Creative Exorcism for the Self-Possessed Writer

Whether I’m writing fiction or nonfiction, every piece begins the same: with a haunting. It grows as any respectable haunting should, first with creaking footsteps in the other room, the sense something is watching, until there’s a full-blown apparition standing beside the bed whispering, “You need to write this down.”

Visits from characters are always welcome. These imaginary friends of mine never want for something interesting to say. Even when they’re flawed or frightening, I understand their motivations. I want to explore them further—dissect and reshape them until they live and breathe, like I’m a literary Dr. Frankenstein.

“What’s the worst thing you’re capable of?” I ask the fed-up YA protagonist, genuinely delighted when she answers, “Under the right circumstances? Probably murder.” 

I nod along, thinking of all the ways I can push her to that brink, eagerly anticipating the sleep I’ll lose until I do. “That’s good. Hard to come back from.”

 We want to spend 300+ pages with characters who make mistakes for compelling, or at least, believable reasons. The joy of reading is watching them blunder and return changed, overcome impossible circumstances, and embrace their faults to satisfying ends. 

But when I’m writing personal essay, the corpse on the slab looks like me, and my scalpel feels more like a weapon than an instrument of creation. I must flay something that already exists, autopsy a story I know too well, all the while wondering—worrying—who cares? And like most writers, halved by doubt and ego, a contradiction: What will everyone think of me when they read this?

The complexities I value in a well written character are terrifying to identify in certain iterations of myself. What’s left for me to say about this girl with an iffy box-dye job and terrible taste in men? I’ve seen her worst and suffered the consequences of her choices. All the stakes—humiliation, abandonment, arrest—are my own to bear. 

It’d be so much easier to pick apart someone less real.

So, I zip the body bag, careful not to touch any part of her—of me—lest her Marlboro menthol habit be contagious. But she catches the zipper teeth before I can contain her. We have the same dark, chipped nail polish. My mother’s voice rings in my head. Tacky. 

“Remember that time you auditioned to be a naked maid?” Black plastic muffles the words, but I still flinch.

I hadn’t remembered demonstrating my dishwashing skills in just a bra and panties until now, and I might’ve gone my whole life without the reminder. I tug the pull tab harder. She doesn’t need fingers. She’s dead, and this time I’ll make sure she stays buried.

But she’s not the only body I have to contend with—the only memory I’m trying to stuff back into the catacombs of my life. I’m in a graveyard. All of my mistakes claw their way to the surface, no more concerned about their manicures than the first.   

“You could write about how many times you bled through your khakis in high school. And how you used to think khakis were stylish,” a version of me says from her tombstone perch, flossing dirt from her braces. 

Another with tissues stuffed up her nostrils muses, “You could explore the American healthcare crisis through the lens of that time you accidentally grabbed a nurse’s boob during a sinus rinse.”

The resting place of my accomplishments, like writing a full-length novel or starting a business with my husband, lay pointedly quiet. I toe the undisturbed grass, hoping someone more palatable will wake up and inspire me with a better universal truth than “period stains, am I right?” But it’s becoming increasingly clear this is my lot: a band of misfits I thought I’d grown out of, one of which hasn’t said a word.

If I want a moments peace, I’m going to have to hear one of them out—act as a scribe for their revelations, no matter how personally disquieting I find them. Maybe I should have read the fine print before signing the soul contract to become a writer. 

The me who hasn’t spoken yet wears a pained expression, as though she’s here against her will. There is nothing about her features that calls up a particular misdeed. She looks healthy, albeit a little thin. I take her silence as a positive sign, asking, “Do you have any ideas?” 

“Remember that tattoo you said you’d never regret?” she says, followed by a tearful recitation of the poem I’d written and inked on my skin after a breakup. 

I’m three rows deep in the headstones by the time she finishes with a hiccup. I can’t stand to look at any of them for another second. 

I get it. I do. They want what they’ve been through to mean something. Isn’t that what I’m after too? But the more time I spend with them, the less sure I am about any of us. Unlike the characters in my novels, I don’t have sword fighting skills or magic to make me feel less helpless. It’s the bare, naked truth—and I’m not so brave as the girl in the body bag.  

So really, in a way, I’m worse off than she is. 

I blink. The cursor in my blank document blinks back. These girls never stood in the way of digging up universal truths, my own fear did. All the shadows and spooks were of my own making. A writer’s imagination is both a blessing and a curse.

Writing personal essay might always feel like grave robbing my own past: something done under the cover of night and never spoken about again, ended with stripping down and scrubbing the dirt from my skin. But at the risk of encouraging either practice, there’s value in sitting beside yourself over an open casket.

“Remember when you were too scared to remember?” A version of myself rests her head on my shoulder and I don’t cringe. 

 “That’s good. Hard to come back from—but we did.” 

I hope when some future version of me exhumes my current body, she is vulnerable in all the ways I’m still trying to learn. I hope she’s forgiving enough of me—of herself—to stop wrestling with terrifying truths long enough to let them speak. And I hope her nails aren’t freshly painted, because she’s definitely going to get her hands dirty.

-Natalie Lockett

Natalie Lockett writes novel-length fiction and produces the podcast, Write Away with Nat & PJ. Her previous work has been published in Across the Margin. Find her on Twitter @strayhag