If you’ve travelled enough, you’ve probably found yourself dealing with some challenging experiences. Perhaps you’ve witnessed an injustice and been part of the effort to help. There were probably times when you felt powerless. I’ve been there. It’s important to write about these experiences, for yourself and for those people you care about.
In Dubai, I volunteered at a woman’s shelter called City of Hope. At first, I taught English on Friday mornings, the first day of the weekend there. Attendance was hit and miss. I didn’t really know what I was doing. I had no clue how to engage women of all levels of English language abilities, not to mention women who’d experienced all kinds of trauma I couldn’t imagine. But I liked going there. I liked the women I met. And, despite the traumas that brought the women there, I liked the warm conviviality inside that suburban house that served as a shelter.
Then I met Sharla, the American woman who founded City of Hope. She was a force, and a charmer. She asked me to write a newsletter about the women’s stories for potential donors, so I did. I listened to some of the their stories, and wrote about them. I head some harrowing tales, but I could handle it. After all, the women were safe now.
Then the Dubai media started attacking Sharla. Headlines accused her of using the women in the shelter as her slaves. People who didn’t like Sharla’s good work said that she only founded the shelter for her own fame and fortune. And that wasn’t the worst of it.
A little while after the media smear campaign started, a little girl was kidnapped from City of Hope by her father. He claimed his daughter was being sexually abused by the other women in the shelter. The news headlines ran with this story. It was utterly cruel and utter nonsense. I knew these women. I had played with that little girl. Her mother came to me with a binder full of her daughter’s medical records, none of which recorded any sexual abuse. Why was this happening?
The story was complicated and convoluted, and it took me a very long time to get it right. The story forms one of the longest and best chapters of Abu Dhabi Days, Dubai Nights, and was definitely one of the most challenging experiences I’ve ever had to write about. I realized that the only thing that I could do to help City of Hope was to write about it, to shine a spotlight on what happened there.
If you’ve witnessed injustice and felt powerless, write about it. Here are some tips for how to write about challenging experiences:
1. Find a way in. Start boldly, describing the most dramatic scene when everything fell apart. Or, try the opposite. Simply introduce us to the rhythms of that shelter, school, or household, and then show us how things incrementally, or suddenly, changed.
2. Present impartial backstory, and how you came upon this knowledge. Give us the facts to utterly convince us that injustice had truly been done. Try to leave your emotion out of it. Facts woven into a backstory will be more powerful and more persuasive.
3. Tamp down your feelings of anger and betrayal in your writing. Those feelings will be obvious to your reader as you describe what happened. SHOW how you felt through the actions you took, and your reader will feel that injustice alongside you.
4. Show how you processed what was happening. What did you do in your ‘off’ time to connect to decency again? What did the rest of your work look like? Give us a scene of you and your friends or family doing something normal to contrast with the painful thing you’re experiencing.
5. Write the final scene. Tell us about the last time you were at this place or in this person’s company. What was say? What did it feel like? Zoom in on the details. What do you know to be true, and what will you never know for certain? Perhaps make a prediction for the future, and tell us what you hope for.
