that in a pretty simple way: when you make promises to the reader in your plot, keep your promises.
If you’re like me, your first drafts are full of unkept promises that you don’t even realize are promises: Motifs that are highlighted at the beginning but never mean anything more later on; questions in the narrative that never get answered; any detail, dialogue line, character choice, setting, or word that when the reader comes upon it, they think “this feels like it will be important later.”
The key to building this trust is pacing. The first fifty or so pages of your book are an excellent opportunity to build a secure attachment with your reader by posing questions and answering them right away—like, on the next line or paragraph or page. You make promises, and you instantly keep those promises. Promises about who you say a character a character is, or rules about the word you’ve created, or any other small details that you can give to the reader right at the beginning.
When you keep lots of small narrative promises early on in your book, you are telling your reader “When I ask a question, I will answer it. When you are left in the dark, I will bring you out.”
And that is when you start to pose the big questions of your book: the central mystery or the dramatic character arc. If you’ve done your job developing a relationship of trust with your reader, they will keep reading no matter how long they have to wait for an answer, because they trust that you will give it to them.
A lot of the therapy for my dissociative disorder involves building trust with the other parts of me: the parts whose baseline understanding of relationships includes fear and neglect. Parts who think that when they need something, that need will not be met. There is no trust in these relationships. I need to start from the ground up.
And I do that like I would the narrative of a novel: I make small promises, and I fulfill those promises immediately. I tell a child part that they we can go to the park when I’m done work, and then we actually go to the park. I acknowledge that another part is afraid of loud noises, so I wear headphones when I’m on transit. If a part feels unsafe, I explain what is going on right away rather than ignoring them. Little by little, these parts learn that when they need something from me, they will get it.
Building secure relationships does not come naturally. It rarely works accidently. With craft, it happens in editing, when you’re able to identify the narrative promises you make and find ways to fulfill them. In care, it happens when we listen to one another and change our behaviour accordingly. Whether you are writing something new or falling in love with someone new, instinct and reenactment will only take you so far.
It is when we do that introspective work—the work that allows us to take what we need from our past experiences and leave what we don’t—that we can build relationships that endure the horror of our world without breaking us.
With love,
Syd
News from the Marsh
You can read my new short story “Dirt Mouth” in the Ley Line Issue of Room Magazine
You can read two new poems of mine, “little dogs” & “Turkey Dump”, in the Summer 2023 Issue of Vita Poetica
I’ll be at AugurCon Live! | Toronto's Scifi-Fantasy Event on Aug 26, 10:00 a.m. – 7:30 p.m. EDT at 50 Wade Ave, Toronto, ON as part of the panel Mirrors and Portals: Scifi Fantasy & the Exploration of Self, Featuring Ai Jiang, Amanda Leduc, Zalika Reid-Benta, and myself.
I update my events and publishing things frequently on my website, so take a browse there if you’re ever wondering what I’m up to. And, of course, subscribe to Marsh Mail if you want more of these kinds of musings in your inbox.
Sydney Hegele is the author of The Pump (Invisible Publishing 2021), winner of the 2022 ReLit Literary Award for Short Fiction and a finalist for the 2022 Trillium Book Award. Their essays on life with Dissociative Identity Disorder have appeared in Catapult and Electric Literature, and featured by Lithub, the Poetry Foundation, and Psychology Today. Their novel Bird Suit is forthcoming with Invisible Publishing in Spring 2024, and their essay collection Bad Kids is forthcoming with Invisible in Fall 2025. They live with their husband and French Bulldog on Treaty 13 Land (Toronto, Canada).