Let’s all Pennebake
Folks, today is International Pennebaker Day; I have so decreed it. And, lucky you, I plan to tell you all about Pennebaking, but not until I have told you this:
We started our Summer Festival of Writing last year because our plans for our regular, physical Festival were thrown into disarray by the pandemic. Then, partly for the same reason, but also because the Summer Festival was such an obviously brilliant thing to do, we ran it again this year, with fifty or sixty live events running across the whole summer.
We’ve now taken the decision that the Festival is so awesome, we should make it as widely available as we possibly can. So from now on, the entire Summer Festival will be free (and exclusive) to Jericho members. That means, if you’re a member, your membership has just become a whole lot better. If you’re not a member, then you have about fifty or sixty additional reasons for feeling sad.
OK. Nuff of that. Back to International Pennebaker Day:
James Pennebaker, a US psychologist, was interested in trauma. He knew that trauma of any kind is associated with bad health outcomes, but what if those suffering trauma were good at talking about their ordeal? Would that make a difference?
Pennebaker decided to investigate. His first thought was that some traumas carried more shame than others. (So, for example, the death of a child by suicide might be more shameful to the parent than a death by car accident.) So perhaps the nature of the trauma would be highly correlated with outcomes?
He investigated and it turned out that the exact nature of the trauma was essentially irrelevant. Instead, what mattered – and it mattered a lot – was what people did with that trauma. If you had a bad experience and talked about it with friends, or family or a support group, you were largely spared the adverse health effects. If you stayed schtumm, you were much more likely to become physically ill.
That was interesting enough, but what if you didn’t talk about your problems? What if you just wrote about them?
Again, Pennebaker investigated. He asked a group of people to write – for fifteen minutes a day, for four consecutive days – about the most upsetting experience of their lives, preferably one they hadn’t shared extensively with others. A control group undertook a similar exercise, but wrote about their homes or their workdays, or something else forgettably bland.
A year later, and with permission, Pennebaker got hold of everyone’s medical records and found that those who had written about their trauma got much less sick than those who did not. An hour’s unstructured writing had yielded major health benefits – a remarkable discovery.
But further research got more interesting still.
If people were asked to describe their emotional difficulties via music, or dance, or painting, they got no benefit. What’s more, if people came to the writing exercise already fluent in their description of their trauma, they obtained no particular benefit to writing it down. The people who benefitted were the ones who made progress over the four-day period; who gained in insight, who built a story.
Now all that is interesting in itself – blooming interesting, if you ask me. But we’re writers, either already professional or with aspirations to be published.
What does Pennebaker’s research mean for us?
Well: I don’t know, but here are some things that occur to me.
First, if you have experienced major trauma, you should write about it. It doesn’t matter whether that trauma was newsworthy or not, of public interest or not. All that matters is that you write about it, for your own mental or physical health. You’ll be glad that you did. It’s an amazing thing to do and you’ll definitely feel better for doing it.
Secondly, I should probably tell you now that memoirs of personal trauma usually aren’t saleable for a mixture of reasons. There are some significant legal obstacles – libel and privacy – for one thing. I know of one really strong memoir, well-written and shocking at the same time, which found an agent, but which publishers declined to take on for fear of the possible legal consequences.
But, look, what publishers do really doesn’t matter. That’s not the point. You’re the point. Write it for you.
Third, I do wonder whether all novelists don’t in some way write books in order to deal with some deep psychic issue – or more accurately, our life experience simply smuggles itself into our work, whether we want it to or not.
John Le Carre spoke somewhere (I haven’t been able to find the quote) that he found himself always writing about love and betrayal. It’s the theme that resonates through his work and one born of childhood insecurity: a conman father, a mother who deserted him. When you read things in Le Carre, like “Do you know what love is? I’ll tell you: it’s whatever you can still betray.”, you know you are reading about the author as well as the character.
If you notice things like that happening, let them happen. The richest novels always have deeper themes stirring beneath the surface. I don’t even think you need to analyse those themes beyond a point. I always love it when I’ve written three-quarters of a book, or am doing my tenth edit of a completed draft, and then think, ‘Dang me, I’ve been writing about X all along and never noticed before now.’ Sometimes that X is a directly personal thing, but often it isn’t, or at least not so obviously as in Le Carre’s more colourful case.
