Leveling up, according to my teenage son, who is familiar with several different video games, refers to a character or creature that gains enough experience to unlock new skills or features.

For example, let’s say you’re playing a game with a dragon that has one primary skill: he can breathe fire. But not big fire; he shoots out just a little flicker of flame, like a cigarette lighter clicking open and shut.

Discover Your Base-Level Abilities

You start the game and figure out how your dragon’s power works. He gains plenty of fire-breathing experience, as you torch abandoned sheds and defend against enemies with a burst of his flame.

At some point, you play long enough to make full use of his current abilities. You encounter every threat at least once if not twice, and you know the lay of the land. The dragon can scorch castle doors and scale turrets. He can flick out his fire to burn through the base of a tree to fell it and form a shelter.

He’s ready to level up. Unlock that achievement and suddenly you face another dragon and yours breathes out a big ol’ fireball twice the size of his original flames. This opens up new possibilities and invites bigger challenges. And with these newfound abilities, he can face them.

Writing is something like that. When we begin writing, we start with natural abilities and skills. We write and we learn what we’re capable of and we gain experience along the way. At some point, we may feel the nudge to level up, so we can see our writing expand—even explode—like a fireball doubled in size.

You’ve Got to Get in the Game

But before any of that can happen, we’ve got to get in the game.

If you want to write, you have to start writing.

Only when you get in the game will you begin to figure out what you’re capable of in the first place. Only when you’re actually writing can you test your skills and talents. Only when you’re in the game can you develop a writing practice, learn the craft of writing, and slowly grow comfortable and confident.

When Hemingway First Got in the Game

I’m reading Hemingway’s A Moveable Feast, reminded of his early days in Paris, when he started writing stories and was figuring out his writing voice, his creative process.

He found that he liked to write in a notebook while sitting in cafes. While he was still a literary unknown he was meeting and learning from his more experienced contemporaries like Gertrude Stein, F. Scott Fitzgerald, and Ezra Pound.

He discovered a system for how to stop and start his work in progress:

I always worked until I had something done and I always stopped when I knew what was going to happen next. That way I could be sure of going on the next day. But sometimes when I was starting a new story and I could not get it going, I would sit in front of the fire and squeeze the peel of the little oranges into the edge of the flame and watch the sputter of blue that they made. I would stand and look out over the roofs of Paris and think, “Do not worry. You have always written before and you will write now. All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know.” So finally I would write one true sentence, and then go on from there. It was easy then because there was always one true sentence that I knew or had seen or had heard someone say.”¹

He also learned to trust his emerging style—his now infamous spare style—that relies on declarative sentences. “If I started to write elaborately,” he explains, “or like someone introducing or presenting something, I found that I could cut that scrollwork or ornament out and throw it away and start with the first true simple declarative sentence I had written.”²

In those early days he wasn’t yet famous; he wasn’t a household name. He didn’t have an editing app named after him. Like every writer throughout history, Hemingway had to get in the game before he could level up.

Figure Out Yourself as a Writer

As you commit to writing, every project you undertake gives you more and more experience. Every writing session will help you figure out your best way to work. Every connection to the writing community gives you insight into how it operates.

Before long, you’re on fire, completing entire essays, short stories, or poems. You’ll be blogging on a regular basis and proving to yourself you can produce content readers are interested in as more and more people subscribe to get updates and click through to read your next article.

Learn the Writing Landscape

Just as a little video game dragon gets familiar with the lay of the land and the pitfalls of the kingdom he’s running around in, you’ll familiarize yourself with the lay of the land: you’ll understand the online writing space, the literary landscape, the publishing industry. You’ll see what others are doing and comprehend the jargon tossed around by authors, editors, and publishers.

You’ll start to see the path to publishing and understand where you are on that path; you’ll get a general idea of what it would take to get to the next level.

But you’re not there yet.

In fact, none of that can happen if you aren’t writing.

An Easy Way to Start (or Start Again)

Some people keep talking about writing someday instead of actually writing.

Some people aren’t sure what to do to become a writer, so they do nothing.

Some people have been writing, but their output has slowed or even stopped altogether.

To get in the game—or get back in the game—these writers can take the very simple step of picking up a pen and paper to scribble out some thoughts. If that’s you, start with these two prompts:

1. “The reason I’m not writing is…”
2. “The reason I want to start writing (again) is….”

When you finish those sentences, guess what? You’ll be writing.

So you see it doesn’t take much to get started or to start again.

Develop a Writing Habit

A first step is to develop a writing habit or routine. You wake up and write 500 words a day, let’s say, or you’ll block out time and write for an hour. Once you establish a writing mindset manifested as a writing habit, you’ve taken the first step.

Keep writing and one day, you’ll complete a project. Once you finish an essay—especially if you’ve never written one before—you’ll feel the thrill of unlocking a creative, literary achievement.

And the cool part is: that’s not the end. That’s the beginning! Now you know how you write an essay, just as Ernest Hemingway had to figure out how he wrote short stories and later, novels.

Write and Finish Projects to Stay in the Game

Write another one, because a next-level writer continues to create. Despite fear or constraints or self-doubt, the writer levels up by continuing to do the work, day after day.

Write regularly, finish projects, and you’re in the game, friend. You’re on fire!

This is how you build a writing life—even a writing career. Isn’t that where you’re heading now that you’re getting in the game? Toward a writing life?

It may be too soon to tell exactly what you’re building and what it’ll look like. You may not know if you want to be a blogger or a poet or a novelist or a nonfiction author.

You know you’re a writer, though. When you got in the game, you stepped into that identity. And now you’re learning how to control the fire inside.

One word after another, you’re discovering what output you can sustain—how many words you can produce per day. You’re learning how many stories you can write per month, how many blog posts you can publish—how long they can be and how often they’ll be shared.

Keep writing and you’ll figure it out.

Get Through Your First Efforts

Now you might love your first efforts or be disappointed.

Have you heard of the first pancake rule? I love it because I’ve literally seen its truth in action. Every time I make pancakes—or crepes—the first one or two are kind of misshapen and unappealing, even though they taste just fine.

After those first two, I get the swing of things. The pan is the right temperature and the batter sort of settles. Before long, I’m flipping stacks of beautiful, round, puffy pancakes ready to be doused in syrup, or piles of elegant crepes ready to be rolled up with some sweet filling.

But I always have to get those first couple of wonky-looking pancakes or crepes out of the way first.

So if your first writing efforts turn out a little weird and misshapen, no one needs to know. The most important thing is that you got started and got those first efforts out of the way. You got familiar with your equipment, your ideas, your research. You got used to putting one word after another to compose a paragraph or craft a scene.

The video game dragon probably burned a few treasure maps he never meant to torch. He was just getting used to his power.

Use Your Writing Power

You have power, too. Keep using it, creating, writing, figuring out the kind of writer you are and what topics and themes you want to write about. Keep exploring your work and yourself. In the startup phase you’re learning the ropes.

Before long, you’ll be zooming along, comfortable with your progress and pleased with your work.

What then?

Why, you’ll take it to the next level.

Resources

• Hemingway App
• Write to Discover What You Really Want to Say [Ep 188]
• Use Freewriting to Give It Some Thought [Ep 178]
• Write to Discover Your Favorite Type of Writing [Ep 186]
• If You Want to Write, You Have to Get Started [Ep 142]
• On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, by Ann Kroeker and Charity Singleton Craig (learn to build a writing life; affiliate link – Kindle version on sale as of this publishing date for 99 cents)
• A Moveable Feast, by Ernest Hemingway (affiliate link; different version from the footnoted edition)
• Next-Level Writer series
• Write to Discover series
• All podcast episodes

Footnotes

1. Hemingway, Ernest. A Moveable Feast. New York: Scribner Classics, 1996. Print. (20)
2. Ibid.

The post Ep 193: Next-Level Writer – To Start, You’ve Got to Get in the Game appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

“I have rewritten—often several times—every word I have ever published. My pencils outlast their erasers.” Vladimir Nabokov, Speak, Memory¹

First Drafts Reveal What You Want to Say

We’ve already covered the power of writing to discover what we want to say. We can do that with freewriting to discover our initial ideas, writing in our journals or as a warmup exercise when we first sit down to work.

We can also use freewriting to bang out our initial draft. This is especially powerful if we’re doing short-form work and pour out the entire story or article in one sitting.

If we prefer, however, we can sit down after we think, plan, plot, and outline, and version one may emerge more smoothly, flowing from one idea to the next with logic and fluency.

Your personality may feel more comfortable with one approach or the other; there’s no right or wrong. The goal is to get that first draft out so you have material to work with.

Once the draft is complete, the real work begins.

It’s time to refine that draft, through rewriting, revision, and editing.

Rewrite and Revise to Improve Your Drafts

As Ernest Hemingway said in A Moveable Feast, “The only kind of writing is rewriting.”²

Editing is how we arrive at our finalized message, our finished work. Because as freeing and freewheeling as we may be when writing the draft, the project needs this next discovery phase. We need to clarify our ideas and clean up our messes. We may need to tweak and tighten.

On the other hand, if the curse of knowledge causes us to write too lean, we might need to elaborate on an idea we’ve skipped over or ignored or we may need to expand a section that needs clarity.

Questions to Consider

To revise, we must begin with the same basic instructions a high school or college student receives in composition class: know the topic, audience, and purpose of your piece.

Read with those three things in mind to be sure you’re staying on topic, providing appropriate content for that particular reader, and achieving the intended purpose (such as to persuade, entertain, or inform). For example, you can cut paragraphs where you’ve veered off topic and add information if your audience would need background information.

Author Mary Karr offers a less formal approach to editing and revising:

“All the while, I question. Is this really crucial? Are you writing this part to pose as cool or smart?

For me, the last 20 percent of a book’s improvement takes 95 percent of the effort—all in the editing.”³

Stephen King, too, reads his drafts with certain questions in mind. In On Writing, he explains:

Underneath, however, I’m asking myself the Big Questions. The biggest: Is this story coherent? And if it is, what will turn coherence into a song? What are the recurring elements? Do they entwine and make a theme?… What I want most of all is resonance, something that will linger for a little while in Constant Reader’s mind (and heart) after he or she has closed the book and put it up on the shelf.⁴

How to Rewrite and Revise to Improve Your Drafts

You’ll find various methods for rewriting and revising your drafts. Writers approach their work in all kinds of ways.

Some can’t move forward before they’ve refined the latest section.

Others basically freewrite and deal with the word-vomit that splatters onto the page by returning later and cleaning up the mess with next-level editing.

1. Revise and Refine Along the Way

In his book On Writing, Stephen King says Kurt Vonnegut micromanaged his drafts so that his completed work each day was crisp and clean:

Kurt Vonnegut…rewrote each page of his novels until he got them exactly the way he wanted them. The result was days when he might only manage a page or two of finished copy (and the wastebasket would be full of crumpled, rejected page seventy-ones and seventy-twos), but when the manuscript was finished, the book was finished, by gum. You could set it in type.⁵

I don’t want to criticize Vonnegut—and plenty of people do take this approach—but I feel this slows down most writers and keeps them from fully formulating thoughts and ideas. Peter Elbow says:

“Revising is only killing when you do it in a fruitless way—and an unfortunately common way: revising as you write and thus judging and correcting and trying to throw away every sentence while you are in the act of writing it; or trying to fix a pinched and scrawny draft that you know with a sinking heart has nothing solid in it.”⁶

Instead of revising and refining work while writing the first draft, I recommend writers set aside their editor-hat and write like mad without worrying about finesse or jazziness. Get the whole thing down first. Tell the whole story at once.

Then go back and fix it later.

2. Fast Draft followed by Revision

This alternative approach of the fast draft follows stages of development. The first, of course, is to pound out the first draft. Next, set it aside for a long stretch of time—especially if the project is long form.

Distance Yourself from the Draft

To gain objectivity, Stephen King says he waits six weeks to return to his novels and advises others to wait as well.⁷ During that distancing, you could keep projects in your writing pipeline: write new drafts, research a book, proofread something you’re about to send out, churn out short-form pieces.

Read in One Sitting

Six weeks later, when you pick up your manuscript again, read it like you’ve never seen it before. Read it all in one sitting if you can. You’ll find it’ll need some help because every draft needs help.

“[O]nly God gets it right the first time,” King writes, “and only a slob says, ‘Oh well, let it go, that’s what copyeditors are for.’”⁷

This attentive reading reveals the convoluted and confusing sections. That’s what you’ll address next.

Tighten and Expand

Much of the time you’ll remove hunks and tighten sections. Other times something won’t make sense and will need clarification, so you’ll expand.

Make a note to revisit sections that need clarity. “Muddled meaning is a plague among inexperienced writers, and well within reach of some veterans,” writes Susan Bell in The Artful Edit. “If you cannot say clearly what you mean, you are not clear about your meaning. Clear thinking makes for clear writing.”⁸

Analyze ideas—do they make sense? Consider organization—does it flow? Figure out pacing—does it drag?

