Write From The Heart by Hal Zina Bennett is one of my all-time favorite books on writing.
The following is an excerpt from Write From The Heart.
“I am convinced that every essential wound, by its very nature, has the potential for opening each of us up to the full potential of our very soul. I do not mean to be Pollyannaish about it, either. It’s not a matter of the universe providing us with the challenges we supposedly need for our spiritual growth. I tend to believe in the universe’s ‘benign indifference,’ as Camus once put it, and that God is something like a courageous and loving parent who gives us all we can take in, then lets us go on to live our lives the best we know how. I think that must have been what Joseph Campbell was talking about, too . . . ‘the world is a match for us and we’re a match for the world. And where it seems most challenging lies the greatest invitation to find deeper and greater powers in ourselves.’
Our own perceptions of the world, the inner vision of what we think life is about, gets challenged in every essential wound. Our true creativity comes about when we think life is about, get challenged in every essential wound. Our true creativity comes about when we start trying to sort all that out, asking what the wound mirrors back to us, what it tells us about ourselves, what we need to let go of, and what we need to learn to embrace. When we do that, we take ourselves out of the role of victim. We see that there’s an alternative to the way we ordinarily look upon our grievances — that we can literally mine even our worst errors for the treasures they contain. When we look at our wounds in this way, we invariable discover turning points, breakthroughs that carry us beyond the limits of everyday thinking. And we can go forth to tell the stories that are truly important to tell, that reveal the hidden truths of our lives and the lives of others, thus building spiritual bridges between our own consciousness and theirs.
The essential wound is a particular kind of experience that happens off and on throughout our lives and goes to the very core of our being. These wounds are important to writers for the same reasons that peak experiences are — they are the resources that lend authenticity to our writing. Essential wounds have an added element in that they reveal our humanness. They reveal that we each create our own inner worlds, mental models of the way we believe things should be. The wound occurs when something happens to reveal the difference between how you see the world and the way the world really is. You may feel shattered, hurt, disappointed, or depressed, but if you keep your eyes open those moments can lead to dramatic revelations.”
Prompt: Write about an essential wound.
