Secrets and Taboos
By: Louise Moulin
Tags: Writing Life, Creative Writing, Self Love, Life, Writing

Secrets and Taboos

Notes on writing dangerously

Photo by Christopher Ott on Unsplash

Write until you bleed. Written in blood.

I can’t even find the right sentence to start this article. The underlying danger is tensing my gut. I daren’t write about the taboos, the secrets, the skeletons in the closet. I daren’t bare the gore of the ugly abandoned and scorned. The narcissists and drunkards, the sex addicts and drug lords the mental torture and children destroyed. I cannot tell you the truth about people I loved or how little, in truth, I was loved.

But when I read scary writing from the wounded; brave enough to stand up and be counted — it takes my breath away. I kind of gasp at their cross between audacity and foolishness. Aren’t they embarrassed, humiliated? Not from me — I think they’re heroes — but don’t they feel exposed and naked smeared with tar and feathers and blood and association-shame? Not from me. Those writers are safe with me. I respect them. Knowing their truths, makes me want to read them more. Applaud them. The writing is raw and image-laden and rotten and golden and shocking.

I’m not brave enough to write like that. But I don’t know what exactly I’m afraid of. A feeling probably. The wobbly feeling of being completely seen. I need my masks and smoke screens and the dance of the seven veils. I dash off-stage and out the exit door around veil four.

And I don’t want to feel those feelings again from the scene of the crime. The creeping rising waters. I’ve been a fool you see and tricked too often to be chance. The things that happen because you were young and silly or unloved. That’s probably my biggest secret if you must know. And the things you did because you didn’t know better — or no one warned you like all the other safe good daughters, or you ignored your sixth sense because no wise person told you the difference between sorrow and hunger. Or maybe the abusers, thugs and drongos, highwaymen and murderers still have a kind of sacrosanct place — that the predators get protected even decades after the fact.

Because you still won’t speak up.

It is easier to couch the truth in fiction. Your character can get dragged whimpering through the gorse bush backwards, trashed by marauding villains, get cheated and victimised insultingly and without the balm of vindication. Your character can be the scandal in a small town.

And there are the secrets that are not yours to tell. The troubles of others. The stories you can’t tell until they die. You won’t be forgiven. The hurt won’t be worth the paper it is written on. Who are you to spill the beans? Mind your own business. You always had a tongue on you.

“If you want to keep a secret — you must also hide it from yourself.”

- George Orwell

But, the truth is where the gold is. The writing that you can’t fake. The specificity of detail and exactitude of emotion in action. My god. The writing thrills and terrifies and yes, you feel it again, but you feel like a warrior like a wise one. The one who lived to tell the tale. When you write the god awful truth it zings you with fire energy and has you giggling maniacally with glee at your own talent.

But I still won’t show you.

“Perhaps I write for no one. Perhaps for the same person children are writing for when they scrawl their names in the snow.”

-Margaret Atwood

I’ve said enough already.

But the goo has a way of infiltrating your stories anyway. Little rumours and wafts of horror. Sometimes as steady sage wisdom, and sometimes as melancholy compassion. And sometimes as knowing judgement and spite. It squirts out the nostrils. Weeps from the eye. Drips on the page. Pus and tears.

It is all grist for the mill.

And good or bad we do grow, don’t we, from mistakes and misadventures and we can’t really know the benefit or deficit until we read it backwards like out the back window watching the road unwind. And we are told to write what we know. And your story might help another soul come to terms or to not feel so alone. And your life is yours to own.

“You own everything that happened to you. Tell your stories.”

- Anne Lamott

The confessions and revelations. The things that happened to you are uniquely yours to tell. No one can say it as you do. Even if someone else also got hit down the road on a foggy winter’s evening on their way home from dance class, in black leotard and tights, by a hit and run driver — did an angel carry them to safety like yours did? Did the ER nurse marvel that you had no broken bones even though you got bounced two houses down the road. Did, bizarrely, you receive a phone call late at night warning you not to tell the police — or you’ll regret it? Do you wake years later and wonder who the hell hit you and did they do it on purpose and how did they know who you were and where you lived and how the F did they get your phone number if they didn’t know who you were? And how did that weave into the weird isolation of the time. How did that feed your aloneness and victim mentality?

Wee snippets only you can tell.

“Write about what disturbs you, what you fear, what you have not been willing to speak about. Be willing to split open.”

- Natalie Goldberg

Storytelling is sacred. You write something and the reader hallucinates your vision. Sacred and mystical, storytelling is powerful like myths and legends, like a shaman in a circle of fire, and to be respected. I’m thinking before writing your most dangerous tales a bit of ritual and protection might be in order. Certainly a cleansing after. It can be dark down those tunnels. Beneath the earth. But demons and false-beliefs burn to vanish when exposed to light.

It is not the reader you are afraid of but the power of the stories themselves.

“Memory is a complicated thing, a relative to truth. but not its twin.”

- Barbara Kinsolver

The pen is mightier than the sword. My bravery grows. I’m tying the laces of my hiking boots in preparation for entering the dark forest in the storm. I know there are snakes and goblins, and the grotesque faces of real foes, I know I might die on the road, that I may not return unscathed, that I might get more cuts and bruises from venturing forth. And I lose my will. I second guess. I think maybe I will just lay down and watch day time television.

But — there is a howling, a calling, a banshee cry hypnotic and magnetizing — it says to use your gifts — it says don’t be a scaredy-cat — it cajoles and dares you to be the storyteller the gods graced you with the stories to be.

Heeding the call is an act of self-love.

“A writer must stand on the rock of herself.”

- Janet Frame “At least I got a song out of it.”

- Joni Mitchell “If people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should've behaved better.”

- Anne Lamott

Thanks for reading,

Louise