Rewrite to discover how to clarify those clunky sections so your ideas shine.

3. Scrap it and Completely Rewrite

Chris Brogan explained how he writes books in an episode of his Making the Brand podcast. He says he often scraps a draft entirely. Even after he’s written up to three or four chapters—the equivalent of, say, one hundred pages—he is unafraid to throw it away and start over.

Destroy It and Start Again

Brogan explains:

I’ll start to re-read it, I’ll read the flow, I’ll say to myself, “Well, can I imagine being the kind of business professional that would sit down and read this?” And if I go, “No. It’s boring. It’s garbage. It’s something that feels like other people’s stuff,” I throw it away and I start again… You have to be willing and not afraid to delete stuff…Some people say, “Oh, just edit your way there.” My place is just to destroy it and start again.⁹

By starting over, he often drops ideas and reorganizes the material, returning to his Table of Contents to revise the overall flow.

While he describes his process of scrapping that first version entirely and starting from square one, I would say if he sticks with the general subject matter, he’s still going to have that first draft somewhere in his head. So I might argue that in essence, he is to some extent revising the previous ideas—the original ideas—even though the words of his draft have literally disappeared.

Recreate It from Memory

Author and actor John Cleese wrote a script once for a television show and lost it. In a presentation, he describes what happened:

I couldn’t find it anywhere. And I was pretty disappointed, but I sat down and I forced myself to rewrite it from memory. And it didn’t take terribly long. And then, I found the original. And fortunately I was curious enough to compare the two, and what I discovered was the one I had rewritten from memory was noticeably better than the original that I had lost.

And I realized that the explanation for this was that after I finished writing the original, my unconscious part of my mind—my unconscious—must have continued working on it even though I was not aware that that was what was happening, with the result that when I came to write it out again, it was better. Why else would it have been better? Particularly as I wrote it out the second time much faster. So I began to see that there was something going on that there was a part of mind that was helping me be much more creative.¹⁰

I’ve had clients and friends reach out in a panic after their computer locked up while they were working on a manuscript. They hadn’t saved the changes for hours, so their draft or revisions were completely lost when they rebooted the machine.

Most of the time, these discouraged, disheartened, disappointed writers were able to recreate their work from memory. Although they didn’t have the original to compare with the reconstruction, as John Cleese did, it’s possible their unconscious mind continued to chew on the idea so that their second version was even better than the first.

This is another way to rewrite to discover how to improve your drafts—whether you intentionally or unintentionally scrap it all and start over.

Approach Revision with Curiosity

In The Art of Memoir Mary Karr writes, “In the long run, the revision process feels better if you approach it with curiosity. Each editorial mark can’t register as a ‘mistake’ that threatens the spider ego. Remind yourself that revising proves your care for the reader and of the nature of your ambition.”¹¹

Whether you’re self-editing or reviewing notes from a professional editor, try to distance yourself emotionally and psychologically, see it as a reader would. Instead of feeling defensive, approach it with curiosity:

• How can this piece serve my reader?
• Why isn’t this clear?
• Can I find a better way to package this?
• What’s the best sequence and flow for the ideas or the plot?

Rewrite to Discover the Best Version Possible

The Writing Center of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill says:

Writing is a process of discovery, and you don’t always produce your best stuff when you first get started. So revision is a chance for you to look critically at what you have written to see:

• if it’s really worth saying,
• if it says what you wanted to say, and
• if a reader will understand what you’re saying.¹²

So let go of your piece enough to let it have a life of its own and make the greatest impact possible.

Instead of defending each line of your draft, write and rewrite to discover the best way to express your ideas, to package your poems, to tell your stories. Mary Karr says to “have more curiosity about possible forms the work could take than sense of self-protection for your ego.”¹³

She continues, “Writing, regardless of the end result—whether good or bad, published or not, well reviewed or slammed—means celebrating beauty in an often ugly world. And you do that by fighting for elegance and beauty, redoing or cutting the flabby, disordered parts.”¹⁴

Serve your readers. Fight for elegance and beauty. Write and rewrite to discover how to produce the best possible outcome for your next project.

Resources

• Write to Discover What You Really Want to Say (includes the topic of freewriting in the Write to Discover series)[Ep 188]
• Use Freewriting to Give It Some Thought [Ep 178]
• Plotters and Pantsers for All Genres [Ep 120]
• Tips for Self-Editing from The Artful Edit [Ep 139]
• Listen for the Music: More Self-Editing Tips from The Artful Edit [Ep 140]
• Make the Most of Your Time with a Writing Pipeline [Ep 114]
• John Cleese On Creativity (YouTube video; excerpt begins around 2:30 mark)
• The UNC Writing Center on Revising Drafts
• Write to Discover series
• All podcast episodes

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. Original Nabokov quote from Speak, Memory. Found in this source: Temple, Emily. “’My Pencils Outlast Their Erasers’: Great Writers on the Art of Revision.” The Atlantic, Atlantic Media Company, 14 Jan. 2013, www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2013/01/my-pencils-outlast-their-erasers-great-writers-on-the-art-of-revision/267011/.
2. Original Hemingway quote from A Moveable Feast. Found in this source: “How I Write – Ernest Hemingway.” Lambert Nagle Books, 30 Dec. 2017, www.lambertnagle.com/how-i-write-ernest-hemingway/.
3. Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. N.p.: Harper Perennial, 2016. Print. (215)
4. King, Stephen. On Writing: A Memoir Of The Craft. New York, NY: Pocket, 2000. Print. (215)
5. ibid (209)
6. Elbow, Peter. Writing without Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. New York: Oxford UP, 1998. Print. (121)
7. King, On Writing (213)
8. Bell, Susan. The Artful Edit: On the Practice of Editing Yourself. New York: W.W. Norton, 2008. Print. (111)
9. Brogan, Chris. “How to Write a Book.” Making the Brand. 11 Dec. 2018, https://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/making-the-brand-customer-experience-with-chris-brogan/id1339191074?mt=2
10. AuthenticEducation. “John Cleese on Creativity (video from a Training).” YouTube. YouTube, 12 Sept. 2010. Web. 02 Apr. 2019.
11. Karr, Mary. The Art of Memoir. N.p.: Harper Perennial, 2016. Print. (215)
12. “Revising Drafts” Writingcenter.unc.edu. UNC College of Arts and Sciences, n.d. Web. 02 Apr. 2019.
13. Karr (216)
14. ibid (215)

The post Ep 192: (Re)Write to Discover How to Improve Your Drafts appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

You know within a few notes if you’re listening to the Beatles or the Bee Gees, James Taylor or Justin Timberlake, Sting or Cher.

Why?

Well, it’s their voice. You recognize their voice.

In literature, it may not seem as obvious, since we aren’t usually hearing the author’s voice when we read their work. And yet, I’ll bet you could read a few lines of someone’s work and tell me if it’s:

• William Faulkner or Wendell Berry
• Barbara Kingsolver or Stephen King
• Tom Wolfe or Virginia Woolf

Why?

Once again, it’s their voice. You recognize their voice.

You’d know if you were reading something by Annie Dillard, Anne Lamott, Ann Voskamp or…Ann Kroeker.

Even if you didn’t know them before, if I put passages from Annie Dillard and Anne Lamott side by side, you’d be able to detect a difference. A big difference.

Some of it would be due to the content. Some of it would be due to stylistic choices each of them makes, like word choice, sentence length, literary devices, allusions. Each writer brings to their work different memories, opinions, and passions. That and more plays into the words we write and the way we write them.

Somehow it all comes together into something we label “voice.”

What Is Your Writing Voice?

Agents and publishers say they’re looking for a unique voice, a new voice, a fresh voice, a genuine voice, a voice that rings true.

We writers want to have a voice like that. We want to know we’ve found our voice and we want to deliver our work in that one-of-a-kind voice that connects with readers and stands out in a crowded market. We’re all trying to land on that special “something.”

What is this mysterious thing called “voice”?

The answer is often vague and subjective, sometimes as unhelpful as “I know it when I see it.”

This answer—and it’s not uncommon—leaves writers anxious and unsure of themselves. They get self-conscious and start to question, “Is this my voice? Or did I sound more ‘me’ in the last project?”

And if they continue to squirm as they work, worried they sound like someone else or like anyone else, they’re at risk of losing the authentic voice that may already be pouring out of them naturally.

Definition of Writing Voice

I poked around in books and online and discovered that a few people venture a definition of voice.

Education Northwest, the organization that developed the 6+1 Traits, describe voice as “the heart and soul of the writing, the magic, the wit, the feeling, the life and breath.”¹ A reader, they say, should identify something individual, something unique from “all other writers.”²

Okay, sounds good. That’s what we’re aiming for: individual, unique, a little heart and soul and, if possible, wit.

But how does the writer find that? How does the writer pull that off? How do we know our paragraphs aren’t pulsing with copycat wit? And how can we get some of that magic?

Develop an Ear for Voice in Writing

While it’s hard to be objective about the individuality of our own writing voice, it’s easier to listen for voice in others. In Writing with Power, Peter Elbow describes a time he assigned autobiographical writing to his students and as he read their work, he paid attention to what held his attention.

Over time, he identified those sections, paragraphs, sentences, phrases, and fragments as writing that “felt real.”³

He said, “[I]t had a kind of resonance, it somehow rang true.”⁴ He sensed power in their words. This power, he decided, was voice.

“On some days,” he writes, “these passages jumped out at me very clearly: it’s as though I could hear a gear being engaged and disengaged.”⁵

Your Writing Voice Is Power

Elbow began to recognize feelings these writers exuded in some of these sections—anything from happiness to self-pity. And yet he found it difficult to nail down a clear explanation or source of the power these writers conveyed or an objective definition of voice.⁶

He did, however, develop an ear for voice over time. So whatever you label it and whatever you call it and however you define it, one way or another, Elbow says it comes down to power. Other words may apply, as well, he says, “like authenticity or authority. Many people call it sincerity… I like to call this power juice.”⁷

What Voice Isn’t

After learning to listen for writing that has voice, or “juice,” you’ll start to notice writing that lacks voice. Juice-less prose.

Elbow says, “Writing without voice is wooden or dead because it lacks sound, rhythm, energy, and individuality.”⁸

Does a passage you’re reading online sound clunky? Does an essay stop abruptly? Do you re-read a sentence multiple times to figure it out? Are you falling asleep because a section sounds wooden and a page lacks life?

That’s writing that could use a little magic and energy, life and breath.

If your own writing lands with a thud on the page, don’t despair. We can learn skills and techniques to apply to our poetry and prose that create an appealing sense of rhythm and sound.

Does Writing Voice Differ from Speaking Voice?

Does that mean you’re developing a voice instead of trusting your natural voice?

Maybe. I think that’s okay.

While we may want to achieve a natural, conversational tone, the way we express thoughts on paper doesn’t—and shouldn’t, in my opinion—sound exactly the same as our speech.

After all, we interrupt ourselves when we speak. We hem and haw. We ramble. That’s natural and lively, perhaps, but I sure wouldn’t want to read an exact transcript of my actual conversations.

Writing benefits from clarity that comes as we develop ideas and express thoughts. If we work at it, our written words emerge with greater fluency and rhythm than our spoken words because we’ve taken time to craft our sentences.

I have to be careful, though.

If I try too hard to sound lyrical, for example, my work sounds forced.

If I’m so conversational my prose turns casual, I could seem sloppy.

So it’s a balance.

But I agree with Elbow that we find a writing voice that sounds like…us. If a friend reads my work, I’d like for him to look up from the page and say, “I feel like you’re talking with me over coffee.”

Adequate Writing and an Acceptable Voice

Elbow says work that reflects a writer’s real voice carries “power to make you pay attention and understand—the words go deep.”⁹ However, many writers stay at surface level and instead of finding their unique voice, they default to an “acceptable voice”¹⁰ expressed through “adequate writing.”¹¹

To achieve this familiar, comfortable, safe, and “acceptable voice,” Elbow says we may have had “to push away feelings, experiences, and tones of voice that felt unacceptable. But these unacceptable elements have energy and power tied up in them that you need to tap if you want to deepen the resonance of your voice.”¹²

Dig Deep for Our True Writing Voice

So it’s time to dig deep and take risks—to risk exposing ourselves.

To release my voice means releasing emotions, feelings, and thoughts that I’ve maybe never allowed near the page.

If you’ve been writing with professional and emotional distance, you may need a little nudge into uncharted internal places and spaces. Return to a journal and write feely, using some of the resources and approaches I recommended in the first episode in this series.

As you write to discover your real self, your real voice emerges.

The Right to Be Heard

In Bird by Bird Anne Lamott says she would ask students why they show up and keep doing the work, especially when it was often boring, even excruciating. She says:

[O]ver and over they say in effect, ‘I will not be silenced again.’ They were good children, who often felt invisible and who saw some awful stuff. But at some point they stopped telling what they saw because when they did, they were punished. Now they want to look at their lives—at life—and they don’t want to be sent to their rooms for doing so. But it is very hard to find their own voice and it is tempting to assume someone else’s.¹³

Julia Cameron has worked with many people who have not been heard. “Sometimes,” she says in The Right to Write, “we do not know we have a writing voice because there has never been anyone to listen. When we begin to listen to ourselves, the inner voice grows stronger. Soon others can hear it as well.”¹⁴

Only Your Voice Can Write Your Truth

But going deeper and listening to ourselves isn’t easy.

