by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
As parent writers, we can often feel like we have to apologize for the work we do. Because work is taking us away from our children and our families, and it’s cutting into the time that we might spend together, and it’s distracting us from the thing we’re supposed to be doing, which is raising our kids, right?
I am not immune to apologizing for my work.
This usually happens when my husband and I are having a budgeting meeting, and we’re talking about all the budget needs that a family of eight can accrue, and we’re trying to see what’s what, and I realize, yet again, that what I’m doing, this writing thing, isn’t contributing a whole lot to that overall what-we-need number. I spend four hours a day writing and another half hour working on business things, and I find myself apologizing for that time I’m taking away from my husband, who is the real breadwinner at this point in our lives.
Fortunately, my husband is a pretty exceptional man who understands that if I’m not pursuing my passion, I’m not the best version of myself—but that doesn’t mean I stop apologizing.
There are times he’ll take me by the elbows and shake me a little bit and says, “What you’re doing is important,” but until I can do that for myself and really, really believe it, then I’m not going to stop apologizing.
I’m going to notice how the baby is being especially fussy this afternoon, and I really should be down there taking care of him instead of holed up in my room finishing this story, and I’m going to apologize for it when the dinner bell clangs and I snap my laptop shut. I’m going to hear how the 6-year-old needs some help with his homework and I’m his mother, and I should really be down there helping him, even though my husband is a competent caregiver and fully capable of helping him do first-grade homework, but I’m still going to apologize for not being there. I’m going to miss that little school assembly that didn’t really mean much at all, because I had a deadline I needed to meet, and I’m going to apologize for not being there.
When will we stop apologizing for our work?
[Tweet “Let’s stop apologizing for choosing work over every-second-presence with our kids. Our work is important.”]
Something I’ve learned in my full-time writing pursuit is that when I’m creating stories, when I’m mapping out my life on a page, when I’m crafting my essays that celebrate the crazy life I have with six boys, I’m a more whole version of myself. I’m a better person for my separate pursuit, and it doesn’t matter how much or how little money I make at it. That’s not the measure of a whole life. The measure of a whole life is what we’re doing to cultivate the passions and talents we’ve been given—mothering and writing and creating and contributing and teaching and (fill in your own blank).
Sometimes choosing a whole life means not being in the audience of our kid’s reader awards, because there’s something we have to do, and, besides, we were there last year. Sometimes it means not volunteering at a school Christmas party, because Fridays are our busiest days and in order to stay on track, we really need to take this one as a work day. Sometimes it means working during Family Movie Night, because we need to get that one thing edited so we can get it out on the market. We don’t have to apologize for those times. We’re still spending time with our kids. We’re still nurturing, we’re still loving, we’re still present with them in all the ways that matter most.
Something my husband has told me over and over again is that it’s not about the quantity of time we spend with our kids, it’s about the quality. I know this. Fifteen minutes of quality time is much better than a whole hour of distracted time, and our kids notice the difference. So when I’m with my children, I’m with my children, and when I’m working, I’m working. I try to separate them as much as I possibly can, because if we’re always thinking about one when we’re doing the other, we’re not going to be great at either.
It’s not exactly easy to get over this apologizing habit, but it’s something we’re going to have to do if we want to ease into this writing and creating fully and completely. We’re going to have to believe that what we do, the work we produce and create, has value,and that it’s just as important to release out into the world as it is to raise our children. We have to nurture it and spend time with it and love it, too, just like we do our children.
And if we never make money or only sell a few copies of that book, or maybe none at all, we can still take comfort in the fact that we have at least brought value to one person in the world—ourselves.
[Tweet “We love best when we’re creating. That’s all the value our families need.”]
Some things to think about when guilt comes knocking, asking us to apologize:
1. What writing does for us.
For me, writing helps me clarify my world. It doesn’t take long for my world to get all fogged up with expectations and disappointments and to-do lists and things forgotten or remembered, and writing helps me take a step back and figure out what’s important and what’s really not. Writing has healing properties. It has many benefits beyond just the simple act of getting words out on a page. So one of the best ways to combat the need to apologize is to figure out just what writing does for us. I’m a more balanced person, a happier person, a more optimistic and hope-filled person when I’m creating. My kids get a better version of their mom when she holes up inside her room and creates.
2. The time we’re actually spending with our kids.
Sometimes we have an deflated sense of how much time we’re actually spending with our kids, but if we were to evaluate it, we’d see that we spend 10 minutes reading to one boy here and fifteen minutes snuggling with that one and five minutes looking into that one’s eyes in the mornings. Remember, it’s not the quantity, it’s the quality. So even if we evaluate that time and think we’re not spending enough of it with our kids, it’s important to evaluate whether that small amount of time is fully focused on our kids or fragmented with all the other things on our mind.
If we find we need to carve out more time, then put away the distractions, tuck away the to-do list, and just hang out.
3. The impossibility of “all things to all people.”
Our kids will always take more time if we’ll let them. They’ll ask us to come have lunch with them at school, and they’ll ask if we’re going to make it out to their end-of-school dance party, and they’ll ask if we can take them to the store this afternoon so they can buy that new book that just came out, but the reality is, even if we’re not making money at it, our creating time is our work time. It’s not easy to see it this way when we’re not going into an actual office, when they can just knock on the office door or (more likely) barge right in, but we wouldn’t leave a normal 9-5 in the middle of the day so we could take our kid to the store. We shouldn’t do it for our creative pursuit, either.
This will make us want to apologize. But if we can remember that waiting is a necessary skill for our child to learn, maybe we won’t feel quite so guilty about it. Rushing out to give our kids everything they want at the drop of a word doesn’t teach them about things like patience and perseverance and ingenuity.
We’re going to have to miss some things along the way. We can’t be all things to all people. We can’t be everywhere at once. No one else can, either, so we can take the pressure off ourselves.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
It’s not easy to call ourselves what we really are: writer.
Mostly because there are so many things we think we have to do first. We have to get a book deal, with a large publisher. We have to get a thousand or ten thousand followers. We have to make it to a bestseller list and see our name in print in all the literary magazines, and we have to snag all the best interviews and do the work of being a big wig. We have to become something before we have the privilege of being a writer. We have to have an agent, we have to have a book in the bookstores, we have to check off all these boxes before we can really call ourselves a writer.
That’s not true.
Now. I’m not suggesting we swing to the other side of the pendulum, which I’ve noticed has happened lately. We can’t really call ourselves a writer if we’re just sending out random emails every few days. We can’t really call ourselves a writer if we sporadically send a letter to one of our family members once a month or so. The most important prerequisite for calling ourselves a writer is doing the work, every day.
[Tweet “What really makes us a writer is, at its simplest, the work.”]
Maybe this will help us get over our fear that we’re not really a writer, that we’re some imposter who still needs to do this or that before we’re considered professional.
Doubt can creep in when we use the W word to describe ourselves when someone asks us what we do. There have been times in my life when I’ve told someone what it is I do, because I do it for at least three hours every day, and they look at me with their eyes glazed over in disbelief, because, you know, everybody is a writer now. But you know what? I do the work. Every single week I crank out between 40,000 and 60,000 words. I’m a writer.
You are, too. Even if you’re cranking out 10,000 words a week, or 1,000 words a day or 500 or 250 words a day, you are a writer. If you’re doing the work every single day (or every writing day we’ve scheduled–because it takes a schedule to make it happen), then you can call yourself a writer, too.
See, we don’t have to have everything perfectly in place. We don’t have to prove that we’re a legitimate writer by having a publishing deal to show for all our work or checking off the list the world thinks we have to finish before we’re legit; we just have to do the work.
You know what’s going to happen if we’re doing the work? We’re going to get better and better, because we’re always practicing, we’re always inviting in the muse and then exercising it. And we’re going to be better at the end of that year we wrote 250 words a day than we were when we started.
This means, of course, that many of us are writers and don’t even know it. Some of us write for publications, and we call ourselves journalists, but we’re really writers. I called myself by the wrong name for years. I thought I was just regurgitating the facts and not using any of my own creativity, but that wasn’t true. I used as much of my creativity then as I do now, except I was telling true stories, and it gave me the priceless practice of telling the true stories of my life (because when you’re a journalist, there’s not room for exaggeration or untruth)—great training for memoir.
