The writer David Lodge once noted that 90 percent of what we call writing is actually reading. It’s going back over your work so you can change and improve it. The excavation task is like that. It’s going back and back over events. The goal is to try to create mental flexibility, the ability to have multiple perspectives on a single event. To find other ways to see what happened. To put the tragedy in the context of a larger story. As Maya Angelou once put it, “The more you know of your history, the more liberated you are.”