Anne Lamott continues:

We write to expose the unexposed. If there is one door in the castle you have been told not to go through, you must…Most human beings are dedicated to keeping that one door shut. But the writer’s job is to see what’s behind it, to see the bleak unspeakable stuff, and to turn the unspeakable into words—not just into any words but if we can, into rhythm and blues.
You can’t do this without discovering your true voice.¹⁵

Her students wonder why they have to do this hard, scary work of flinging open those doors and peering inside, reporting on what lurks in those unexplored spaces. She talks about the “liberation and joy” that comes from that action. She adds, “And the truth of your experience can only come through in your own voice.”¹⁶

We write our own truth in our own voice. Lamott says, “You cannot write out of someone else’s big dark place; you can only write out of your own.”¹⁷

Write to Discover Your Voice

Julia Cameron may disagree with my thought that we can learn and practice writing techniques that improve the rhythm and sound of our work and in that sense we’re developing skills that affect our writing voice.

She says we need not “develop” a voice in writing because we have already have a voice. Further, she says, we already have a “unique” voice and need not work on that, either.¹⁸ We simply need to draw it out—discover it—with practice.

And of course anyone who knows Julia Cameron knows that Morning Pages is her assignment—three pages, handwritten, first thing in the morning, every single day. She truly believes we write to discover our voice every morning in the privacy of our bedrooms, before we’ve let the voices of the world wheeze, whine, and whisper in our ears, seeping into our sentences and influencing our ideas.

Conclusion

Peter Elbow, Anne Lamott, and Julia Cameron all suggest that our true voice will emerge and energize as we seek truth, explore it, expose it, and express it.

And as we bring those memories, fears, and struggles to the page, we may do so with deliberate, careful word choice, sentence length, literary devices, and allusions. Or we may stay as casual as we might be around the dinner table with friends. Maybe we’ll figure out how to do both.

I wish I could boil it down to a formula or a process. I wish I could come up with a clear definition. But I think it really might be part mystery and part magic, as it all comes together inside us to form our one-of-a-kind voice that connects with readers with authenticity, authority, sincerity, and power.

However you define it, I do think most everyone would agree that the only way to discover your voice, is to write.

Resources

• How to Be a Better Writer: Boost All 7 Traits of Great Writing [Ep 169]
• What Lies Beneath the Surface of Your Life? [Ep 174]
• Write to Discover: Start with Yourself [Ep 180]
• Write to Discover series
• All podcast episodes

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. “What Are the Traits?” Education Northwest, December 2012, https://educationnorthwest.org/traits/trait-definitions.
2. ibid.
3. Elbow, Peter. Writing with Power: Techniques for Mastering the Writing Process. Oxford University Press, 1998. (283)
4. ibid.
5. ibid.
6. ibid. (284-285)
7. ibid.(286)
8. ibid. (299)
9. ibid.
10. ibid. (301)
11. ibid. (302)
12. ibid.
13. Lamott, Anne. Bird by Bird Some Instructions on Writing and Life. Anchor Books, 1995. (196)
14. Cameron, Julia. The Right to Write: an Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. (159-160)
15. Lamott (198)
16. ibid. (199)
17. ibid.
18. Cameron (154)

The post Ep 191: Write to Discover Your Voice appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

When I feel my writing getting a little stale, I start looking around for a teacher. Now, I don’t mean I’m looking for a class with an instructor, although that’s certainly another way to learn and grow as a writer.

I mean I start looking around for an author and text that has something to teach me. In this way, I can continually improve my skills as a writer.

Develop a Customized Course of Study

A lot of writers feel a strong urge to enter an MFA program to do this. If you feel compelled to pursue that, by all means, research it and see if that’s the best next step for you.

But you don’t have to embark on a pre-planned course of study. You can develop your own path to establish a writing foundation, to build on an existing set of skills and experience, or to refresh your techniques after falling into a writing rut.

Without spending a dime, you can invent an efficient, customized writing course using resources readily available online or at your local library to build your skills and style.

By including reading, study, analysis, and practice pertaining to your biggest areas of struggle or weakness, you can write to discover the skills and techniques you’re lacking and integrate them into your work.

Discover New Skills the Ben Franklin Way

Novelist James Scott Bell wrote an article about how to strengthen your fiction the Ben Franklin way.¹

He explains how Ben Franklin came up with his own self-study course to grow in virtues.

Franklin made a grid and evaluated whether or not he was successful in his pursuit of a given virtue each week. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father concluded he did not attain perfection, as he had hoped, but “was, by the endeavor, a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.”²

James Scott Bell proposes the fiction writer identify key areas to develop into a stronger writer much as Franklin identified his list of virtues. Bell calls these key areas “critical success factors,” or CSFs.³

He explains:

Business and sales folk have been using Franklin’s system for decades to improve their own performance. Not via Franklin’s virtues, but by determining their own areas of competence. These are called critical success factors.⁴

Bell goes through each CSF a fiction author would want to develop and points to related resources: if the reader wants to learn about scenes, voice, or other aspects of fiction, Bell provides links to articles or books that can address each of those. By tapping into these resources, the writer develops his own self-study course.⁵

You can do the same.

Discover Your Critical Success Factors

You can make a list of what you feel are your personal CSFs related to the writing you do. In this way, any of us can identify an area to improve in and find instruction and models pertaining to that exact skill or technique and we can learn from them.

For fiction, you could check out James Scott Bell’s list in that article, where he cites the seven key elements a fiction writer could focus on:

• plot
• structure
• characters
• scenes
• dialogue
• voice
• meaning (theme).⁶

You could make a list of CSFs for nonfiction writers. This might include research, idea development and organization, sentence fluency and word choice, grammar skills, or something as focused as transitions.

Find Mentor Texts

Find some “mentors,” or more accurately, some “mentor texts” you can study and learn from—mentors who excel in the areas where you feel you’re weak.

Some of these mentor texts may be instructional, explaining how to do things. Others may simply serve as models. When you find a mentor text like that—that’s a model—it’s time for close reading. And I’ve found that close reading is achieved easily with a practice we normally think of for children: copy work.

Any adult ready to develop stronger skills can practice copy work. It forces close reading. It requires attentiveness to avoid skipping a word, missing a comma, or losing our place. That attentiveness is key to understanding a writer’s decisions. Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer:

Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices.⁷

As a writer, then, we’re making decisions with each word choice, each exclamation point, each series of three phrases that produces the rhythm we want to achieve. We can pick up some of this simply by reading, as Prose herself does. She says, “I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made.”⁸

When we copy out someone’s work, it’s even better, closer—we don’t miss a thing. We see it all, each and every decision, as it emerges in our writing notebook. Copy work documents the work of another writer so that the copyist is naturally, organically mentored by the original author.

Prose points out that close attention to a text offers “the excitement of approaching, as nearly as you can hope to come, the hand and mind of the artist. It’s something like the way you experience a master painting, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, by viewing it from not only far away but also up close, in order to see the brushstrokes.”⁹

Famous Writers Who Used Copy Work

You’ll be in good company if you write to discover new skills.

Jack London copied Rudyard Kipling’s work word for word in hopes that Kipling’s techniques and energy would teach London how to improve as a writer.¹⁰

Robert Louis Stevenson would read a passage twice and try to recreate it perfectly, word for word. In this way, he’d understand the intricacies of his mentor text to understand his choices and seeing how he might achieve a similar effect.¹¹

An Open Culture article says Hunter Thompson typed out The Great Gatsby, Hemingway’s A Farewell to Arms, and some of Faulkner’s stories in order to learn as a writer.¹²

And we’ve already mentioned Ben Franklin, who approached his mentor texts in a few different ways. First, he’d read the text and make a few notes, then set aside the original. After a few days, he’d attempt to recreate the original from only his notes.¹³

Another technique of his was to turn a story into verse and then convert it back into prose again. This helped him play with the ideas and incorporate novel vocabulary to make the piece work as poetry. One of his critical success factors was vocabulary, and this approach locked in new words he could use in his everyday communication.¹⁴

Try It Yourself

Getting up close and personal with the text, you’ll notice details in that writer’s technique. You’ll see how they used a literary device in a way you’d never realized.

Try it yourself. Copy someone’s work to learn from them, and then apply what you learn. Give it a go.

You can practice copy work or any of Ben Franklin’s variations in a practice notebook. As you grow more comfortable and confident, try writing a micro-essay employing some of these techniques. If you like the result, post it on social media or anywhere you feel free to write without feeling judged.

That way you can apply these devices and techniques freely as you practice, writing to discover new skills that address your critical success factors. As you play around, your writing will naturally evolve and improve because you’re stretching yourself by studying master texts.

Mentor Texts Don’t Need to Be Classic Texts

The work you select for inspiration—the mentors you choose to learn from—don’t have to be Hemingway, Kipling, or Fitzgerald. You can select modern writers whose work you admire and learn from them.

Ben Franklin often chose contemporaries who wrote articles in the local newspaper that he admired. We can do that, too.

Avoid Plagiarism: Track Sources and Make It Your Own

Remember, too, that your copy work must be done in private for learning purposes only. I recommend, in fact, you clearly label the source and the author, so you know the original source. That way if you ever find yourself drawing from an actual phrase that author used, you can credit the source. Otherwise, you risk plagiarism.

But as you learn from a mentor text a literary device like allusion, metaphor, imagery, or foreshadowing, you apply it in your own way with your own ideas and your own phrasing, so you won’t be at risk of plagiarism. You’re simply practicing new techniques.

Discover New Skills

You’re looking to improve—to discover new skills.

Read, analyze, and then write. Write to discover the skills, techniques, and devices, and write to lock them in as your own.

Resources

• Learn from the Best: Imitate But Don’t Plagiarize [Ep 106] (explains Ben Franklin’s copy work techniques)
• Learn from the Best: Copywork for Grownups [Ep 107]
• How to Develop Your Own Self-Study Writing Course [Ep 88]
• Strengthening Your Fiction the Ben Franklin Way, by James Scott Bell via Kill Zone
• Write to Discover series
• All podcast episodes

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. Bell, James Scott. “Strengthening Your Fiction the Ben Franklin Way.” Kill Zone. https://killzoneblog.com/2017/01/strengthening-your-fiction-ben-franklin.html
2. Franklin, Benjamin. Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Henry Holt and Company, 1916, 1922, The Quinn & Boden Co. Press. Digital version available through Project Gutenberg. https://www.gutenberg.org/files/20203/20203-h/20203-h.htm
3. Bell, “Strengthening Your Fiction the Ben Franklin Way.”
4. ibid
5. ibid
6. ibid
7. Prose, Francine. Reading like a Writer: a Guide for People Who Love Books and for Those Who Want to Write Them. Harper Perennial, 2007. (16)
8. ibid (3)
9. ibid (30)
10. McKay, Kate, and Brett McKay. “How to Become a Better Writer: Copy the Work of Others!” The Art of Manliness, originally published 26 March, 2014; updated 31 Jan. 2019, www.artofmanliness.com/articles/want-to-become-a-better-writer-copy-the-work-of-others/.
11. ibid
12. Jones, Josh. “Hunter S. Thompson Typed Out The Great Gatsby & A Farewell to Arms Word for Word: A Method for Learning How to Write Like the Masters.” Open Culture, Open Culture, LLC, 5 June 2017, www.openculture.com/2017/06/hunter-s-thompson-typed-out-the-great-gatsby-farewell-to-arms.html.
13. Kroeker, Ann. “Learn from the Best – Use the Ben Franklin Method to Imitate without Plagiarizing.” Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach, 20 June 2017, annkroeker.com/2017/06/20/ep-106-learn-from-the-best-imitate-but-dont-plagiarize/.
14. ibid

The post Ep 189: Write to Discover New Skills and Techniques appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

[Ep 188]

In this series, you’ve discovered more about yourself through writing—you may have begun to heal emotional wounds. The act of writing has helped you find the courage to continue to write. Through writing, you’ve articulated your reason for doing the work. And you’ve identified your top themes and topics. Most recently, you’ve written to discover your ideal reader.

Today, you’ll see how the act of writing—the process of writing any given project—can lead us to discover what we really want to say.

Discovery Writing to Unearth Ideas

Before we begin to outline or research, we can use writing to probe what is on our mind—to unearth what we want to say. An effective tool for this—and I’ve talked about it before—is freewriting.

I was introduced to the practice of freewriting in college, thanks to a book that was newly released at the time and used in two of my creative writing courses: Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg.

