Writing Fiction As Narrative Repair

The perennial question every writer asks themselves: why am I like this?

I don’t have an answer for you, dear genre fiction writer. I do, however, have a sort of? answer for how you can go about figuring that out. Specifically, how you can use genre fiction to your advantage when trying to figure it out.

DISCLAIMER: I am not a licensed healthcare provider and the following post isn’t to be taken as medical advice. Always work with a licensed healthcare provider when working through a traumatic event. The case study in this post is my experience and your experience with disability and queerness may be different. The goal of this post is to open a discussion about the ways in which writing fiction may assist with narrative repair.

This is also the part of the post where I say:

Hi! My name is A.D. and I have a Ph.D. in which I used narrative theory as my framework, which means I know a bit about narrative theory and narrative methodologies and why they’re useful.

or, in plain terms:

Just trust me, bruh***.

***within reason. don’t trust me to do your plumbing or electrical work.

The complete slides to my lecture can be found by following this Google Drive link. They might not be super helpful to folks since I tend to have very sparse text on slides, but if you have any questions, feel free to reach out!

What is Narrative Theory?

The core premise of narrative theory is that we make sense of the world and ourselves by telling stories about said world and about ourselves. In fact, we make and re-make ourselves in this act of telling and re-telling.

One scholar that was very interested in the ways in which we speak about ourselves amidst major life changes was Arthur Frank. In his work, Frank focused on illness narratives, speaking with people who were experiencing chronic and/or prolonged illness. Frank was interested in the way that people reorganized their identity when illness happened.

I will be using a lot of Arthur Frank’s work as a scaffolding of sorts in this post. Although Frank mainly spoke of illness narratives, I believe that these frameworks can be applied to any major life change someone experiences, whether positive or negative. Illness is a good stand-in for many life-changing and possibly traumatic events as it is guaranteed to happen to anyone.

Most narratives Frank collected fall into three categories:

1. Restitution

2. Quest

3. Chaos

Restitution Narrative

A restitution narrative has a return to “normal” as a goal. For example, someone experiencing illness (or any major life change) may see it as temporary and treatable through medical intervention. They might admit that they are sick now and unable to participate in the activities they used to participate in, but the time of illness will end and they will return to their old self. In this narrative, the individual’s identity is separate and unchanged by the illness (or major life change); who they are now is simply a temporary waystation.

Quest Narrative

In the quest narrative, the illness (or major life change) is positioned as a challenge meant to change and/or transform the person. While the individual isn’t necessarily positioning the change as a good thing, they are open to learning something from the experience. In this narrative, identity is seen as fluid and ever-changing. Even though the person might admit that they may not return to what once was “normal”, they are open to the ways that the experience might change them.

Chaos Narrative

Chaos narratives are the most destructive and are where narrative rupture occurs. Simply put, a chaos narrative uproots identity, throwing the individual in the middle of whatever change and/or illness they are experiencing. There are no lessons to learn and no “normal” to return to. Since there is no hope of returning to a “normal” and a new “normal” hasn’t been shaped yet, sense of self is often shattered. There is little way to explain the experience as it happens and people are often at their most lost.

Narrative Repair—the How

A ruptured narrative can be repaired.

During narrative repair, we story our pain. Through this process are allowed to make alternative meanings of these experiences. These new meanings may help the strands of our identity to gather up and weave themselves into one coherent, strong rope. But that takes work. Narrative therapy is only one of the many ways that this can be done, and is conducted with a licensed professional during sessions. During narrative therapy, a psychologist assists their clients to re-author their life story, that is to say, to create stories about themselves that are helpful to the client.

If you’re introverted and don’t feel like talking to people, you can journal, scrapbook, or use artistic expression as the vehicle for narrative repair. Physically writing down our stories (or giving them any physical place to live) can help us understand where things fell apart and identify the pieces we need to bring together to go on.

But say you’re introverted, and you don’t have a lot of money, and you’re also easily bored. What then? That’s exactly where I found myself right before I wrote Dragonfly. I didn’t mean to work through my relationship with disability and queerness in a novella I was going to sell, and that was going to get published for others to read (oh no), but I did, and people did read it. It was only retrospectively that I realized what I had been doing subconsciously all along.

Let me explain what went down.

Case Study: Narrative Repair and The Dragonfly Gambit

Because I had no words for queerness, I had no way to describe where I might fit on the continuum. This all culminated in me, sitting up in bed one day at the ripe age of thirty, wondering, “Why am I like this?”

