How Practicing Gratitude Transforms Hard Times—and Your Writing

Discover simple ways to embrace gratitude even when life feels heavy, and learn how this practice can make your stories more impactful.

In 1997, I didn’t have a grateful bone in my body. My life was nothing but pain upon more pain upon more pain. My brother’s suicide. A friend’s death due to AIDS. My grandfather’s death from cancer. My crumbling marriage. I wanted nothing more than to give the world and any sick, sad creator behind it the bird. Most days, I spiraled into deep despair.

Fast forward to 2012. While I’d spent years learning to practice gratitude, my life was again built upon pain. This time, my battle with Lyme disease, rather than loss, was the culprit. Not wanting to repeat the Great Grief of 1997, I engaged in a daily gratitude practice despite feeling completely ungrateful.

I had a few rules for this practice: I had to be legitimately grateful for whatever I’d chosen, and I couldn’t use this to gaslight myself or dismiss my pain. I completed this practice just before dinner as a sort of grace. Most of my early attempts started with, “My life sucks, and I’m grateful for…” Somedays it was the fact that I was breathing, that I’d made it through the day, or that I’d seen a bluebird on my morning walk. The observations were small, yet they kept me alive when the future seemed incredibly bleak. Gratitude disrupted my gloom and reminded me that our stories about what happens to us are malleable.

Practicing gratitude when I’m not grateful hasn’t just helped me cope with hard times. It’s made me a better writer. The practice forces me to attend to all that’s around me. My keen observations help me insert bright spots in dark material, which allows it to transcend my default perceptions.

This week, some Americans are jubilantly celebrating Thanksgiving while others mourn election results, difficult life events, or Thanksgiving itself. It’s a holiday of both/and, which perfectly describes the times we’re living in. As a dear friend recently said, “Our house is on fire, but many houses are on fire right now.” So, what do we do with this?

Gratitude is easy when life’s going well. If that’s your experience, make your list and embrace the goodness you can easily access.

If you’re not feeling it, here are four ways to practice gratitude when you’re not feeling grateful.

Focus on your breath: Whether you think about it or not, your lungs automatically breathe in oxygen and expel carbon dioxide. The automatic nature of this bodily function is miraculous.

Go outside: Leave your house and intentionally look for something beautiful. You can ask spirit/universe/higher power/your powers of observation to gift you with a surprise. Then, see what happens.

Focus on suffering: This one might sound counterintuitive, but connecting with all the people who currently suffer your affliction can make you feel less alone—which can bring sweet relief when life is at its heaviest.

Do something for someone else: One of the biggest reasons life sucks when tough things happen is that we feel powerless over the situation or our feelings about it. Doing something for others empowers you, which breaks this cycle.

That last one will be the focus of the next three weeks. The full details will appear in next week’s newsletter, but here’s a quick preview. Between Tuesday, December 3, 2024 (Giving Tuesday) and December 19^th, you can earn tickets for my annual Giveaway for Good extravaganza by donating $25 or more to a nonprofit that supports the social good or a nonprofit writing center. Tickets will be included in my end-of-year drawings for prizes, like paid subscriptions to this Substack, coaching sessions, and even a manuscript evaluation. The more you donate, the more prizes I offer, and the more chances you have to win. Last year, we raised $12,777 in donations for local communities and writers. I’d love to exceed last year’s total.

But before we get there, let me share three ways gratitude can impact your writing life.

If dark scenes or a dark story are bringing you down, or your beloved writing group has asked you to include more levity in your manuscript, try this:

• Identify who or what helped you. While this list can include other people or external things, you can also focus on a mental or physical fortitude you drew upon. If it feels like no one helped you back then, make a list of who’s helping you now.

• Journal about the insights you now have about this event. Those insights are reminders that you are more than what happened to you.

• Take it further by writing about how surviving this helped you survive something even harder. For example, while Lyme disease sucked a royal blue egg, I knew I could survive it because I’d already survived my brother’s death and everything else that happened in 1997.

• Throw yourself an impromptu Gloria-Gainer-style “I Have Survived, and I Will Survive” dance party. That dance party alone will open your eyes to something you’ve yet to uncover.