Her invitation to freewrite—to set a timer for, say, ten minutes and write, pen to paper, without stopping—gave me a way to shimmy past my stifling editor-mind to what Goldberg calls “first thoughts.”¹

Those first thoughts unleashed in me the memories, stories, images, and ideas that I hadn’t yet reached when I sat down to write using an outline. Over time, the practice generally led to my discovering what I really wanted to say in my next project—which, at the time, was usually a poem.

Freewriting While Composing the Draft

I still use freewriting as a tool to unstick my thoughts—often before even launching a new project. But freewriting can be also used while my writing is in-progress.

I can be busy writing a paragraph—sometimes even when I’m following an outline I’ve developed—and pause to go deeper with freewriting.

Priscilla Long agrees with this balance of writing into an essay form or structure while occasionally stepping away to further explore ideas and thoughts through freewriting. She refers to freewriting as “discovery writing” in The Writer’s Portable Mentor, where she says this:

[W]riting into a structure should be done in tandem with “discovery writing,” that is, writing to learn what you have to say, writing to work out your thoughts, writing to find out what your antagonist thinks (by writing from her point of view in your notebook, even though in the finished story you are never going to be in her point of view).²

In other words, when we need clarity, Long recommends we stop in the midst of writing to an outline or “template” and spend a few minutes freewriting. This avoids shallow treatment of our topic or story. Instead, we respect our mind’s hesitation and take time to discover what we really want to say.

After freewriting, we gain insight and turn back to the draft, adjusting our ideas as needed.

Determine and Draft Your Project’s Big Idea

Let’s say that you’ve spent a few minutes freewriting to determine what to write about. You’ve thought about it, you’ve researched, you’ve outlined. You have a good solid concept for this project.

When you’re ready to embark on the first words of your next project, determine and draft your project’s Big Idea.

What’s this piece about? What’s the focus? What’s the driving theme?

Articulating Your Working Thesis

Writing this out is a kind of discovery writing all its own—you’re trying to articulate a thesis.

Remember the thesis? Back in high school and college you were probably trained to express it as one sentence—a statement that is, in fact, arguable. A thesis can be used in fiction, nonfiction, and some poetry; it encapsulates what your project is about.

The thesis statement expresses the Big Idea of your project in that one sentence. You set out to explore and support this statement throughout the piece.

Your thesis establishes strong focus for the project from the start. A working thesis is flexible, though. The further you get into your research and writing, the greater the possibility your thesis will be tweaked to reflect how your ideas have morphed.

This simply means you’re refining your ideas through the writing process—once again, discovering what you really want to say through the work of writing.

Write that thesis—that Big Idea—as your first official act of articulating what you want to say. Plaster it across the top of your screen or notebook or Scrivener file to help you focus while knowing it can evolve as your ideas evolve.

Jack Hart’s Theme Statement

One way to go about it is what author and writing coach Jack Hart suggests in his book A Writer’s Coach. He writes what he calls a theme statement—it’s basically a thesis—at the top of the page. He assures the reader it doesn’t need to appear in the piece itself (though it could). Basically it helps the writer focus.³

He says to format it like this: subject, transitive verb, object.

EX: [SUBJECT] [TRANSITIVE VERB] [OBJECT]
[The myth of the perfect first line] [obscures] [the importance of focus and organization]⁴

So that sentence—“The myth of the perfect first line obscures the importance of focus and organization”—would appear at the top of his screen, to remind him where he’s headed.

Eric Maisel’s “Headline” Sentence

Creativity coach and author Eric Maisel recommends the same basic idea in his book Deep Writing:

In my experience, beginning writers and seasoned writers alike often do not take the time to articulate the idea for their current book in a simple sentence or two, even after the time when those few sentences could be articulated. This is a shame, because “headline” sentences of this sort can serve as a reminder, an anchor, even an affirmation throughout the writing process.⁵

He gets pushback from writers who argue that this step stifles the creative process and locks them in. In fact, trying to express the core idea of an entire book in one sentence, they say, seems limiting. “Besides,” he imagines the reader saying in response to this suggestion, “how could any single sentence do my idea justice?”⁶

But this is a kind of discovery writing. Expressing the essence of the idea forces limits and gives us a filter for our content. Because when we know what our project is about, we know what to include and what’s beyond its scope.

Maisel continues:

[A]rticulating your theme or idea in a sentence or two is a worthwhile suggestion, something to consider. To be able to do so may help you hold the intention to write and maintain motivation as you create…. [O]nce I could articulate the theme, however roughly and inadequately, I possessed a powerful reminder of the book’s purpose and intention. ⁷

Focusing with a Title and Subtitle

In addition to writing a thesis, theme sentence, or headline sentence that captures the essence of a project, I recommend you craft a working title and subtitle.

For longer projects like a book, a working title with a subtitle helps me “maintain motivation” as Maisel claims, because the title I reminds me why I set out to pursue this project for this particular reader.

My book Not So Fast: Slow-Down Solutions for Frenzied Families did just that. I came up with the working title and a friend suggested the subtitle. When I locked that in during the process of writing the draft, I always knew who the book was for (frenzied families) and what it was about (slow-down solutions).

If I land on a strong title and subtitle, I can get by without including my thesis at the top of the page, because the title forces me to discover what I’m saying. Generating a title serves the same goal as a thesis—for me, at least—of expressing the project’s purpose and intention.

Get Good at Writing Headlines

Headlines differ from titles and thesis statements. We craft a variety of headlines to land on one that will grab the reader and lure him in. Headlines work best for shorter pieces and that express what we’re really trying to say.

I once shared the story that Jon Morrow told in an interview of how he got a job working for Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger. Brian gave Jon an assignment early on when they started working together to write 100 headlines a day for different blog posts. Get really good at it, he said.

And Jon did. A month later, he went back to Brian with 3,000 headlines. Brian was astonished because he had given that assignment to other people, but only Jon followed through.

In fact, Jon continued the practice of writing 100 headlines a day so valuable he continued it for two years, seven days a week. He never took a day off. He wrote 36,400 headlines in one year, and at the end of two years, he’d written 72,800 headlines.

With all that practice and repetition, he got better and better at writing headlines. He also got really great at generating and vetting ideas that would entice and hold a reader’s interest—all because of the focus brought by the headline.

Finding the best headlines helped him discover what he really wanted to say.⁸

Ask: What am I trying to say?

At times we start to write and find that the work morphs before our very eyes. We can yank the words back into the structure and organization we’ve determined in advance and commit to our initial thesis. Or we can write our way into the piece as it shifts and turns.

That’s fine. That’s why we have a working thesis. And that’s why we ask ourselves focusing questions along the way.

In William Zinsser’s classic book On Writing Well, he says:

The writer must therefore constantly ask himself: What am I trying to say? Surprisingly often, he doesn’t know. Then he must look at what he has written and ask: Have I said it? Is it clear to someone encountering the subject for the first time? If it’s not, it is because some fuzz has worked its way into the machinery. The clear writer is a person clear-headed enough to see this stuff for what it is: fuzz.⁹

Clarity comes as we ask that question: What am I trying to say?

As we ask and then move into that question with a sense of curiosity and openness, we see the fuzz. And then we become a clear-headed writer.

We feel the freedom to let our ideas and our project evolve for the sake of clarity and for the purpose of discovering what we really want to say.

As we write to discover what we really want to say, we’re learning to think—and to think clearly. “Thinking clearly is a conscious act that the writer must force upon himself,” Zinsser writes, “just as if he were embarking on any other project that requires logic: adding up a laundry list or doing an algebra problem.”¹⁰

Keep Writing to Discover What You Really Want to Say

Even with that clarifying question, a fog can set in.

We doubt our ideas.

The clarity and confidence we felt when we first set out blurs as we attempt to articulate the concepts in sentences and develop well reasoned paragraphs.

Keep writing.

That fog will lift through the act of writing itself. We’ll find our ideas solidifying as we force ourselves to verbalize them on the page.

Through writing—getting our words out onto the screen or page—we thought we were heading one way only to realize we’re moving toward a different theme or opinion.

It doesn’t mean you’re waffling or ambivalent. It reflects how writing and thinking work together more intimately than we realized. The longer we write and see this occur, the more we may grow to trust writing as the means to probe our thoughts and arrive at the deeper meaning we intend.

Writing becomes a way to figure out what we really think.

When this happens, we relate to E.M. Forster, who is attributed as saying, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”¹¹

Check Your Final Draft with the Big Idea

If you’ve expressed your Big Idea succinctly—in a thesis, sentence, title, or headline—and tweaked it along the way, you can use it to check your work.

When you’ve finished your draft and you’ve dug deeper and you’ve tweaked your working thesis, you can read your piece with that Big Idea in front of you. Have you fulfilled its promise? Have you answered its question? How well did you support its claim?

If your content doesn’t align with your thesis—your Big Idea—pull out a separate notebook and ask what you want to say—what you mean to say—and with any luck, you’ll discover what you really want to say.

This, I believe, is one of the greatest gifts of writing. Flannery O’Connor said, “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”¹²

Joan Didion, too, says, “I write entirely to find out what is on my mind, what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I’m seeing, and what it means,”¹³ and she said, “I don’t know what I think until I write it down.”¹⁴

By writing, we discover what’s on our mind, what we’re thinking, what we’re looking at, and what it means.

By writing, we discover what we think.

By writing, we discover what we really want to say.

Resources

• The Writer at Work – Use Freewriting to Give It Some Thought [Ep 178]
• What’s the Big Idea? [Ep 46] (on developing a theme statement or thesis)
• Stop Waiting for Last-Minute Inspiration [Ep 50] (Jon Morrow writing headlines)
• Write to Discover – Start with Yourself [Ep 180]
• Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears [Ep 181]
• Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing [Ep 182]
• Write to Discover Your Top Themes & Topics [Ep 183]
• In a World of Author Branding…uh, What’s an Author Brand? [Ep 155]
• Write to Discover series
• All podcast episodes

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala, 2010. Print. (4)
2. Long, Priscilla, (80)
3. Kroeker, Ann. “What’s the Big Idea?”
4. Ibid.
5. Maisel, Eric. Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life. J.P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. (36-37)
6. Ibid (37)
7. Ibid (38)
8. Kroeker, Ann. “Ep 50: Stop Waiting For Last-Minute Inspiration.”
9.  Zinsser, William. On Writing Well: An Informal Guide to Writing Nonfiction. New York: Harper & Row, 1980. (9)
10. Ibid.
11. This quote is attributed to E.M. Forster, as discussed in this thread and several other sites, but seems to have been a line Forster gave to a fictional character. http://emforster.de/hypertext/template.php3?t=thread&thread=145
12. This quote is attributed to Flannery O’Connor, though the precise source is not indicated. My citation is this website: https://www.aerogrammestudio.com/2014/03/27/why-i-write-23-quotes-famous-authors/
13. Trimble, John R. Writing with Style: Conversations on the Art of Writing, Second Edition. Upper Saddle River, New Jersey: Prentice Hall, 2000. 169. Print. [Trimble includes a section at the back of the book called “Writers Talking Shop.” His source for the Didion quote follows: Joan Didion, “Why I Write,” a Regents’ Lecture at the U. of California at Berkeley, reprinted in The Writer on Her Work, ed. Janet Sternburg (New York: Norton, 1980), p. 20.]
14. “Joan Didion Quotes (Author of The Year of Magical Thinking).” Goodreads, Goodreads, www.goodreads.com/author/quotes/238.Joan_Didion.

The post Ep 188: Write to Discover What You Really Want to Say appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

[Ep 187]

In composition classes, college students learn to identify their audience—who are they writing for?

On the topic of audience, The Writing Center at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill suggests students think about writing a letter to their grandmothers about their first month at college. Then they say to imagine writing another letter on the same topic, but this time to their best friend.

“Unless you have an extremely cool grandma to whom you’re very close, it’s likely that your two letters would look quite different in terms of content, structure, and even tone.”¹

The writing form was the same—a letter.

And the topic was the same—the first month in college.

The only variable was the audience—the reader. And knowing the reader will affect the writer’s choices.

Discover Your Ideal Reader for a Writing Project

In this Write to Discover series, we’ve explored our top themes and topics and seen that they can be conveyed in a variety of packages—that is, various genres, styles, or forms. As we add in this new element—the reader—we must ask:

• Who will be reading this piece?
• What does he already know about this topic?
• Will this reader have certain expectations based on the type of writing, such as a genre with its conventions?

As we dig into the reader’s demographics and experiences, our examples and language as writers will shift; our choices will narrow.

For example, an essay on recycling written for The Atlantic will be read by a different audience than a children’s book about recycling or an article in a women’s magazine about recycling. We’ll make different choices to suit our reader in order to produce the best possible project.

For any given writing project, you have to know your audience.