I went on to write The Dragonfly Gambit because I wanted to tease out all the uncomfortable ways in which I felt about myself and my disabled body. Now, I wasn’t consciously doing this; the conclusions I’ve drawn come post-fact, after revisiting the work over and over again, and really sitting in the uncomfortable bits.

So, what has writing the novella helped me do, from a mechanistic perspective (see graphic below)?

Splitting of Themes Into Characters

Dragonfly is self-inserting, but not as a 1:1 ratio. I’m in there (oh, I’m really in there), but I’m also split into at least three characters, all interacting with one another and having conversations about everything that bothers me. Kaya, Rezál, and Nez are there to represent the conflicting parts of me. This was a neat exercise in having literal conversations with the different parts of me and interrogating the different narratives I had already crafted for myself.

Create Narrative Distance

The very reason I’m able to split myself into the three main characters and have the uncomfortable conversation is because of narrative distance. There are many layers of “spec” between myself and each one of these women. I’m not in space. I’m not in a military. I can’t drive, let alone pilot a space-jet-thing. All of these degrees of separation allow me the psychological safety to talk and write about difficult things while still feeling like it’s not about me. Due to this distance, I always have a bird’s eye view of the situation and hence, never lose control.

Practice Reflexivity

It was really at this stage that I had to confront all the internalized ableism I had, but it was also at this stage that I realized how much grief I held for a hypothetical future I could have had if I wasn’t disabled. I felt wronged. I felt robbed. So many of those feelings bled into Dragonfly, into both Nez’s and Rezál’s interactions. But also, there was a deeply buried pride I held in being better at many things than able-bodied people, things that I was supposed to be worse at. That bled into Dragonfly as well. This isn’t to say that my way of feeling about my own disability is the correct way, but rather that by being reflexive I was able to dig into just how I felt about it.

Re-claiming and Re-writing the Self

When I look at Dragonfly now, I see all the threads, all the thinking that was brewing under the surface while I was writing it. Before that, the ideas and the conflicts existed in the strange, abstract space that was my mind. Writing them down made them real. The process of writing these tensions down allowed me to face them, for the first time in my adult life, and to finally accept the many conflicting thoughts I held about my disabled body. It also helped me understand the ways in which my environment and my relationships with others shaped many of these conflicting ideas. All of these were then integrated into a new identity, emerging, like a really stabby butterfly from a cocoon.

Conclusion

As you might have noticed, I didn’t really touch on queerness that much in this write-up. This is mostly due to the fact that I have zero clue, still, about where I fit on that spectrum. And that’s ok. My relationship with gender and my queer identity as a whole is ever-evolving. Disability was easy (relatively) to tackle. Heck, it’s just a ruptured vertebra and some limb stuff.

This is by no means a how-to manual for processing trauma. That’s reserved for licensed professionals. But at my core, I believe that some questions are not therapy questions. Some questions are not questions at all. Sometimes we just need to lay the facts of our lives out before ourselves and take stock. It doesn’t always make us feel better and it doesn’t make us better people, but it helps us make sense of the people that we are.

Things, major life-changing things, don’t necessarily happen for a reason, but if we never reflect on them, we are robbing ourselves a chance to learn something, to grow, to change. Again, I’m not saying that trauma is a great learning opportunity, just that it might be one, one day, someday, and we can use genre fiction to get there.

Obligatory Writing Stuff

Awards season is upon us! Screech!!

The Dragonfly Gambit is eligible for all the Nebula, Hugo, and other awards in the novella category and in the novelette/novella category for the Aurora. If you are reading for awards, please don’t hesitate to reach out for a review copy!

Dragonfly is also up on the 2024 Nebula Reading List so, if you’ve enjoyed it, please consider giving it a thumbs up!

In other news, my gay Severance story was published in the first issue of Saros!

Thanks for making it this far!

Cheers!

References

Frank, Arthur W. (1995). The wounded storyteller: Body, illness, and Ethics. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Molinaro ML, Polzer J, Laliberte Rudman D, Savundranayagam M. Pediatric oncology caregiving as narrative repair: Restor(y)ing disrupted family biographies and damaged moral identities. Health (London). 2024 Aug 5:13634593241270955. doi: 10.1177/13634593241270955. Epub ahead of print. PMID: 39099340.

Olmos-Vega, F. M., Stalmeijer, R. E., Varpio, L., & Kahlke, R. (2022). A practical guide to reflexivity in qualitative research: AMEE Guide No. 149. Medical Teacher, 45(3), 241–251. https://doi.org/10.1080/0142159X.2022.2057287

Rasmussen, Anders Juhl & Sodemann, Morten (2024). Narrative Medicine: Trauma and Ethics. Vernon Press