some thoughts on writing
Since my freshman year of college, I've filled 14 journals with drawings, class notes, short stories, poetry, and diary entries. The journals come in all different sizes, decorated or plain—an 8x10 inch journal gifted to me by a dear friend that took me a year to fill cover to cover; a little red spiral notebook that I finished over one winter holiday.
In these journals, I started poems and essays that would be published, gathered my thoughts on subjects that would become these blog entries, dumped my emotions, documented relationships and family events, preserved news and current events, all in the hopes that they would be useful to me in old age, or—to be very, embarrassingly, honest—some historian a hundred years from now.
Over the course of these now thousands of pages; several literature, writing, and history classes; dozens of events and conversations with friends and fellow writers, I've started to gather a sort of philosophy on writing—five ideas that now guide how I think about craft and responsibility.
1: Consideration for those I love.
What stories are mine to tell? About a year ago now, a friend shared an anecdote with me, and I could tell that it shook them. A few months later, I tried to write a poem about it. I got halfway through before I stepped back and realized, almost with a sense of horror, that I could not write this poem. This was their story—to write it in my words, to try and gather narrative or meaning from something that meant so much to them, was to co-opt it for myself. I felt like I'd betrayed their trust.
I think about this a lot in my poetry, which reflects so much of my thoughts, fears, emotions, and relationships; and now I think about it while writing entries for this blog, too. My story is deeply intertwined with those around me, so navigating that fine line is difficult. I try to ask myself—What stories might hurt or embarrass others? What stories don't belong in my mouth at all? And even—What details are too private and intimate to include even off-handedly?
I don't envy memoirists, or people who write autobiographical fiction. How do we balance our desire for growth and truth as artists, our desire to share what we believe is vital, and the duty we feel toward those we write about?
2: Hopeful, Useful, True.
A few weeks ago, I read Richard Powers' The Overstory. In one scene, a character is finishing the last pages of her book and she's struggling with the ending—she wants to write something "hopeful, useful, and true."
I used to write a lot of sad stories. I'd relish exercising all my creative muscles to bring a reader to tears—but now that's just not my jam. I'm not interested in making people cry anymore. I don't want to write about a problem, its horrors or complexities, and leave a reader feeling stuck or lost. Now, I also try to think of how I'm dealing with this problem, or how others might, so we at least feel like we're taking the first baby steps.
I want my writing to reflect solutions and hope, to work toward what Christiana Figueres, executive secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, calls "stubborn optimism." She believes that optimism isn't a disposition or a personality trait. It's a choice that we must make consistently. Change only comes when we believe it is possible—the moment we become complacent, defeatist, or too apocalyptic in our thinking, we lose any chance of moving forward. I want my writing to move forward.
3: Writing as conversation.
Last winter I went to a reading by two authors at City of Asylum, and during their post-reading conversation on stage, I realized there's a tension between every writer and their audience. How do we balance between being true to ourselves and our voices, and being accessible to our readers?
Some writers solve this problem by writing for an audience that already knows where they're coming from, an audience they relate to and love, or an audience that's at least willing to meet them halfway. Some stories must be written a certain way to maintain a sense of authenticity or integrity—writing to accommodate a wider audience would pollute them. Plus, plenty of readers could afford to read outside their comfort zone.
These lines of thinking are super valuable, especially because so many voices outside of the (white, rich, male) mainstream haven't had a chance to share their voices or experiences.
But I'm also interested in writing that bridges the gaps between experiences. How do I write to pull readers in who wouldn't usually engage with these stories and ideas? There's a lot of talk about pandering, or stooping to the "lowest common denominator," but I think that only frames writing as a weapon, or a crutch—how can it be used in service to one another, in the spirit of accessibility and inclusiveness, even when we're opposed?
4: Writing as memorial.
I thought about this a lot as an English and history student; as a reader of historical fiction, which combines craft and past. A really formative book for me was E. H. Carr's What is History?, which I read in a history writing seminar my sophomore year.
His basic ideas are that history is an inherently subjective discipline. It requires historians to make judgment calls on which evidence to take seriously; what to take at face value; where to keep digging; how to shape language and present the facts. And all of these decisions are based on who the historians are themselves. Where they come from, what they've learned and experienced, the era they live in.
In other words, historians are storytellers. They find narrative out of facts and weave them together for other people to take in. They also memorialize—press permanent to page the experiences of the past. As I read and studied, I began to think—How can my writing serve as preservation? For my experiences and those of whom I love? How can my writing expose something previously unexplored, how can it memorialize something that might have been lost forever?
Writing—as plenty of books, treatises, articles, and pamphlets have shown—not only reflects reality, but has the power to change it. Stories drive people to new conclusions and new perspectives—and often it's just a matter of seeing what was once unseen. By giving voice to a story, person, or event, we give it a place in a wider memory. What do we want to preserve? And how do we preserve with empathy and justice?
5: Writing to be shared—writing as service.
Finally, since starting to write these rather personal posts, I've come to peace with the idea that sharing my work is terrifying because it makes me vulnerable in so many ways. It preserves my younger, less mature selves—my clichés, my cringe-worthy craft experiments, like when I thought second person present tense was the only way to write a sad story. It preserves all my bad takes, and the regrets—stories that only in hindsight I'll realize weren't mine to tell, or that I didn't do justice—or it might expose a part of me that my loved ones think is laughable or even hurtful.
These all suck, and almost make me want to lock my stuff in a box or set it on fire, so no one ever sees another word from me. I'm sure many friends and fellow writers have felt the same way.
So why do we publish, and share our work, at all?
For one, it forces us to do our best and have more care. It raises our standards. It encourages us to look at our work with a critical eye, to engage with other perspectives, even hypothetically, and to anticipate mistakes.
Secondly, and this is kind of narcissistic, but the act of sharing implies that our writing is valuable—that we can be helpful or moving for another person. Despite the narcissism, I think this is also an altruistic point of view. Like baking a cake for a friend, or planting a garden in our neighborhood, or painting a mural in our community, writing is an act of service.
Sharing our work—our labor, our art, our ideas—is also an act of faith. In ourselves, and in those who read us. That they care about what we have to say, and that we care about their response; that they will do right by us as readers, and we will do right by them as writers.
Thanks for reading, and take care,
—Mia