“I never think of an audience”

But you may be resisting this basic writing advice. Perhaps you side with writers like Diane Ackerman, who said in an interview:

Actually, I never think of an audience when I’m writing. I just try to write about what fascinates me and to contemplate what disturbs me or provokes me in some way, or amazes me. I suppose if I have a philosophy on this it’s that if you set out to nourish your own curiosity and your own intellectual yearnings and use yourself as an object of investigation, then, without meaning to, you will probably be touching the lives of a lot of people.²

With this philosophy, Diane Ackerman’s audience would be comprised of, well, people sort of like Diane Ackerman. So while she says she never thinks of an audience but instead simply writes what disturbs, provokes, or amazes her, she’s actually writing for an audience demographic that’s close to her own.

And it’s worked well for her. She’s a prolific, successful author of many books, poems, and essays. Even if you resist this idea of an ideal reader, even if you’re simply writing what pleases you, you are indeed writing for a certain kind of reader—a reader with characteristics similar to yours.

Writing Is a Business with a Customer: the Reader

Lee Gutkind, in his book Creative Nonfiction, seeks a balance between writing what you enjoy and keeping the reader in mind:

[W]riting…is a business. The reader…is a customer. When you write, you are attempting to create a product that your reader wants to buy—or read.

Don’t get me wrong. You must like what you write—and be proud of it. Your article or essay has your name under the title and contains your thoughts and ideas. You are the creator, the person responsible for its existence. But never forget the ultimate reason you are writing nonfiction—to inform, entertain, and influence the readership, however extensive (as in The New Yorker) or limited (as in your school newspaper) it may be.

Yes, writing is a selfish art. We write because we want to write. But we also write because we need to make contact with as many other people—readers—as possible and make an impact in order to influence their thoughts and actions.³

Who’s Your Current Reader?

In our desire to make contact with as many readers as possible to “make an impact” and “influence their thoughts and actions,” let’s look at your current reader.

If you’re already writing—you’re a published author or you’re a blogger seeing a fair amount of traffic or you’re a poet whose work has appeared in literary journals—you may already have a following.

• Who’s already reading and responding to your work?
• How would you describe the people who comprise your current audience?
• Do you know one of your readers personally—enough to write a description of him or her?

These people are your VIP members. They’re the people who make time for you in their inbox if you send out a newsletter. They pause on your social media update to read the latest. They click through to read articles you’ve published. They pre-order your forthcoming book.

Understand your existing readers and seek to know them. Write a profile about them to capture who they are and what matters to them. Hopefully, most of them represent the ideal reader you want to reach.

Ideal Reader Profile

But it’s possible your first followers grew from a mixture of old high school friends and extended family who enjoyed seeing your early writing efforts. So you may want to write to discover your ideal reader beyond your existing base of subscribers and followers.

Darren Rowse of Problogger fame has encouraged bloggers to create reader avatars, which he says are also called reader profiles or personas.⁴ Sales and marketing teams do the same thing, breaking down their ideal customer profile using demographics and psychographics.

Darren recommends taking the time to develop an ideal reader profile to avoid chasing after numbers. Instead, engage ideal readers. You’ll stop trying to be all things to all people when you have an ideal reader you’re trying to reach.

Because those random people you entice to your website or social media channel in an appeal to the masses and in hopes of raising your numbers?

Well, they may not stick around, because what you’re writing is irrelevant to them.

Plus, you’re at risk of writing bland copy, lacking energy because you really don’t know the person reading your words.

Now compare that with those readers you draw because you’re reaching out to an ideal reader. They’ll stick around. Why? Because it’s clear you understand their struggles, questions, and problems.

You’ve discovered them by writing and delivering content that seems customized to them. You know the entertainment they crave and can deliver it.

Start First with Ten

Years ago Seth Godin wrote a short piece on his website titled “First, Ten.” In it, he recommended anyone in marketing find ten people who need or want what you offer. As writers, we’d be looking for ten readers who, in Seth’s words, “trust you/respect you/need you/listen to you.”⁵

Write something and see how your first ten respond. Do they love it? Do they share it with their own ten friends or followers? Do they comment on it? Email you about it?

Good. It’s working. Your ideas are spreading. Your writing is, at least on a small scale, validated.

Write more in that vein.

Now, did those ten readers fall silent after you clicked publish? Did they ignore it?

Well, now you know. You wrote to discover what your ideal reader would respond to and apparently that wasn’t it.

Try something else, something different, something new. If those readers are still with you, test their reaction to your next offering. And so on. It’s a simple approach to figure out what to write next and how to connect with your first ten readers.

And it’s a simple approach to find and keep ideal readers. After all, new readers will join you when one of your original ten shares your pieces. Your growing tribe of ideal readers will stick around as you deliver what they need and want.

Go to Your Readers and Write to Them There

While it’s fun to publish at your own website or on social media channels, you’re not restricted to what you can write and publish in your own spaces. Don’t forget you can reach out to places where you think your ideal readers hang out: their favorite social media channels and websites they frequent.

Once you find those places, you can pitch article and guest post ideas so that you write to discover readers on the very channels and websites they frequent. You’ll show up in the magazines they read.

Back in the early blogging days people recommended leaving comments at influential websites. Why not try it now? That’s another way to write to discover your ideal readers: in that flow of interaction responding to someone’s ideas.

Plus, in your well-written comment you get to thank and support the original writer whose work complements your own. It makes this literary world a better place.

Also, be sure you’re creating a fascinating website of your own that appeals to this ideal reader. It’s your home base. When a curious reader discovers you somewhere, he is going to hop over to learn more about you. Be sure more ideal content awaits them so they confirm you’re a writer who relates to them.

And consistently serve them. When you consistently serve people who are gaining value from your writing, who “get you” because you “get them,” you’re developing a loyal audience who will show up to read what you’ve written time and again.

Writing Is Selfish and Writing Serves

By encouraging us to serve readers, I’m not necessarily recommending we write to market, or write for the commercial market…unless you want to. It can be fun and rewarding to write to market—that is, to figure out the top performing genres and subgenres and learn to write novels that fit well in that market. But that’s for another topic some other time.

My point is that you don’t need to write exclusively to please others. Whatever writing you undertake, it needs to be something you enjoy doing—something you’re eager to work on, even if it’s hard. As Lee Gutkind says, “Yes, writing is a selfish act. We write because we want to write.”⁶

But he points out that we also write to serve an audience—readers—and we hope to reach as many as possible…to make a difference in their lives.

Otherwise we’d just write in a journal and at the end of the day, shove it under the mattress for safekeeping.

No, we are writers, seeking to discover and serve our ideal readers.

Maybe it does just start with ten. First, ten. If you can discover and serve ten ideal readers? Well, frankly, that sounds like a great place to start.

Resources

• Ep 79: Your Writing Platform – Who Is Your Who?
• Problogger’s “How to Create a Reader Avatar for Your Blog” (step-by-step guide)
• Seth Godin’s short article “First, ten“
• Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself
• Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing
• Ep 183: Write to Discover Your Top Themes & Topics
• Ep 155: In a World of Author Branding…uh, What’s an Author Brand?
• Write to Discover series
• All podcast episodes

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. The Writing Center | University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/audience/.
2. “A Conversation with Diane Ackerman,” by Kathleen Veslany, on page 158 of the book by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction: How to Live It and Write It. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review, 1996. Print.
3. Gutkind, Lee. Creative Nonfiction: How to Live It and Write It. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review, 1996. Print, pages 51-52.
4. Rowse, Darren. “How to Create a Reader Avatar for Your Blog.” ProBlogger, 17 Oct. 2017, problogger.com/how-to-create-a-reader-avatar-for-your-blog/.
5. Godin, Seth. April 2, 2009. “First, Ten.” Seth’s Blog, 1 June 2018, seths.blog/2009/04/first-ten/.
6. Gutkind, Lee. Creative Nonfiction: How to Live It and Write It. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review, 1996. Print, pages 51-52. (emphasis mine)

The post Ep 187: Write to Discover Your Ideal Reader appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

When I was in junior high, I joined the track team. Track and field offers a lot of events, so the coach had us try a little bit of everything so we could get a feel for what we might like.

I had played softball when I was younger and was a good hitter, so I gave the shot put a few big hurls. My throws weren’t too shabby, but I wasn’t interested in training for it, so I moved on to other options.

The coach thought I might be good at the 400, which is once around the track. By the time I completed the oval, I was struggling for breath. Sure, with practice I could get stronger and build endurance, but that felt like torture. Any other options?

No interest in the 800 (twice around the track? I could barely make it once!) or worse, the 1600 (a mile? Are you kidding me?).

I knocked the bar off every time I attempted the high jump—even when they set it at the lowest notch. Later, I tried to clear one hurdle, but it seemed impossible to clear one after another all the way down the track. Pass.

The long jump required some funky training to standardize strides for the approach. You have to hit a skinny wooden board without even the tip of the shoe going past. Step, step…boom. Launch for takeoff! I hurtled through the air hoping to land in the sand without falling backwards.

I did it. I exploded off that little board and hit the sand falling forward. That was fun. I signed up for that.

Next up: the 100-meter dash. I struggled to place my feet in the starting blocks, but once in motion, I was built for speed. I flew down the track. Same with the 200. The gun would go off, and I’d power around the curve and then down the straightaway to the finish line. I felt electrified. Alive. Yes, I was born to sprint. Well, I wasn’t good enough to compete at the college level, but for my rural high school I did pretty well.

Figure Out Your Favorite Type of Writing

Trying to figure out our favorite type of writing—the writing that makes us feel electrified and alive—can feel at first like experimenting with track and field events. You have to jog once around the track or pick up that shot put and give it a spin. With any luck, you’ll find one form or type of writing that just fits, as the 200-meter dash fit me.

With writing, you have to stick your hands on the keyboard and tap out the first paragraph of a narrative essay. You have to pull out a pen and paper and write the first line of a poem. You can’t know what kind of writing will fit you best or what will end up your favorite form until you learn about it and try it out.

Your first attempts may feel awkward at first, like leaping backwards over a high-jump bar. How do people do this? On your first few attempts at something new, your resulting efforts might not turn out as you hope or imagine—in fact, they probably won’t. It’ll feel like you’ve knocked off that bar and fallen to the mat in an awkward tangle of limbs.

But as you keep testing out writing forms and styles and genres to find what you enjoy—what feels right for you, what electrifies you—you’ll get the hang of it. You’ll see how others pull it off. You’ll study their technique and see if it will work for you.

Don’t let the fear of a messy, awkward first attempt at any form—from short stories to a profile piece—stop you from trying.

Try a Little Bit of Everything

You may be tempted to discount something thinking it’s too big, too complicated, or too foreign to you. You may feel like ignoring a type of writing. In my interview with Tania Runyan, she says she has no interest in writing a novel.

In college, I signed up for an introductory creative writing course. They focused on short story half the semester, then switched to poetry. I thought for sure I’d love fiction and hate poetry—or excel at fiction and fail at poetry.

From Fiction to Poetry

What a surprise when I tried my hand at a short story and struggled to make it work. With practice, I could have improved—kind of like the 400. I could have trained and might have been pretty good at it, but I wasn’t interested.

Just as I rejected the 400- and 1600-meter events in junior high, I never returned to the short story form after my first efforts in that college course. So, yes, you can refuse to continue or even try out a writing form or style. No one will judge you; no one will ever know.

But never say never. You might be surprised at how quickly you pick up on how to pull it off. You just need practice and experience to be functional or find that you excel. And you’ll only find out if you try it. At least once.

When we switched to poetry in that college course, the instructor introduced us to free verse. I took to it as naturally as running down that track full speed for the 100-meter dash. I mean, I had plenty to learn, but that form or type of writing fit.

I didn’t continue forcing attempts with short story after I discovered my love of poetry.

Freelance Writing

But I didn’t stick with poetry. Tania Runyan—who thinks of herself primarily as a poet—branched out as well. She currently writes web copy for a living.¹

After college, I launched a freelance writing career and found that I liked writing informative pieces. I wrote feature stories for our local newspaper and submitted work to several magazines. Years later, I contributed content to online publications.

Nonfiction Books

Somewhere along the line, someone suggested I write a book, but I wasn’t sure I could handle writing long form. I knew I was capable of sustaining an idea and organizing material for pieces up to, say, 4,000 words. I struggled to stay organized and sustain interest and focus, but I had done it.

But a book? How many words is that? When someone told me a good length for a trade nonfiction book would be around 55,000 words, I said no way. Too long. Too complicated. That sounds like signing me up for an ultra-marathon. I was a sprinter, not a distance runner.

Then again, years earlier I had learned to measure the distance from that wooden long jump board to the spot where my approach should begin. I’d paced my strides so I could explode at takeoff and nail the landing. Maybe I could do the same with a book? Maybe I could work my way back from that overwhelming word count goal? Maybe I could break it down and spread it out?

Once I divided 55,000 words into 13 or 14 chapters of 4,000 words each, I realized I was capable of writing 13 or 14 “articles.” So I wrote a book. Then another. And another.

My point is that you can try lots of writing and see what you think. If you don’t know how to tackle it, read plenty of published work in the same style, form, or genre you’re going to try. You could also take a class, read a book about writing that form, and analyze a writer you admire to see how they pulled it off.

