Once you let it go out into the world…it’s there, and your readers, your audience, will bring their own experiences and frames and biases and emotions to your story. “The story belongs to the reader,” one of my mentors used to say, and I know he was quoting a mentor of his own. Of course we want more good than bad - we’re human, after all…but we cannot control what happens to our words after we publish them. My strongest pieces get the strongest responses - good and bad.
The thing is? Nobody’s going to love everything you write.
Should I say this? Should I soften it, choose my words more carefully, think about how people might react? With each of those pieces of writing - and so many more - I felt the fear even as I was composing them. Or that I grew up on a hippie commune where all sorts of crazy things happened. Or that I later threw myself into polyamory, choosing lovers like they were delicious dishes on a giant buffet. When I tell you that I married a man with a lot of money and it didn’t actually make me happy. When we come here and say true things to each other. It begins and ends with the honesty, though. I can remember only a handful of times in my mature writing life, getting into that zone, where I tapped into something that felt like it wasn’t even me, it was so uncensored. I’ve gone back later and not had to change a thing. And, in those rare and golden moments, the words have turned out to be awfully damn good. They’ve come out as fast as I can type - and I’m a fast typist. Words extruded from my fingers, covering the page, the screen. I have just let them all out, without watching them, without censoring. I have experienced, more than once, the joy of opening myself to the river of words within, the thoughts and emotions deep inside.
#Simple writer hurt how to
We wouldn’t gobble them up like each one was finally going to be the one, the golden ticket, the one piece of secret code that will finally unlock the great mystery of just how to do this ineffable thing.Įvery once in a great while, I find it, that ineffable thing. It’s not that easy, though, is it? If it were, we wouldn’t need so very many writing books. “Just write the words, let them flow” is such basic advice, it’s why all the creative writing books ever published give some variation of it. I know I am so, so, so not the first person, or even the hundredth, to make this observation. But editing does not belong in the raw process of the first draft. Make no mistake: there is absolutely a time and a place for editing (and I’ll explore that more deeply in a later essay). The editing that intrudes on the writing.
#Simple writer hurt full
Even my later journals are full of self-conscious little asides addressed to my “future biographer,” which of course I didn’t (and don’t) believe there will be one, but just in case… It’s the embarrassed, ashamed, explain-y little instinct for self-minimizing, apologizing, waving away the inconvenient and the weird and the awkward. The audience, alas, is Pandora’s Box: there’s no putting it away again, once you really understand it’s there. Okay, so we just need to banish the audience from our raw process. But…I would argue (haha) that this is only a small part of becoming an honest, meaningful writer.Ī writer whose stories people actually want to read. I will admit that I did become a much better writer during the course of my education. That was fine for a college essay paper, I suppose and thinking about who your reader might be isn’t a bad approach for later in the editorial process, either. So airtight that when they reach the end of your piece, they leap to their feet and exclaim “Yes! That’s right! What a fool I was to ever believe otherwise!” Write as though you are speaking to a skeptical, imaginary person who disagrees with your premise, as you build an airtight case for your thesis. You must choose each word with this aim clearly before you. You must always keep your audience in mind when you write, we learned.Īll your arguments (that’s what they call the form of a Rhetoric essay: an argument) are meant to persuade, to convince, to draw the reader along to an inevitable conclusion. It was a great major - it was smart and wide-ranging and endlessly fascinating - but what’s important here is that that was the first time this notion of an audience was codified for me: when there was finally a name to put to this formless, vaguely terrifying awareness that something huge and intrusive had taken over what had once been a private process. Really, that’s actually a thing you can do.
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