Writers make silver linings out of car accident experiences
When he pulled himself from the wreckage of a serious car accident, Brendon Burchard realised that this was his life-changing experience. That if he had been given a second chance at life, he had to commit to living it fully.
In the years since, he has taken the experience of that car crash and turned his personal injury into a personal triumph, becoming a well-respected life coach, consultant and leadership speaker. He also took the incident into fictional form in his inspirational story, Life's Golden Ticket.
Unlike Stephen King's use of his own road traffic accident in his adaptation of The Kingdom, Burchard took only the psychic transformation of his experience into his novel. The emotional journey of his hero, Henry, is taken instead through a mysterious amusement park, filled with characters who embody his problems and his solutions.
Like Paolo Coelho's book, The Alchemist, to which Burchard admits a debt of inspiration, these allegorical characters and the episodic way in which they appear to Henry mean that there's a quality of a parable or a fable to the story. His prose style hasn't hit the liquid simplicity of Coelho's masterpiece, but the author is open about the plot being his focus in this book.
Some critics have noted that the life truths revealed in the book aren't terribly deep, but this may be beside the point. He is not trying to claim glory for discovering new truths, it seems; rather, Burchard's intent appears to be persuading people to act on the simple truths that his car accident taught him to value without their needing to incur the personal injuries that he did.
He is not the only writer who has taken the experience of a road accident and used it to fuel a piece of writing. Aside from The Kingdom, already mentioned, Stephen King's recuperation from the near-fatal truck collision also included the creation of Dreamcatcher, one of the better books of his later career, even if it didn't make a great film.
Another part of King's recuperation process was to buy the truck that he had been run over by and destroy it, by having it crushed in a junkyard.
More locally, the Top Gear accident that left Richard Hammond hospitalised led to his writing a book, On The Edge, detailing his experiences from the crash through to his triumphant return to his BBC presenting role. One of its pleasures is the way it combines the big drama of the blowout with small details, such as his taste buds changing to appreciate celery.
His wife contributes strongly to the book too, showing how a crash and a resultant brain injury affect people beyond those that were in the car when the injuries are sustained.
This is not to suggest that people who want to be writers should try to be involved in a collision. Out of the thousands of crashes that occur every year in the UK, very few lead to a whiplash sufferer or injured passenger writing a bestseller - although therapy involving writing about the experience may be useful to those sufferers.
Some of those accidents, sadly, result in fatal personal injuries, and can extinguish a promising creative spark. One such was Anno Birkin, a well-loved young poet and singer-songwriter who died in a car accident in Italy in 2001. His family, including his film-writer father and the actress Jane Birkin, put together a collection of his lyrics and poems - or 'words', as he called them - which became one of 2003's best-selling poetry books.
This book, Who Said the Race is Over?, overflows with youthful energy, and is shot through with the author's handwritten notes and sketches. If he had had the second chance that Brendon Burchard was gifted with, his achievements could have been incredible.
If you are involved in a car accident, then, the moral of these experiences seems to be that it's certainly worth trying to write something to make sense of your experiences, or some other activity that you have always put off. Painting, perhaps, or music, or finally mastering chess; if there is something within the experience that you can turn into a silver lining, it may well be more beneficial to your life than the compensation claim will be.