Discover Your Vein of Gold

You may be comfortable and content where you are, writing what you’re writing. You see no need to branch out. You’ve found your vein of gold, your sweet spot, your wheelhouse. Why mess with that?

Here’s a reason why: you may discover a type of writing you never knew you’d love. Another reason? You’ll become more versatile, capable of pivoting as the industry shifts. A third: you may have more fun as you experiment.

The other day I said to someone, “If you think of Meryl Streep, what kind of character does she really shine at playing?” I was remembering films like Sophie’s Choice, Kramer vs. Kramer, Silkwood: her heavy, haunting roles, sometimes played with an accent.

The person blurted out: “Comedy! Oh, Meryl Streep is so funny!”

Comedy? They were probably thinking of The Devil Wears Prada, Mama Mia, and Julie and Julia. Meryl Streep has played such a variety of roles, she’s made herself a versatile actress capable of making us laugh, gasp, and cry. She could have stuck with sad and serious roles, but she didn’t. Good thing she stretched herself and discovered new possibilities and new strengths.

I’ll bet she had fun as she experimented.

The way to discover your favorite type of writing is to try writing new projects, new forms, new genres, new styles. Why not branch out, have a little fun, and see what you think?

The Best Package to Deliver Your Message

This will pay off when you realize that some messages, themes, and topics are better suited for a particular form. For one reason or another, a topic you thought you’d write as a memoir works better as a prescriptive nonfiction book, or a poem needs the space of a novel.

You may be more comfortable with prose but realize poetry would best convey a challenging or painful topic. Images, metaphor, or rhythm allows you to tell it slant.

Or distribution may drive your decision. You want to package an important theme on, say, injustice, as a poem, but you realize you’ll reach more people if you write it as an op-ed.

In “A Conversation with Diane Ackerman,” found in Lee Gutkind’s book Creative Nonfiction, Ackerman says this:

A poem is so small a canvas on which to work, so compressed a form, that you’re somehow reduced to taking contingency samples. You have to somehow capture the gesture or mood and that puts an enormous amount of pressure on every word, every space, every half-rhyme that you use. I love that. I would much rather do that than anything else in my life. Then…I’ll wake up one morning and I’ll realize that there’s something that I need to do that requires more elbow room and suddenly, I find myself working in prose. I don’t think the goals are any different, and very often, the language isn’t any different.²

So even though you might love a form or genre or approach, you need to figure out the best package and the best delivery for your theme or topic. And this might mean that you write in a style that isn’t your sweet spot—that isn’t your vein of gold—because you’ve realized a particular form is the best fit.

Like Diane Ackerman, you’ll wake up and find that your poem needs more “elbow room” and you’re suddenly “working in prose.” The goals and language connected with your project aren’t that different; it’s just that the ideal form for your message wasn’t your first choice.

But if you keep writing to discover your favorite genre, you’ll gain skills along the way. You’ll increase your experience and skill set. You’ll build confidence. You’ll become a solid writer equipped to pull off a variety of types of writing.

Conclusion

What’s a new form for you? A new style? A new genre? This week, try something new. You don’t have to show anyone your first attempts. Just give it a go.

This week, write to discover your favorite type of writing.

Resources

• Ep 185: [Interview] Poet Tania Runyan
• Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself
• Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing
• Ep 183: Write to Discover Your Top Themes & Topics
• Ep 137: What Do I Write Next – Experiment and Expand Your Repertoire
• Ep 136: What Do I Write Next – Enjoy Your Vein of Gold [This mentions Julia Cameron’s book The Vein of Gold and Meryl Streep]
• Ep 57: Go Ahead and Play to Your Strengths 

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. “Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach” podcast, episode 185, an interview with poet Tania Runyan.
2. “A Conversation with Diane Ackerman,” by Kathleen Veslany, on page 160 of the book by Lee Gutkind, Creative Nonfiction: How to Live It and Write It. Chicago, IL: Chicago Review, 1996. Print.

The post Ep 186: Write to Discover Your Favorite Type of Writing appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

I recently signed up for Reddit. During setup, I clicked on categories and topics of interest so the app could deliver relevant updates.

On the spot I had to decide my preferences: do I want ongoing content about this topic or that? Do I want them to send information about technology, politics, economics? Food, fitness, travel, entertainment?

Select Your Top Themes and Topics

I’ve had to do this several times over the years, with apps like Flipboard and most news outlets. I created my own categories for Twitter lists and Feedly subscriptions that groups the content by general topic.

The act of choosing—of being forced to choose—helps me make decisions. I must discern what I care to know more about and what’s less interesting to me.

Narrow Your Top Themes and Topics

Once the articles start flowing into one of these apps, filling my feed with content related to the areas I clicked on, I’ll often realize, “Oh, wait. Wait. I guess I don’t want to know that much about weight training or Broadway shows.” So I update my preferences, usually eliminating a category.

Before long, I not only realize I’m bored by topics I thought I’d like, I also begin to see topics I’m deeply interested in. When I stop everything to read an article and share it on social media, for example, or talk about it a lot at the dinner table, that’s a clue. I pay attention to my intensifying interest, as it’s a strong indication it might be one of my top themes or topics.

We can figure out our interests in other ways, however.

• What do you already know a lot about? Obviously, it’s been a topic of interest already.
• What books do you check out at the library? That indicates you want to dig deeper and know more.
• What outings do you invest time or money in? Do you often visit an art museum, movie theater, car show, live concert, lecture, conference, or state park? Our calendars and credit cards can point us toward our top interests.
• Do you steer conversations toward a particular topic? Do you seek others who join you in an animated, energizing discussion? Take note. That’s probably a top theme or topic for you.
• Where does your curiosity consistently carry you? You don’t have to be an expert to start digging into a topic that captivates you. Explore it.

When you begin to identify these top areas of interest, pick up on clues to narrow your focus. This will help you discover the kind of writing you can pursue.

Confirm Your Top Themes and Topics by Writing

To confirm which of these top themes and topics you want to write about—and the ones you want to be known for—start writing about them.

Did you…

• read an article that riles you up? Write a response and submit it as an op-ed piece.
• read an article that skims the surface of what you know to be true? Write a deeper and better-researched piece and submit it to a relevant publication or work it into a book.
• read a short story that touches on themes you care about? Write something that grapples with the same theme using a different plot or cover the same theme in a different genre. Maybe you read a short story but you can explore it in a poem.
• read a poem that stirs you with its subject matter or theme? Weave your own images or story into a form poem different from what you read, so you explore the same topic in a new way. Or you could switch genres and write an essay in response to the poem.

Whether you write nonfiction, fiction, or poetry, write to discover topics that captivate you, energize you, and hold your attention.

Your Personal Themes and Topics

The “subscription model” I talked about at the beginning where you identify top themes and topics will reveal a lot. But it leaves out something critical: personal history.

What do you obsess about from your past? What episode or memory do you return to in your writing to explore all over again? Discover that and you’ll further refine your top themes and topics, and kind of fold these obsessions into your top themes and topics.

In his book Telling Stories, Lee Martin admits he worries about returning to his family history too often. He says, “I worry that readers will eventually tire of my writing about the accident that cost my father both of his hands when I was barely a year old and the rage he brought into our home.”¹

Write About Your Obsessions

Then he recalls a famous author—he says maybe it was Fitzgerald or maybe Flaubert, but he isn’t sure and I couldn’t confirm it. Martin says this author claims that a writer would be lucky “to figure out early on what his obsessions were and to spend a lifetime writing about them.”²

Natalie Goldberg says something similar in Writing Down the Bones: “Writers end up writing about their obsessions. Things that haunt them; things they can’t forget; stories they carry in their bodies waiting to be released…We are run by our compulsions. Maybe it’s just me. But it seems that obsessions have power. Harness that power.”³

In fact, she recommends you make a list of your obsessions.

I think that’s a great idea. Do that.

Our personal passions and obsessions extend beyond those articles we’ve subscribed to about internet marketing or a book release on politics. We can be obsessed with politics or marketing, yes, but our personal passions and obsessions drill down deep.

We write to discover more about where we stand on an issue and how we spread our perspective on a topic. But we also write to discover our obsessions and to discover more about our obsessions.

Lee Martin continues:

My obsession, it seems, is never ending, as, of course, true obsessions always are, but the position from which I see is always moving, using different characters or situations as my viewfinder. The end result for me is a fuller picture of my own experience. I learn something new with each essay that I write. If the material is richly complicated, as this story of my family is, I’m not sure one will ever run out of new ways to explore it as long as the writer is open to the slightly off-center perspective that other characters or stylistic choices can provide. ⁴

The best way to discover and affirm and understand our top themes and topics and obsessions is to write about them.

Store Information about Your Topics

Years ago, I heard about author Elizabeth George’s Five Fat Files. Her idea is to pick five areas you’d like to grow in—even develop into an expert in—and focus your resources on those five areas.⁵

They could be five ideas, topics, or themes, and they are five areas you can live with for a long, long time because you’re investing in them in a way that invests in you yourself as a writer, and as a person, over time.

This file concept fits well as a logistical way of storing information related to these top topics and themes.

Easy Access, Easy Organization

Elizabeth George’s Five Fat Files were fat because she stored literal pieces of paper—articles and printouts with relevant information—in physical file folders that got thicker and thicker the more she learned.

Author Sophfronia Scott uses a visual, old-school system for her big fat writing journal: a blue binder. She likes that you can move things around in it. She stores topics, works-in-progress, observations, and excerpts in the binder and carries it with her everywhere.⁶

Ryan Holiday uses a 4×6 card system, filing quotations, excerpts, and observations, under bigger topics and themes of his own in a big box.⁷

You could create physical files, but don’t be afraid to use digital files. The people I just mention would probably advise you to use physical means to store information related to your top themes and topics. They feel it’s important to be able to pull out the cards, open the notebook, or pluck material from the file folders for inspiration.

Frankly, for my convenience, I’ve had to go digital. For years I used Evernote but recently I’ve been transitioning to Drive.

Whatever system you choose, make it easy to access, easy to organize, and easy to revisit like these other authors are doing. They’ve created versatile, flexible systems designed for them to access daily. Notes and content await them to inspire and inform their writing projects.

Also, be sure to keep track of all the citation information connected to anything you record. That way you can go back and figure out your original sources and correctly cite them. This is especially important if you’re writing a nonfiction book because you need to back up all those sources and add them to your endnotes. Set up a simple system that you can tweak as you go.

Review and Write

But most importantly, start writing about these top themes and topics. Write about them in a journal, and write about them for publication. Write essays and articles, short stories and poems. Write in whatever genres you enjoy most.

Write not only to discover your top themes and topics but also to narrow and confirm them.

Your Top Themes & Topics Build Your Brand and Platform

The more you write, the more knowledge gaps you’ll reveal; you’ll see how to increase the depth of your understanding and the content you need to add to your Five Fat Files.

You’ll lock in what you’re learning by forcing yourself to express it in writing.

You’ll share with readers life themes and values that matter most to you—and with any luck, you’ll hear from them and learn from their responses.

And as you write about your top themes and topics, readers will start to connect you to those ideas and interests.

Who knows? In time, you may be the one interviewed on a podcast or invited to speak on a panel on a particular top theme and topic.

You’ll be building an identity, a brand, and a platform so naturally, you won’t even notice. You’ll be having too much fun and finding too much value in writing about the things that matter most to you.

Resources

• Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself
• Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing
• Ryan Holiday’s Note Card System
• Sophfronia Scott’s Big Fat Writing Journal
• Overview of the Elizabeth George’s Five Fat Files from Pam Weaver

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. Martin, Lee. Telling Stories: The Craft of Narrative and the Writing Life. Lincoln: U of Nebraska, 2017. Print. (137)
2. ibid.
3. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing down the Bones: Freeing the Writer Within. Boston: Shambhala, 2006. Print. (42, 43)
4. Martin, 138
5. Pamelaweaver.com. N.p., n.d. Web. 30 Jan. 2019. <http://www.pamelaweaver.com/5-fat-files-what-would-you-like-to-be-known-for/>.
6. Scott, Sophfronia. “My Big Fat Writing Journal.” Sophfronia Scott. N.p., Aug. 2012. Web. 30 Jan. 2019. <https://sophfronia.com/my-big-fat-writing-journal/>.
7. Holiday, Ryan. “The Notecard System: The Key For Remembering, Organizing And Using Everything You Read.” RyanHoliday.net – Meditations on Strategy and Life. N.p., Apr. 2014. Web. 30 Jan. 2019. <https://ryanholiday.net/the-notecard-system-the-key-for-remembering-organizing-and-using-everything-you-read/>.

The post Ep 183: Write to Discover Your Top Themes & Topics appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

If you’ve read On Being a Writer, you know my coauthor Charity Singleton Craig and I start with identity—claiming we are writers. I told the story of the university publication that accepted my first poetry submissions. They asked for a bio. I looked at examples from a previous issue I’d purchased. The poets talked about why they write.