And all this makes me wonder: does writing novels have a health-protective effect? If we sublimiate our emotional difficulties and work them out via space opera / detective stories / Regency romance / literary fiction / dystopian YA, does that work as well as doing the Pennebaker exercise, the way he set it out?
I’m going to guess not, but (A) I bet it does something beneficial, and (B) it does seem, from Pennebaker’s work, that there really is something special about words, as opposed to paint, music and all that. (The ‘lesser arts’ as we can agree to call them.)
Which gives us a conclusion of sorts, I think.
If any of you have real trauma to deal with, I think the Pennebaker exercise looks genius. Four days. Fifteen minutes a day. Just write, don’t judge. The science says you’ll be wiser, happier and healthier for that (tiny) investment.
And all of us: if traumatic events smuggle themselves, subliminally, into our fiction, then great. Our fiction is likely to be the better for it. As you know, I can be quite analytical about fiction, but when it comes to that personal/fictional interface, I tend to be quite incurious. I somehow feel that if my unconscious wants to work a few things out via my story and characters, I’m probably better off leaving it be. I’ll look after the story. My unconscious can look after its Pennebaker-chores.
That’s it from me.
In this week’s, Kids Being Barmy news:
I screwed some castors onto an old wooden pallet and added a rope to pull it along with. The four kids pull the pallet up the road outside the house, then ride it downhill with the younger boy shouting, ‘Crash coming up! Crash coming up!’
His predictions generally come true within a few seconds of being issued. So far, no major injuries.
This is so so true (even though I originally thought you were sending me a pasta bake with penne). When I reread my debut novel recently I was astonished at how it told me things that were going on in my life that I hadn’t even spotted at the time. And funnily enough, Le Carre came to mind. Always enjoy your blogs but this was particularly insightful
No-one knows you, better than you. Writing offers the permission to ask yourself those awkward questions. ‘What if?’ being a classic one.
Trauma? I’ve had a few. Too few to mention.
Excellent piece. My mother and her sisters had a shared trauma. My mother told her children about it and discussed it a lot. The others never mentioned it. My mother lived to 90 and was never ill. Her sisters all died before 70 and were often ill. Perhaps that is too pat, but it is what it is!
Gosh, yes. As you say, that’s just one data point … but it’s a Pennabaking good one!
Really interesting article…
I actually studied the Pennebaker technique as part of my doctoral dissertation in Clinical Psychology, exploring the impact of expressive writing on eating difficulties. We found that that students who did the Pennebaker task showed reductions in disturbed eating pre- and post- compared to a control group who were asked to write Mindfully about neutral objects.
I definitely know I work my own traumas out in my books. It’s nice to be reminded not to be ashamed of this!
I’ll add on note to Harry’s lovely points above, which is that if you have major trauma, you might ant the support of a qualified therapist while you address this (whether via writing or otherwise). Tackling major trauma alone can be overwhelming, so seek someone to go on the journey with you if you feel you need!
Thank you, Harry and Jericho Team, that is a wonderful and generous gift for members. Given all the fun we have, and the volume of information we garner from the event, I think at a stroke you have doubled if not trebled the membership value. By far and away the best money I spend is on membership to Jericho.
That said, Harry, an excellent piece, probably the best this year. Writing definitely focuses the mind like no other exercise. Clarity of events, reactions and emotions help, if not resolve matters, then create a path on which to tread and a foundation on which to build. It is said that you need to walk in someone’s shoes a long time to just begin to understand their lives and problems, let alone write authoritatively about them or their situation with any degree of conviction and emotion. This leads me to something that has been discussed at Jericho a few times, writing characters with specific issues/circumstances. Hard work to be done well with any real believability. And some say best not attempted at all, at least not from a first-person perspective.
Keep up the great work on the skate pallet. Just don’t let on to Health and Safety else they’ll want airbags, bumpers, and seatbelts on the thing. Probably road tax too!
Our pleasure re the Festival – it’s really nice to be in a place to give something like that away for free. There are more good things coming up too; can’t mention them yet, but the coming year is going to be easily the best ever time to be a member.
And yes: writing definitely has a precision about it, which means you can’t avoid the specific questions it rams you into.