• Look for ways to incorporate what you’ve discovered into your scenes. While a memoir involves what happened back then, a good one is infused with what you the writer now know. See if you can hint at redemption or plant an easter egg that at the end of the book will make it seem like the narrator’s transformation was inevitable.

If you still don’t have something, focus on the light. Notice how the sun continues to rise even on a shitty day. Search for glimmers of light in your manuscript and see how they impact the narrator’s feelings. Notice how focusing on the light makes you feel now and how this work sustains you and helps you always write on.

Warmly,

Lisa

PS: I’m grateful for is your time and attention. Thank you for supporting this Substack, and, more importantly, for your presence on this earth. You are a gift to all of us. Now it’s your turn. What are you grateful for? Share your answer in the comments. Then spread some love around by reading and sharing the stories and essays written by this week’s Red-Hot Writers and Milestone Makers.

Latest Writing Your Resilience Podcast Episode

Join Sourcebook’s nonfiction editor Ariel Curry and ghostwriter Liz Morrow and me as we talk about the mindset writers need to succeed, how to stay hungry while working on your writing projects, and the surprising new role self-publishing plays in the publishing industry.

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ICYMI

• Leaning into the Light

• Welcome to the Void

• Let Community Crack You Open

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October Writing Your Resilience Episodes

• The Loneliness of Sibling Loss with Lynn Shattuck and Alyson Shelton

• Bright Spots, Neurodiversity, and More Chicken In your Memoir with Kristin Jarvis Adams

• Forgiveness to Friendship and Why It’s Never Too Late with Gayle and Mildred Kirschenbaum

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Craft Articles:

• “Breaking Point, Back Story, Resolution: A Three-Part Structure for Memoir” by Jennifer Landau

• “How to Describe Your Target Readership So It’s Meaningful to Agents and Publishers” by Jane Friedman

• “My NaNoWriMo Was a Train Wreck” by Elinor Florence

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The Writing Life

• “Build Self-Efficacy to Write Your First Book” by Ariel Curry

• “Why the Best Life Lessons Are Writing Lessons, Too” by Jessica Strawser

• “Doubting Yourself Is Not Failing” by Amy L. Bernstein

• “In Defense of Giving Up” by Stacey May Fowles

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The Biz

• “There Is No Such Thing as a Good Editor, Good Agent, Good Publisher, Good Publicist, Good Marketer…” by Jane Friedman

• “If You Build It Again, Will They Come?” by Kate McKean

• “The One Thing Missing from Your Website That’s Costing You Sales” on the ECommerce Made Easy Podcast. While this one might seem like an odd fit, it’s all about what belongs on your website and customer psychology, which is priceless.

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Posts That Touched Me

• “Facing Our Shadows: How Self-Awareness Can Help Heal a Polarized World” by Sarah Chauncey

• “It’s Okay to Not Be Okay After a Stressful Political Outcome” by Melanie Brooks

• “Oh No. Is It Happening Again?” by Michele Capots

• “A Sorrow Shared” by Eileen Vorbach Collins

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Books on My NightStand

Without You Here by Jody Hobbs Hessler: A touching and exquisitely written novel about the reverberations suicide has on a family. The story is incredibly touching. Plus, it’s an excellent primer on the power of active verbs.

The Full Catastrophe by Casey Mulligan Walsh: A beautifully written literary memoir about about the desires born from grief and how we learn to go on when the world crumbles around us.

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Red-Hot Writers

“Categorically So” by Jessica Yen

“Writing the Hard Scenes” by Deborah Svec-Carstens

“Death Tax” by Marianna Marlowe

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Milestone Makers

Marianna Marlowe

I received in the mail the physical ARC of my debut book, "Portrait of a Feminist: A Memoir in Essays."  It really felt like a milestone--to hold a book with a cover and pages and the smell of ink. I kept touching it to convince myself that it was real!  

If you’ve read this far, thank you so much for your valuable time and attention! I’m so grateful to have played a role in your writing journey. You can support this work and yourself even more by becoming a paid subscriber. Benefits include quarterly ask me anything sessions. The first one is scheduled for Wednesday, December 11, 2024.

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