“Without overthinking it, I scribbled out, ‘I write, because no one listens to me.’”¹

Until I wrote it out, I don’t think I realized why I was penning poems and pursuing the life of a writer. But when forced to express it in writing, there it was. At that nascent stage of my writing career, I simply wanted to be heard.

Your reason for writing can be as simple as that—to have a voice. That may always be what drives you to the keyboard. But it can change over time. It’s been a few years—a few decades, if I’m honest—since I first identified my reason for writing. Over time, my purpose, my motivation—my reason—has changed, and changed again.

It pays to revisit this question of why you write and see if your reasons have morphed. Because when you know why you write, you can stay focused and motivated. You can run decisions through the filter of your primary purpose.

How to discover it? Through writing.

Why Do You Write?

Most of this exploratory work can happen in our private writing, like journals, rather than in public forums, like a blog or an essay. But you may find that an essay or poem intended for publication ends up effectively verbalizing your purpose.

Writing invites us to grapple with unspoken desires and tap into our driving forces. When we write, we not only unearth our purpose, but we articulate it.

I’m going to give you a couple of prompts to help you find your reason for writing—for being a writer.

You might answer them in a single sentence without a pause because you know exactly why you’ve turned to writing.

Or you might look at these and realize you’re not at all sure why you write.

Or you might end up writing paragraphs in search of the answer. You might unearth multiple reasons that suggest more than one motivation.

Get them down on paper. Write them out.

Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing

You’ll understand yourself better. You’ll realize why you’re drawn more to one project than another. You’ll have a way to decide where to focus your resources.

And keep in mind that your purpose doesn’t have to be noble or big. Let’s say you decided to try writing a thriller on a dare from your best friend and it’s fun. That’s a reason for writing. You might want to see your name in a publication, to make money, or to be known as a subject matter expert. Those are all reasons for writing.

You could work your discoveries into some sort of personal mission or vision statement, or a manifesto. Or going through this process may simply make you more aware of what’s driving you to write. It will ground you.

You can play around with this. Jot out ridiculous answers and see how they look on paper. Make yourself laugh. Maybe, well, maybe that’s why you write—to entertain first yourself and then, others.

Write to discover your reason for writing.

The Prompts

Now here are the simple prompts to get you started:

I write because __________.

OR

I write to _____________.

Your response can be honed down to a few phrases. For example:

• I write because I can’t not write.
• I write because I love words.
• I write because I have important observations to share.
• I write to become famous.

Maybe you write in response to this and discover a specific reason based on curiosity, industry knowledge, or some personal experience—joyful or tragic—that ignites a passion, like:

• I write to explore the deepest reasons people lie.
• I write to bring underreported historical events to light.
• I write to explain creative organizational solutions.
• I write because I love sharing my frugal travel discoveries.
• I write because I want others to care about the health of our oceans as much as I do.
• I write because I want to share my insights about mental health and offer hope.

Write everything that comes to mind. If you write for your own pleasure, to play with words, to express your thoughts clearly, or to tell riveting stories, get that down. Write to discover your reason for writing.

I write because…

I write to…

Our Reason for Writing Helps Us Plan for the Future

If we can land on our reason for writing, we’re set up for long-term success. Joanna Penn said in a Problogger podcast episode:

[M]y number one tip for new bloggers, I would say that you can think big, and you need to decide what you want to be known as in 5-10 years [sic] time. What can you create that will lead to that outcome, because you have to know where you want to end up, and that will really help guide you and keep you going in the nitty gritty bits because there are nitty gritty bits when you are blogging.²

When we discover our reason for writing, we can make better long-term decisions like what she’s describing—what we want to be in five to ten years’ time.

And the nitty-gritty bits gain meaning.

Of course we’ll concede the possibility that our reason may shift and what we want to be known for may evolve. But it’s a good way to start out with intention today in order to build something for the future.

Our Reason for Writing Helps Us Express Our Truth

Brenda Ueland, in If You Want to Write, says:

But at least I understood from William Blake and Van Gogh and other great men, and from myself—from the truth that is in me (and which I have at least learned to declare and stand up for, as I am trying to persuade you to stand up for your inner truth)—at least I understood that writing was this: an impulse to share with other people a feeling or truth that I myself had. Not to preach to them, but to give it to them if they cared to hear it.³

That was her reason for writing. She wrote to share with other people a feeling or truth that she herself had, and to give it to them if they cared to hear it. She encouraged her readers to do the same.

This can be a reason for writing that changes as our feelings shift and we grasp deeper truths.

Write Toward Your Reason

Our reason for writing isn’t always clear and obvious, even when we devote time to pondering the answer to why we write.

Don’t let that stop you from making progress—you don’t have to know your reason in order to write. In fact, by writing whatever it is you feel the impulse to write, to borrow Brenda Ueland’s term, you’ll learn a little something more about yourself.

Julia Cameron, in The Right to Write, says:

Writing is a lot like driving a country blacktop highway on a hot summer day. There is a wavery magical spot that shimmers on the horizon. You aim toward it. You speed to get there, and when you do, the ‘there’ vanishes. You look up to see it again, shimmering in the distance. You write toward that.⁴

If you can’t immediately discover your reason for writing, head off in the direction that seems right for now. Write toward that wavery, magical spot that shimmers on the horizon. That seems reason enough to put pen to paper. Aim toward that. Write toward that.

Cameron adds, “Kabir tells us, ‘Wherever you are is the entry point,’ and this is always true with writing. Wherever you are is always the right place…Start right where you are.”⁵

Write, even if your reason is elusive or keeps changing.

Ask Why at the Start of a New Project

In his book Smarter, Faster, Better, Charles Duhigg writes, “When we start a new task, or confront an unpleasant chore, we should take a moment to ask ourselves ‘why’…. Once we start asking why, those small tasks become pieces of a larger constellation of meaningful projects, goals, and values.”⁶

He continues, “That’s when self-motivation flourishes: when we realize that…it is part of a bigger project that we believe in, that we want to achieve, that we have chosen to do”⁷

When you discover your reason for writing—when you understand why you’re undertaking a project or task—you’ll see how it works toward what you believe in and what you want to achieve.

Today when you devote an hour to research or you churn out 500 words in your work-in-progress, you’ll see how it feeds into the bigger picture, the driving reason, your personal why.

Discover your reason for writing, and you’ll work with deeper purpose. You’ll find what drives your creative efforts. Discover your reason for writing and you’ll answer, project by project, the question the late Mary Oliver posed in her poem “The Summer Day”:

What have you chosen to do with this one wild, precious life?⁸

Resources

• Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself
• Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing
• Ep 183: Write to Discover Your Top Themes and Topics
• Ep 54: It’s Good for a Writer to Ask Why
• “228: From Crying in the Bathroom at Work to a Multi Six Figure Online Business – A Writing Blogger Shares Her Story.” ProBlogger
• On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, by Ann Kroeker and Charity Singleton Craig (affiliate link)
• The Right to Write, by Julia Cameron
• Smarter Faster Better, by Charles Duhigg (affiliate link)
• If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland (affiliate link)

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. Kroeker, Ann, and Charity Singleton Craig. On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts. Ossining, NY: T.S. Poetry, 2014. Print, 19.
2. “228: From Crying in the Bathroom at Work to a Multi Six Figure Online Business – A Writing Blogger Shares Her Story.” ProBlogger. N.p., n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2019.
3. Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2007. Print, 24-25.
4. Cameron, Julia. The Right to Write: An Invitation and Initiation into the Writing Life. New York: Jeremy P. Tarcher/Putnam, 1999. Print, 4.
5. ibid, 4-5
6. Duhigg, Charles. Smarter Faster Better: The Secrets of Being Productive in Life and Business. New York: Random House, 2016. Print, 36, 37
7. ibid.
8. “The Summer Day” by Mary Oliver Poetry 180: A Poem a Day for American High Schools, Hosted by Billy Collins, U.S. Poet Laureate, 2001-2003.” Planning D-Day (April 2003) – Library of Congress Information Bulletin. Library of Congress, n.d. Web. 23 Jan. 2019. <https://www.loc.gov/poetry/180/133.html>.

The post Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

Ralph Keyes observes in his book The Courage to Write, “The trail of literary history is littered with those who fell along the way because the anxiety of trying to write paralyzed their hand”¹.

Writers’ Anxiety

If you’ve begun to reflect on troubling, traumatic memories, you’ve likely encountered fears. Some of those fears are personal and some, professional.

Digging for personal truths almost always leads to increased anxiety in the life of a writer. Keyes notes this causal relationship:

The closer they get to painful personal truths, the more fear mounts—not just about what they might reveal but about what they might discover should they venture too deeply inside. To write well, however, that’s exactly where we must venture. Melville admired most the writers he called “divers,” those who dared to plunge deep inside and report what they found. Frederick Busch thought this need for inner exploration was what made novel-writing so daring. “You go to dark places so that you can get there, steal the trophy and get out.”²

Keyes profiles several “diver”-authors, each willing to go to dark places because they knew they needed to steal the trophy and get out. The first person he first highlights is E. B. White.

The Fears of E. B. White

As a child, White was scared of darkness, girls, lavatories, speaking in front of people, the future, and the “fear that I was unknowing about things I should know about.”³

His anxiety didn’t dissipate in adulthood, either; it simply shifted. He grew up to fear that “the brakes would fail on a trolly” or that he would collapse on the street, and he continued to fear public speaking.

White also worried—to the point of obsession, it seems—about his writing. Keyes said, “He rewrote pieces twenty times or more and sometimes pleaded with the postmaster of North Brooklin, Maine, to return a just-mailed manuscript so he could punch up its ending or rewrite the lead.”⁴

White said, “I am not inclined to apologize for my anxieties, because I have lived with them long enough to respect them”⁵. White not only respected his anxieties, but he also seemed to funnel these fears into his projects—working them out, as it were. His readers can clearly see fear exhibited in such characters as Stuart Little and Wilbur the pig.

He risked negative responses to his work each time he sent off a project to be published. This added to his anxiety—no wonder he pleaded with the postmaster!

E. B. White wrote to discover his fears.

However, he also wrote to discover the courage he needed to confront those fears.

The Courage to Confront Fear

Merriam-Webster’s definition of courage is this: mental or moral strength to venture, persevere, and withstand danger, fear, or difficulty.⁶

Courage, then, isn’t the absence of fear. We discover the courage we need when we venture in, when we persevere, when we write despite the fear—whether or not we write about the fear itself.

Keyes believes “[a]ll writers must confront their fears eventually. The sooner they do this, the better their work will be.” He also clarifies that the courage we need to do the work doesn’t mean we “conquer” our fears.⁷ In fact, he seems to agree with Steven Pressfield’s claim that to silence Resistance, which includes anxiety and fear of all shapes and sizes, we must do the work.⁸

“Working writers aren’t those who have eliminated their anxiety,” writes Keyes. “They are the ones who keep scribbling while their heart races and their stomach churns, and who mail manuscripts with trembling fingers…. They learn how to keep writing even as fear tries to yank their hand from the page”⁹

Keyes goes on to suggest that anxiety is a necessary element of a writer’s life, arguing anxiety energizes our work, infusing it with truth and energy absent from safe, surface-level writing. “Trying to deny, avoid, numb, or eradicate the fear of writing is neither possible nor desirable,” he says. “[F]ear fuels excitement. Writing is both frightening and exhilarating. It couldn’t be one without the other. The best writers … convert anxiety into enthusiasm and an unparalleled source of energy.”¹⁰

How to Write Courageously

Let’s say you see yourself in this description—you’re feeling the fear and ready to write. How? How do you convert it into a source of energy? How do you even get started?

I’ll offer a few suggestions.

Manage the Mind

In his book Deep Writing, creativity consultant Eric Maisel says we must manage our minds.¹¹ If we hear voices “scolding, insulting, and mocking” us, stirring up anxiety and generating fear, we must silence those voices. And he offers a simple—seemingly simplistic—way to do this. He calls it “hushing the mind.”¹²

“When the voices start rising, a hubbub to keep us from our work, literally say ‘hush’ and mean it.”¹³

He’s been made fun of for this idea. Maybe it does sound a little silly. But before criticizing the idea, maybe try it?

He uses it with great results in the workshops he leads. “My goal is to quiet the nerves and minds of the participants,” he explains, “to let the anxiety be normalized, embraced, dissipated, to silence the demons by naming them and then smiling. The results are remarkable. People write. They write and write. They write as they have wanted to write. All I provide is a path to right silence.”¹⁴

Managing the mind by hushing the hubbub seems accessible, practical. Seek silence to discover the courage to write all you’ve wanted to write.

Write a Letter to Fear

In her book Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert advises readers to write a letter to Fear. Personify it. Talk to it.

In her own letter, she tells Fear, basically, she knows Fear’s coming along on a road trip and she can’t leave Fear behind, but she’s got a few rules:

There’s plenty of room in this vehicle for all of us…but understand this: Creativity and I are the only ones who will be making any decisions along the way…You’re allowed to have a seat, and you’re allowed to have a voice, but you are not allowed to have a vote…Dude, you’re not even allowed to touch the radio. But above all else, my dear old familiar friend, you are absolutely forbidden to drive.¹⁵

Fear likes to drive, to pull the car to the side of the road, turn off the engine, and throw the keys out the window into the ditch. Fear brings us to a screeching halt so we stop taking emotional or professional risks.