And the skate-pallet – yeah, I’m not worried about that. I’ve registered it in my older girl’s name, so if anyone is done for the road-tax thing, it’ll be her. 🙂
I love Pennebaker! and he also found that that first year undergraduates who wrote about ‘the worst thing that had ever happened to them’ did better in their final exams than those who wrote about starting university, and it didn’t make any difference if nobody read what they’d written. So we still benefit even if no one ever reads a word of it …
That’s an amazing fact too, isn’t it? It’s strange that people can know that research … and then undergraduates aren’t set that exact exercise day 1 of their course.
In fact, it makes me think we should get our Ultimate Novel students to perform that exact exercise at the very start of their course with us. I’m going to suggest the idea, then people will say no, then that will be the end of that – but at least I’ll suggest it.
Great news about the Festival ! And very generous. If Jericho can afford to offer a free festival to members, that means it’s doing well, which is great news for the organisation. And much deserved.
Great title and great post too, Harry. It inspired me to do a little research on Pennebaker, whom I’d never heard of ; the man looked thoroughly baked, well in himself. I’m surprised about the art and music. Art therapy has a pretty solid reputation, but that’s apparently more for dealing with anxiety than trauma.
I agree with you that trauma – and less grave ‘stirrings’ – slip into our fiction and that it is richer for them, in most cases. I remember one book where I didn’t feel that it was. You mentioned LeCarre and his conman father. He treats that theme overtly via the WW II underworld in A Perfect Spy, which is supposed to be his most autobiographical novel. I feel that Michael Ondjaate, who has his own ghosts, more hidden, treats that underworld (more post WWII) with greater mastery in Warlight. Maybe the comparison isn’t quite fair, because the father-son relationship in that novel is less direct, and we know less about the writer. I just recall that I got tired and even a little bored with LeCarre’s portrait of that world, which seemed overly repetitious, whereas Ondjaate’s was totally absorbing and kept me reading. Subjective reaction, of course.
Maybe one difference lies partly in the extent to which the writer has made some kind of peace with the trauma or whether it still has something of an upper hand. Difficult to say. There’s also the sheer talent of the writer, and I think Ondjaate has more depth and breadth than LeCarre.
It’s a fascinating subject ; thank you for a stimulating post.
I was very interested to read Harry’s piece. I have written a journal for 50 years! It is no coincidence in my opinion that my entries are very often triggered by something negative and the most seriously traumatic incidents in my life – of which there have been around a dozen – are written about at length. It has always felt cathartic and for me personally quite simply essential to keep my sanity during some truly horrendous experiences.
It is this continuous writing over fifty years that has led me to believe that I would have struggled to ‘create’ a voice for my novels. My own natural voice is so well established, I think I would struggle to write in any other way!
Bet that’s not true actually. If the right character popped into your head, you’d find you had more voices available. It happened to me, y’know
Thank you. I have found the Pennebaker advice to be great. I’ve written myself out of some doozies. One that I want to use in my writin. As a child I feel I lived in a soap opera. As an adult I was determined to live in a musical comedy. I love your blog.
What a fabulous take on life! A musical comedy -yes. Magnificent.
I was surprised to see this topic spring up in this post as it is something with which I have been struggling for YEARS and is the source of my massive writer’s block. My life is like a dish of spotted dick: studded with dark little traumatic events and yes, there is one major one, but they are all fairly extreme, so I have an enormous case of PTSD and YES, I am sick – disabled, actually – AND I have had an eating disorder since I was about 6, when my mother began to focus on my weight in a way that was cruel and added to the other traumas.
I’d never heard of that study, but the results don’t surprise me, however I will echo what another commenter has said, and that is that if you are like me and have a serious case of PTSD, it is recommended that you NOT discuss or write about “the worst thing that ever happened to you” because it majorly triggers the PTSD and can cause some serious problems on top of whatever you’re already dealing with.
However, there is a nugget of HOPE for me in Harry’s post, and I believe that it has helped me find a way to get my personal story to move out of the way so that I can write something that others will want to read, and that’s a tremendous gift to me today – so THANK YOU, HARRY! Let’s see if it works for me. I think it might.
God bless,
Silver Rose
Good luck! And good word of caution there! Thanks