Emerging from a culture of female silence, keynote speaker, actress, and author Reema Zaman has healed through telling her story in the best-selling book I Am Yours. Now she offers advice for other writers who want to tap into their traumatic personal histories to empower themselves and others.
Want to amplify your voice and cause? Here are some tips from Zaman on how to get through that difficult process:
Purpose is Useful
Zaman suggests writers embrace their craft with a sense of mission. She says it’s having a purpose that drives the work and softens the frustrations the inevitable professional rejections that everyone faces.
“Something about my personal narrative spoke to a universal narrative and by bringing our stories we offer solidarity and healing to others,” said Zaman. She says that focusing on writing as an act of service creates authentic demand and a natural market.
“All of us on some level want to make the bestseller lists,” she said. “But we can’t control any of that and ego is the surefire strategy for creative failure.”
She says that if a writer’s work affects the life of just one reader then that is a success in itself.
Find Forgiveness
“Let the fairytale of what could have been and should have been die,” said Zaman of holding on to past anger. “We need to release the idea that if we can go back and change the narrative then we’ll the change thing.”
She says that forgiveness allows the writer the space to be the protagonist in their own stories and that a distant perspective allows writers to mine the wisdom from their past experiences. This also allows for personal healing through the writing process.
Speak from the Scar
“We do our audience a disservice when we haven’t taken the time to let our wounds scar over,” said Zaman of how writers need to gain emotional authority over their work.
She says that a first draft is a perfect place to express feelings of anger and that subsequent drafts are edited to express a more positive emotional impact. “If we are re-traumatizing ourselves with our work then we are probably traumatizing our readers as well.”
She encourages writers to sit with their work until it becomes a healthy emotional practice.
Turn Pain into Poetry
“We want to invite people into our painful narratives, but never at the cost of putting pain on top of them,” she said of how writers need to come from a place of confidence.
She suggests that writers use their natural wit, charm, resilience or whatever is an authentic part of their voice to provide hope for the reader. A reader should feel that even if the situation is brutal that there will ultimately be redemption.
Allow the Transformation
Zaman says that character transformation in memoirs drives an authentic connection to the audience. If the work is transforming the writer, then it’s likely to have a similar effect on the reader.
“Memoirs are us going back and parenting ourselves,” she said. “We are holding space for our inner child or young adult self and giving it the unconditional love that the people in our lives at that moment didn’t.”
She found that once her transformation began to occur that she stopped moving toward abusive relationships and traumatic situations. “I started behaving as if I had been raised by love.”
