Exploring the Shadows to Shine Light on Our Writing and Our Lives
Characters we love to hate
As children, many of us found Cruella de Vil, the villain in The Hundred and One Dalmatians book or movie fun to hate. As adults seeking a good book, movie, or TV show, we often prefer characters who are more relatable, like people we know. Our closest friends and loved ones are individuals who possess a full range of positive and negative qualities. We all have flaws, or as I like to say, we are “multifaceted,” which is what makes gemstones shine. And most of us are living superb lives compared to Cruella de Vil, the embodiment of vanity, greed, and cruelty to animals.
Creating more nuanced characters
In more subtle fiction and nonfiction, having compassion for the people we’re writing about—our characters, people in our lives, and ourselves—is critical. Developing well-rounded protagonists and supporting characters is equally important. When a writer neglects the darker aspects of their characters, or themselves in memoir, readers struggle to relate to them and may perceive them as “flat” or “unbelievable.”
Facing our fears to achieve greater insight and creative flow
These distasteful qualities in our characters or the subjects of our creative nonfiction often represent the emotionally charged areas of ourselves we’d rather not examine. As much as we’d prefer to ignore these shadows, our best material frequently hides within them. Though it can be challenging to face these parts of ourselves, doing so can lead to breakthroughs in our writing and or lives.
The process of facing our shadows parallels the development of a character over the arc of their story, or, in the case of memoir, examining a dramatic period of our own life. The author’s shadows become part of the characters. The changes the characters or narrator achieve by the end of the story mimic the kind of transformation people make throughout their lives, especially if they consciously seek ways to overcome blocks with methods like “Shadow work”, initially developed by Carl Jung. Our shadows, formed by our past and once barriers to fulfillment, become guides to a more bountiful future. With Shadow work, we make our darker emotions our allies. The dimensions of ourselves we once feared become portals to a life of increasing contentment, punctuated by moments of joy and creative flow.
