Name: How creative writing can help you through life's hardest moments | Sakinah Hofler
Uploaded: 2021-01-14T18:10:27.000Z
Duration: 14 min 54 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

Transcriber: Joseph Geni Reviewer: Camille Martínez

and you wish you could have said something

A second question I have is: Has something ever happened to you

of the difference between seeing something,

Bearing witness means writing down something you have seen,

The most important part of bearing witness is writing it down,

Writing it down acknowledges its existence.

One of the biggest examples we have in history

of someone bearing witness is Anne Frank's diary.

She simply wrote down what was happening to her and her family

and in doing so, we have a very intimate record of this family

during one of the worst periods of our world's history.

And I want to talk to you today about how to use creative writing

And I'm going to walk you through an exercise,

that I actually do with a lot of my collegiate students.

These are you future engineers, technicians, plumbers --

they don't plan on becoming creative writers.

But we use these exercises to kind of un-silence things

So step one is to brainstorm and write it down.

And what I have my students do is I give them a prompt,

with times they might have experienced something,

or seen something and they could have intervened,

And I have them write it down as quickly as possible.

So I'll give you an example of some of the things I would write down.

and two boys dared themselves to touch me,

The time when my sister and I were walking in a city,

and a guy spat at us and called us terrorists.

and girls a couple years older than me were being married off to men

The time when a friend pulled a gun on me.

The time when I went to a going-away luncheon

and a big boss questioned my lineage for 45 minutes.

And there are times when I have seen something

For example, the time when I was on a train

and I witnessed a father beating his toddler son,

Or the many times I've walked by someone who was homeless and in need,

they've asked me for money, and I've walked around them,

and I did not acknowledge their humanity.

but you want to think of times when something might have happened sexually,

times when you've been keeping things repressed,

because (In a hushed voice) God bless them.

but at the same time, we don't talk about things.

So we may not talk about the family member who has been using drugs

We don't talk about the family member who might have severe mental illness.

We'll say something like, "Oh, they've always been that way,"

and we hope that in not talking about it,

we can act like it doesn't exist, that it'll somehow fix itself.

So the goal is to get at least 10 things,

you've actually done part 1, which is bear witness.

You have un-silenced something that you have been keeping silent.

And so after this, you're ready for step 2,

And what I suggest is going back to that list of 10

and picking three things that are really tugging at you,

It doesn't have to be the most dramatic things,

but it's things that are like, "Ah," like, "I have to write about this."

And I suggest you sit down at a table with a pen and paper --

that's my preferred method for recording, but you can also use a tablet,

but something that lets you write it down.

And I suggest taking 30 minutes of uninterrupted time,

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How creative writing can help you through life's hardest moments | Sakinah Hofler

weird

pretend

nasty

basically