“A symptom of November”: Exploring language and emotional truth in fiction

This autoethnographic study examines the relationship between my personal trauma and the language I used to portray fictional trauma in a young adult novel. Using deconstruction and open coding, I analyze the language used in the novel, written over the course of my time in the doctoral program. This exploration provides some insight into my own writing process, how my own trauma has informed it, and the impact of this on the way I teach creative writing as a college instructor. In this exploration, I found a clear connection between my personal experiences of trauma and the language I use to write about it in both fiction and nonfiction work.