THE CRAFT OF WRITING
Sarah Sentilles on writing about people you know.
June 1, 2022
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Readers sometimes assume the challenge of writing Stranger Care: A Memoir of Loving What Isn’t Ours — a love letter to our foster daughter, who was returned to her mother — was the grief I was experiencing while writing it, but that wasn’t what made it hard. Writing helped me survive my grief or at least to learn to live alongside it. When we were losing our foster daughter, I felt helpless — I could not keep the child in our care safe. But when I was writing the story of that loss, I felt an agency I didn’t feel in the rest of my life. Arranging words on the page reminded me of my power, even if my writing could not change the outcome. To write a sentence is to alter the world, even when that sentence is, She is gone.
For me, the bigger challenge was writing in a generous way about people who had done harm to our foster daughter. Navigating the foster care system, interacting with social workers and bureaucrats, forced me to confront capacities for rage and violence and hatred I didn’t know I had.
Before our foster daughter came to live with us, I’d been giving talks about the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. Most of his family was killed in the Holocaust, and he worked to develop a philosophy that would make another genocide impossible. And it is this: When you are confronted by the face of the Other — a being you do not understand, who threatens your life, who could kill you — then that is the sign you are in the presence of God. Their life must be protected at all costs, even at the cost of losing your own life.
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The MFA program at UNCW—an intensive, three-year studio-academic experience in the writing of fiction, poetry, and creative nonfiction—joins students who share a common passion and faculty members who provide critical support of their work. The faculty of the Department of Creative Writing view MFA students as colleagues-in-the-making. UNCW does all that they can to mentor MFA students to successful lives as writers; in return they ask that students contribute something of value to our writing community.
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Levinas’s philosophy was easy for me to think about in the abstract, but it was much harder for me to live. How do I write about social workers who harmed a child I love? How do I write about her mother? What do I owe them on the page?
My solution was to write the raw version, often in all caps, leave it alone for a while, and then comb the judgment out of it when editing. I didn’t need to tell the reader what to think. I just let the characters speak for themselves. It isn’t that I hid my fury; rather, I let the scene generate fury in readers, while also leaving room for them to interpret things differently.
I also tried to remember that every human is complicated and suffering. Often, they are doing harm because of the harm that was done to them. The social workers I interacted with were deeply traumatized, even if they didn’t understand themselves that way. They see the worst we do to one another, to children, every day. |
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I’m a trained theologian, and what I’ve kept from that education is a belief in transcendence — not in the idea that there is one being (God) who is transcendent, but in the idea that there is part of everyone that is uncapturable, resistant, unknowable, mysterious, free. There is always more to everything — every tree, river, refugee, child, prisoner, social worker — than what we think we know, than what we write. How do you make room for the people you’re writing about to exceed and to trouble the language you use? How do you let your characters be more than what you say they are?
“But what if other people have a different version of this story?” my writing workshop participants ask me. Of course they do. But you have a right to your version— as long as you are telling the truth.
After I sent a rough draft of Stranger Care to my agent, Molly Friedrich, she said, “You and your husband are really smart people. If you wanted to adopt, then why in the world did you foster?” Her question made me realize I’d been writing around a story I didn’t want to tell, and without it, the whole manuscript rang false. I had to write about my marriage and its remaking, even though I didn’t want to, even though it scared me.
In case you don’t have a truth-telling reader like my agent, here’s a prompt for you (inspired by a writer in Australia named Annie Keely): Find a scene in your manuscript that isn’t yet working and ask yourself, What am I avoiding?
Ultimately, what helps me is to remember that our stories choose us. They trust we can become the writers they need us to be. That means we can trust ourselves too. |
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Sarah Sentilles is the author of Draw Your Weapons, Breaking Up with God, A Church of Her Own, and Taught by America. A graduate of Yale University and Harvard Divinity School, she lives in Idaho’s Wood River Valley. |
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