We, too, need to have a chat with Fear.

If you’re feeling anxious about any aspect of your writing life, why not try it? Discover how it’s holding you back by writing your own letter to Fear. Tell it what you think. Boss it around.

Write the letter. Banish Fear to the back seat if you must. Then get to work.

Write Small

Jane Anne Staw discussed her writing fears in a guest post at Jane Friedman’s website. Staw said writing small was the key.

In college, after critiques from professors convinced her she couldn’t write, she turned to poetry. The act of writing poetry—of writing small—lowered the stakes because she could tackle the project word by word by word and because she wrote poems for pleasure, not on assignment.

As a professional writer in her post-college years, she continued to think small. Working on essays and books generated anxiety, she says. “So I learned to think small and focus on the current sentence I was composing, or at most, on the current paragraph.”¹⁶

It’s easier to find courage when you only need it for small chunks of text and time, so try writing small.

Write Fast Without Editing

We can not only write small to gain courage—we can also write fast. The draft may be messy and redundant and long, but you can slip past the fears if you compose without thinking of any readers. Just go for it. On a keyboard, you can churn out 500 or a thousand words with relative ease and speed.

You’ll find courage to write what needs to be written when you tell yourself it’s only a draft. So spill it without stopping.

The computer’s great for this. Fingers move fast and the format is flexible. After recording the initial draft, computers offer freedom to play around and move a passage here or there before committing. Knowing we don’t have to get it right the first time also releases some anxiety.

Computers also catch spelling and grammar errors. Again, this can remove fears related to “doing it right.”¹⁷

Write Bad on Purpose

Author Brenda Ueland had students so paralyzed by the fear of writing badly they wouldn’t write a single sentence.

She’d tell these writers, “‘See how bad a story you can write. See how dull you can be. Go ahead. That would be fun and interesting. I will give you ten dollars if you can write something thoroughly dull from beginning to end!’ And of course no one can.”¹⁸

With this assignment, Ueland’s creatively blocked students would find the courage to write a few sentences in their attempt to bore their instructor. “And since everybody who is human cannot say a sentence without revealing something—something mild or violent or waggish in their souls—or without having something fine in it, I would point this out. Courage would expand and they would gradually write more.”¹⁹

If you are anxious and fearful, write dull, write something truly terrible, to feel courage expand. As Ueland says, “Try this yourself. It is a relief and you see then how you are not dull at all.”²⁰

Write to Discover the Courage to Write

Maybe it sounds like a contradiction or an oxymoron, but write to discover the courage … to write. In the act of writing, you’ll tap into the courage to keep writing. More than that, you’ll find the courage to dive down to discover the hard truth, the stuff readers come back for because it transforms them.

Your discovery becomes theirs, as the writing transforms both writer and reader.

Resources

• Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself
• Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing
• Ep 183: Write to Discover Your Top Themes and Topics
• “Make Your Writing Anxiety Disappear by Writing Small,” Jane Anne Staw via Jane Friedman
• “Resistance and Self-Loathing,” by Steven Pressfield
• Do the Work: Overcome Resistance and Get Out of Your Own Way, by Steven Pressfield (affiliate link)
• The Courage to Write, by Ralph Keyes (affiliate link)
• Deep Writing: 7 Principles That Bring Ideas to Life, by Eric Maisel
• If You Want to Write, by Brenda Ueland (affiliate link)

Footnotes

1. Keyes, Ralph. The Courage to Write: How Writers Transcend Fear. H. Holt, 2003. Print. [Public library], 9
2. ibid, 64
3. ibid, 4
4. ibid, 3
5. ibid, 5
6. “Courage.” Merriam-Webster. Merriam-Webster, n.d. Web. 16 Jan. 2019.
7. Keyes, 12
8. “Resistance and Self-Loathing.” Steven Pressfield. N.p., 04 Nov. 2013. Web. 16 Jan. 2019.
9. Keyes, 12
10. ibid, 13-14
11. Maisel, Eric. Deep Writing: Seven Principles That Bring Ideas to Life. New York: J.P. Tarcher, 1999. Print. [Public library], 14
12. ibid, 15
13. ibid, 16
14. ibid, 17
15. Curtis, Linda A. “Don’t Let Fear Drive Your Decisions: How to Shift Gears.” Linda Curtis. Linda Curtis, 17 Jan. 2018. Web. 16 Jan. 2019.
16. Staw, Jane Anne. “Make Your Writing Anxiety Disappear By Thinking Small.” Jane Friedman. Jane Friedman, 10 Apr. 2018. Web. 16 Jan. 201
17. Keyes, 142-143
18. Ueland, Brenda. If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit. Saint Paul, MN: Graywolf, 2007. Print. (65)
19. ibid
20. ibid

The post Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.

A few weeks ago I shared with you how freewriting freed me. The book Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg, played a big part in that during my college years, introducing me to the idea of timed writing as a means to write and discover.

Even though I wasn’t all that interested in Goldberg’s frequent references to Zen Buddhism, I liked her basic approach: “When I teach a class,” she says, “I want the students to be ‘writing down the bones,’ the essential, awake speech of their minds.”¹

When I tuned into to my own inner voice and wrote down that “awake speech” of my mind, I began to know myself better. And the better I knew myself, the better and more interesting my writing became.

But when I look back, I realize the practice of self-reflection started even earlier, in high school.

Write to Discover

One afternoon when I was about 14 years old, I was glancing through books on writing at my local library and noticed a title: Write to Discover Yourself, by Ruth Vaughn. I looked both ways and plucked it from the shelf, running my fingers over the green cover with a fuchsia Gerbera daisy poking out of a pencil cup. It seemed a little wacky, but . . .

Write. Discover.

Writers have a lot to discover, but a way to write true and fresh no matter the project is to start by discovering oneself. I knew that instinctively, even then, and felt affirmed by this title.

I desperately wanted to understand myself, to unearth who I was meant to become. And, I wanted to write.

I took the book home and retreated to my room where I followed instructions to “portrait” the important people in my life, exploring memories, capturing life.

I sat on the hardwood floor of my bedroom and composed a word-portrait of my father, struggling to express the way his resonant voice, rising from deep within his barrel chest, could build and fill—even shake—the house. Or was it just me, shaking?

Page after page, the author encouraged me to continue being specific, to use concrete details and metaphor. I poured out stories from my little world.

Digging into yourself requires a depth of honesty that is painful, the author said, but imperative. She quoted a professor who said a writer “is the person with his skin off.”

First Thoughts

That’s how I began to decipher my life. On the pages of a journal, I wrote with my skin off—bare, vulnerable. I tapped into the “awake speech” of my mind, burning through to what Goldberg calls “first thoughts” in order to write down the bones, the hard truths, the core of what and who I had been and was becoming.²

The idea of first thoughts made so much sense to me, because I wanted to express my truest self but I knew I was mostly living in layers of thought, edited thoughts. Goldberg explains:

“First thoughts have tremendous energy. It is the way the mind first flashes on something. The internal censor usually squelches them, so we live in the realm of second and third thoughts, thoughts on thought, twice and three times removed from the direct connection of the first fresh flash.”³

So I used her idea of freewriting when I was in college—timed writing without stopping—hoping to once more get to the bones of thought, experience, memory, feeling; to gain clarity on faded and forgotten memories.

As I practiced this private outpouring of words and deeply personal reflections—first with the help of that stumbled-upon writing book and later with guidance from author Natalie Goldberg—I peeled back layers to stare at my heart and soul. I began, through practice—through pain—the lifelong process of finding myself.

Methods for Using Writing to Discover Yourself

Since then I’ve found other resources that encourage a similar practice, like Proprioceptive Writing, Expressive Writing, and Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages. I encourage you to look into these various methods and learn more.

Whatever approach you try, seek to know yourself better and find insight and freedom by tapping into memory, dreams, images, and emotions—then exploring what you find. Reflect on who you are and what you think by writing through how you were raised and what you’ve survived and who influenced you most and why.

Write to discover yourself.

Personal Writing as a Warm-Up for Professional Projects

Some writers do these private, reflective sessions before they proceed with their work in progress intended for sharing with the public. In Writing the Mind Alive (book incorrectly cited as Proprioceptive Writing in podcast recording) Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon explain their method, which produces what they call a daily “Write”:

Many writers report that by doing Proprioceptive Writing on a regular basis, they’re able to enter their terrifying feelings about writing and bring them down to size. And they do this on the spot, at their desk, without losing a day or a week or a month of work. Whether they are experiencing anxiety or not, some writers begin each workday with a Write, then segue into the formal writing project at hand. They use Proprioceptive Writing in a nuts-and-bolts way, as a warm-up, a problem-solving tool, a technique for working through issues their text raises. They use it as a way of figuring out the answer to that unnerving question, “Just what am I writing about here?⁴

They describe a playwright they’ve worked with who says of this practice, “By playing with the material of the intellect—words and meanings, ideas and memories—the raw gets exposed, allowing new circuits to form and to connect. It is a perfect warm-up to my work on my formal writing projects.”⁵

Go Deep to Find Healing

In the book Writing as an Act of Healing, Louise DeSalvo says, “Safe writing—writing what we already know or understand, writing that is superficial—won’t help us grow, either as people or as writers. For our writing to be healing, we must encounter something that puzzles, confuses, troubles, or pains us.”⁶

Why stick with safe writing that doesn’t help us or our readers? Why not risk greater health in ourselves and a greater impact on our readers by digging a little deeper? This happens through writing about hard parts of ourselves.

DeSalvo invites readers use Expressive Writing “[t]o accept pain, fear, uncertainty, strife. But to find, too, a place of safety, security, serenity, and joyfulness. To claim your voice, to tell your story. And to share the gift of your words with others and, so, enrich and deepen our understanding of the human condition.”⁷

Can expressive writing really offer all that? She cites research by James Pennebaker that indicates, yes, writing about traumatic experiences using their recommended steps can indeed lead to greater healing and health—both psychological and physical health.

Pennebaker and DeSalvo both warn, however, that writing about deeply traumatic events (especially for people with mental illness) should be handled under the supervision of a trained counselor.

Write to Discover Your Fun and Playful Side

On the other hand, although Pennebaker’s research does indicate that diving into trauma as opposed to sticking with lighter topics will result in the greatest healing effects, not all of this timed writing needs to tackle the deepest scars and struggles.

That’s one thing that sets apart Julia Cameron’s Morning Pages and Natalie Goldberg’s freewriting—they welcome you to entertain playful discoveries like oddball dreams as readily as a deep dive into the scarred psyche.

As you write to discover, start with yourself. Discover more about you, the writer, and bring your wiser and more grounded self to every project, inserting fresh insight and honesty into everything you share with readers. And walk away with greater health.

Resources

• Featured image and hosta image with Goldberg quote both by Sophie Marie Creative, used with permission.
• Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself
• Ep 181: Write to Discover the Courage You Need to Confront Your Fears
• Ep 182: Write to Discover Your Reason for Writing
• Ep 183: Write to Discover Your Top Themes and Topics
• On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, by Charity Singleton Craig and Ann Kroeker (affiliate link)
• Ep 178: The Writer at Work: Use Freewriting to Give It Some Thought
• Ep 52: Open Your Heart and Invite Your Reader In
• Writing the Mind Alive: The Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice, by Linda Trichter Metcalf and Tobin Simon (affiliate link)
• Writing Down the Bones, by Natalie Goldberg (affiliate link)
• Morning Pages explanation with video embedded of Julia Cameron explaining the concept
• Writing as a Way of Healing, by Louise DeSalvo (affiliate link)
• The Artist’s Way, by Julia Cameron (affiliate link)
• Opening Up by Writing It Down, Third Edition: How Expressive Writing Improves Health and Eases Emotional Pain, by James Pennebaker and Joshua Smyth (affiliate link)
• Write to Discover Yourself, by Ruth Vaughn, is out of print and only available used

You can subscribe to this podcast using your podcast player or find it through Apple podcasts, Stitcher, or Spotify.

Footnotes

1. Goldberg, Natalie. Writing Down the Bones. Shambhala, 2010. Print. (4)
2. Excerpt from Chapter 8, On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, by Charity Singleton Craig and Ann Kroeker. Print.
3. Goldberg, (8)
4. Metcalf, Linda Trichter., and Tobin Simon. Writing the Mind Alive: the Proprioceptive Method for Finding Your Authentic Voice. Ballantine Books, 2002. (52-53)
5. ibid (xxix)
6. DeSalvo, Louise A. Writing as a Way of Healing: How Telling Our Stories Transforms Our Lives. Beacon Press, 2000. (93)
7. ibid (9)

The post Ep 180: Write to Discover – Start with Yourself appeared first on Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach.