I was about to leave the courthouse when one of the journalists intercepted me.

“We’ve got the cameras set up outside,” she said. “Can you give us a comment?”

I didn’t want to. I profoundly didn’t want to. I was emotionally exhausted after attending a series of hearings spread out over several months. All I wanted to do was go home.

“I guess,” I said, and walked out of the courthouse into the plaza. There I found a couple of cameras and I don’t know how many microphones pointing at me.

And I did an awful job. Dreadful. There was an opening question I don’t remember, after which I fumbled for words. Da-da, da-da. Then came a flood of disconnected sentences. I said everything I felt about the case all at once—except of course that it was only a miniscule part of what I felt. Sentences crashed into each other like logs in a logjam. I had a vague idea that the journalists looked stunned. 

Finally one of them said, “Thank you,” and the mics dropped.

As I stood there for a moment, trying to compose myself, one of the journalists said sympathetically, “I guess you’re not used to being interviewed.”

“I do interviews all the time,” I told her. “But not about one of my oldest friends being murdered.”

Our friend Michael—a journalist himself, and the best man when my husband and I got married—had died after a random street attack. He was a cancer survivor and frail, and without any warning, the man who had just been convicted of manslaughter had pushed him down onto a low wooden planter. Michael had suffered broken ribs, lung damage, internal bleeding and then a fatal heart attack. 

Being a writer with a flexible schedule, I had attended the hearings as a representative of Michael’s large number of friends. Over the months, I’d suffered from insomnia, nightmares and stress eczema, which I’d never even heard of before.

Now I’d made a fool of myself—and I was surprised how little I cared. Michael’s cousin was there as well, and she gave them a couple of sensible comments. I knew they’d use a clip of her instead. I wouldn’t be embarrassed by anyone seeing me fall apart on TV. And if they did, so what? It was nothing compared to the horror of Michael’s death. I walked away shrugging to myself. Blew that one, didn’t I?

But. And here’s my point.

The experience was useful to a writer. In fact, as I got on the subway, I realized rather coolly that I’d learned something that would improve the novel I’m writing. 

And so I began a process that I’ve found helpful—crucial—in my work; a method of research that goes beyond digging into libraries and archives, interviewing people (more successfully) and making trips to places I plan to write about. 

It’s a specific way of using myself.

Every writer has to find her own methods. We all know, or should, that there’s no one correct way to write. But this is something I’ve found useful, so I offer it to other writers. 

Also to readers who wonder how on earth we manage this strange job of bringing new books into the world. 

***

Our poor protagonists. We load them up with trauma—otherwise known as drama—to keep their stories caroming along. As I sat on the subway, heading home from the courthouse, I realized that I’d stumbled onto one way a traumatized person could act, suddenly becoming incapable of doing a chore they were actually pretty good at. Pressured by one demand too many, their years of experience could fall away. They’d find themselves lost in a brain fog, jabbering, jittering, and coming across as a complete idiot. 

How interesting. 

The novelist Graham Greene famously said that writers need a chip of ice in their hearts. The job, he said, is to observe everything around them and be prepared to use it in their writing. The plots we compose and the characters we create are fictional, of course—or at least fictionalized—but as Greene noted, ice-chip moments of observation can make a piece of writing ring emotionally true.

I sometimes put it to my writing students a bit differently. Writers need to have a little creature on our shoulders, I say, a homunculus. Or, more mechanically, a camera that swivels around, watching and recording what’s going on around us. (There’s a reason I call my Substack Alive to the World.) 

And what’s crucially important is that the camera must also swivel toward us, observing how we react, especially when things get tense. We need to record our feelings—not just the ones we choose to display, but the raw emotions underneath, the ones we don’t like admitting to, and with them moments of unbridled and instinctual behaviour, however embarrassing. 

Or admirable behaviour, of course. Noticing when we’re charming, brave, witty, and maybe pretty damn attractive. Us at our best. And what precisely does that consist of? 

***

When I got home from the courthouse, I didn’t have much time to rest. I had an email chain of Michael’s family and closest friends waiting to hear what had happened in court, including testimony given during the preliminary hearing months before that had remained privileged—off the record—until the sentence was handled down. With Michael’s brother’s permission, I had a public post to write as well, giving more details than the media outside the courthouse would have the air time or column inches to provide.

But a couple of days later, I hauled out my journal and started writing more personally about the hearings. Because this is the next step, and I find it imperative.

I don’t mean that I started journalling in the therapeutic sense. That works for many people, and great. If it helps, excellent. Yet every week, at least, I open my journal to write down a very precise account of things I’ve recently seen or done, small narratives, even if they’re just details about taking a walk, say, and stumbling on a man flying a drone. It’s practice writing, and lets me think about what’s going on around me. It also means I’ll have some notes banked about, say, drones if I ever want to include one in a project. (In this case, it went into my manuscript almost immediately.) 

Because I’d already written about what had happened in court, I opened my journal entry by detailing the botched interview. As I wrote, I realized that even a couple of days later I had no memory of the first question one of the journalists had asked. None. Complete blank. It was a little disturbing, actually. I don’t blank out. Except that this time, I did. And in contemplating the blank, almost seeing the misty brain fog, I felt ….

That’s for the novel. So are the other ways the trauma of attending the hearings had affected me, and the way her trauma might affect my novel’s protagonist, or another character in the future. Because writing about that moment sent me circling back through the case, recalling the burning in my chest when the footage from the cop’s bodycam shown in court gave me my last glimpse of Michael, and how the testimony from the pathologist set off this strange internal shaking, and probably led to the case of stress eczema I absolutely will not give my protagonist, since I’m putting the poor woman through enough already. 

Maybe you think this is exploitive. If so, I should say that I’m not going to write Michael into a novel. I have a policy of not writing about my friends. In fact, being my friend is pretty much a guarantee you won’t appear in any of my books. But the woman on the subway with the tat of a wide-open eye on her wrist? Or the elderly woman at the supermarket telling the cashier the can of beans was 89 cents, not 99 cents, and the cashier knowing she was wrong but ringing it through anyway, her eyes so sad.

I don’t know either of them, but they’re in my journal, and they might make it into my writing someday in a way neither of them would recognize, presuming they even read it. 

Yet my most honest and human and useful material comes from observing myself. Clinically, deeply, unforgivingly—and sometimes in the end, forgivingly. Maybe the journal has therapeutic value, after all. 

But it’s also central to my writing.