I know it’s not easy. Calling yourself a writer is sort of a scary thing, because people don’t really understand what it means, and they have their own expectations. The follow-up question that I typically hear when I mention that I’m a writer is, oh, have I heard of your books? And I have to say, Probably not, because most of them are out in submission and some of them have been self-published and only sold a handful of copies. But I’m getting there. I’m building a writing career, and soon, maybe, I’ll have more popular books. It doesn’t matter if I do or don’t. I’m still a writer, because every day, between the hours of 12:30 and 3:30 p.m., I stand in front of my standing desk, and I write. That’s enough. I’m a writer.
So what building a business as a writer really comes down to is the commitment. Are we willing to commit to the work of being a writer? Will we write every day (or at least most days)? Will we do it regardless of how we feel? Last week my family and I were hit by “The Plague”—our name for a stomach virus, because with a family of eight, it recurs in delightful cycles—and I still worked. (Sat down, though. Every time I stood up, my insides started climbing out. I know you wanted to know that.)
The other day I was taking my kids to the church nursery, and there was a new person working. She and I got to talking, because she was noticing my 3-year-old twins and she’s always been fascinated with twins (as the 3-year-olds ran in and destroyed the room in five seconds). She asked if I stayed home with them all. I told her, no, I’m a writer. She asked what kind of writing, and I told her. I’ve had lots of practice with this script, believe me, but still I found that my words were coming out sort of apologetically. Now. This has a little to do with the large family thing, and people expecting that a mom of a large family stays home with her kids, but some of it also has to do with not really believing that I’m a writer.
Even now, even after pursing this writing thing for more than a year, I had to remind myself: I’m a writer because I do the work.
Like I said, it’s not easy.
But we can remind ourselves, in those moments when doubt peeks over our shoulders, that we’re writers because we’re doing the work. And if we’re not doing the work? Then take out the schedule, mark off the time and get to work.
How to get started:
1. Start with some morning pages.
I do this every morning. I write exactly three pages on whatever I want in a composition book. What this usually amounts to is a brain dump—all the things that are swirling in my mind, leftover dreams or worries or things I need to do for the day. I don’t try to be creative with it. I just write. Sometimes I write about what I did the day before. Sometimes I write about the argument I had with my husband. Sometimes I write about how I’m worried about the 9-year-old and his attitude lately. This is not something intended for anyone else’s eyes, though sometimes I find the beginnings of a blog or a story in it.
2. Write to a prompt.
If you’re having trouble getting started, try writing to a prompt. I have a folder filled with one-word writing prompts. I’m actually using them to write a memoir right now. I take a word and write on it for as long as I need to (you can set a timer if you want and come back to it later). It’s amazing how many memories of mine are associated with the word “snake.” Prompts are great for drawing out what’s in our subconscious without much pressure on us.
I use other prompts, too. This year I challenged myself to write a poem a day, and I’ve been using quotes from authors for that one. I have a fiction project that I wrote based on the pictures a friend of mine sent me. Photos are great for stirring up creativity, at least for me. It’s probably my favorite prompt to use.
3. Call yourself what you are.
Next time someone asks you what you do, try out, “I write,” even if you don’t make a living from it. It’ll feel weird at first (and they’ll have a whole bunch of questions), but you’ll get used to it. But you’ll never have the opportunity to get used to it if you never say the words in the first place.
Week’s prompt:
Photos have an amazing ability to unlock our creativity. So write on this photo for as long as you want. Write what you see, write what it makes you think about, write what you feel. Just write.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
The most asked question I get when I tell people I’m an author who is also the mom of six children is this: “How do you do it all?”
[Tweet “The important truth we have to learn when we’re writers who are parents: We can’t do it all.”]
I mean, we can try. But we’re going to end up frustrated and burned out and exhausted from the trying.
It’s taken me a long, long time to learn this truth—not just in my writing projects but also in the interior of my life. There are so many projects that come to me on a monthly and weekly and daily basis, and I have them all written down in a massive brainstorm binder, where I let them sit and flesh out, if they want to, while I’m not looking. Sometimes it’s just a phrase jotted down on a piece of notebook paper. Sometimes it’s the opening line for a book or a story or a poem. Sometimes it’s a whole paragraph of information about a character who’s insisting that I write about him or that I explore her story.
