A few weeks ago at a writing conference I went to a panel about writing the LGBTQ narrative. While I am not LGBTQ myself, I wanted to know what the panelists felt about writing their stories, often for the first time, and often to audiences they fear do not understand them. Those 90 minutes were some of the most useful and enlightening minutes of the conference for me. My empathy and love for the LGBTQ story grew, but also, an empathy and gratitude for my own story felt very real. In some ways, I felt like the five panelists could have been replaced by any particular group of people who are concerned with the idea of telling stories that are bursting at the seams of the box they have long been kept in. My Mormon self, my female self, my mothering self, connected with what they said.
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Disrupting the patterns of our storytelling
Writing and Revelation
My wife and I recently watched “The Words,” a movie with nested stories about writers. It featured a trope that occurs fairly regularly in movies about writing: the all-night burst of inspiration that produces Deeply Moving Prose, usually after the person doing the writing has gone through a prolonged period of emotional difficulty. The desired effect of this trope is to imbue the writing with a kind of mystical power—an effect that these movies usually augment by keeping said Deeply Moving Prose more or less sealed off from the viewers, Hitchcock-style, because it’s easier to imagine Deeply Moving Prose than it is to produce it (which may explain the irony that most movies about writing, including this one, are badly written). [Read more…]
By Common Consent, a Mormon Blog 
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