I can’t get to all of them at the same time, that’s easy enough to see.
But what’s not quite as easy to see is that I will also not be able to get to all the other things in my life. This “you won’t be able to do it all” applies to something larger than just my writing career. It applies to my life as a mother and wife and volunteer and friend and sister and daughter.
I can’t tell you how many times I go somewhere or hear from someone who enjoys my work, and usually the second thing they say after “I enjoyed that essay about (fill in the blank)” is “I don’t know how you do it all.”
It’s indicative of our society to notice that this is a universal comment that comes to me on a regular basis. I get it. It’s because I’m the mom of six kids, and yet I still manage to produce tens of thousands of words every week. How in the world do I do it all?
Well, you should see my house.
The thing is, when we’re parent writers, we will reach that point where we have to ask ourselves, “Is this something that’s important to do right now, or can it wait?” This is the question I ask most often of my responsibilities around the house. Things like laundry, cooking dinner, tidying the house, those are nonnegotiable for me. Kids have to be clothed, they have to eat, and I function best in a (mostly) tidy house. But things like scrubbing the baseboards and cleaning the insides of counters and moving the stove so I can mop the floor underneath it? Those are negotiable.
I recently missed my oldest’s third-grade field trip, the first one I’ve missed in the years he’s been in school. I was all torn up about it, until I remembered that we’re not going to be able to volunteer at every school event with our kids, just like we’re not going to be able to have a perfectly spotless house and we’re not gong to be able to have meetings with those people we used to meet with every day of the week if we’re really serious about using our time to make a career out of this writing thing.
I stay home with my kids half the day, and the other half of the day I have roped off for working. Writing. That means I don’t schedule meetings with friends and I don’t volunteer at my kids’ school, unless it’s a week where I can afford to take some time away.
Our society demands a whole lot from us. I’m a mom of kids in school, and that means there are parties to volunteer for, programs to attend, end-of-year-parties and playdates and all kinds of things that will creep into my work time if I let it. It’s not easy to look at our schedules and know how to label one thing negotiable and one thing non-negotiable, but it has to be done.
[Tweet “If we don’t schedule our writing time like it’s work time, we’ll never finish our book.”]
Something will always compete for our time. It might be the kids, who want a ride to the store so they can spend that $5 they got in the mail yesterday. It might be a friend, calling just to talk. It might be the floors and all those spots, reminding you it’s been way too long since it was mopped.
We’re not going to be able to do it all, writers. What’s more important: mopping a floor or writing a story?
I know which one I’d choose.
We’re not going to be able to do it all. We’re not.
Sometimes this will bother us. Sometimes I regret that I didn’t volunteer at my second son’s kindergarten Christmas party, like I had volunteered at his big brother’s, because work was too busy. So we adjust. This year I made accommodations and finished up a project early so I could do volunteer at his first-grade party instead. Because sometimes, we can justify the break, when we know we’ve been working hard all year and now we deserve to take a day off. But when I look around my house and see the dust an inch thick on my bookshelves and tables, I don’t feel the least bit guilty. Because my writing time is worth sacrificing that one little thing so that I have a few more minutes to change a life or two.
We have to be able to rid ourselves of the pressure to do it all. Society doesn’t make it easy, but we have to do it. We have to look at all the things we could set aside, even if it’s just for a season, just until we get this one manuscript finished, that’s all we’re asking, and then we have to make sure we’re okay with that decision.
[Tweet “We’ll never be able to be the best at anything if we’re trying to do it all.”]
How to combat the urge to do it all:
1. Hire someone.
If it’s in your budget to hire someone to help out with something, then do it. If you need a sitter for a couple of months until you can finish something pressing and get it out into the world, do it. If you need a house cleaner because you’re not that great at cleaning anyway, then do it. If you need a lawn team to take care of yours, hire them. There are reasons these services exist, and what you’re really doing is buying yourself time and energy.
2. Discuss with your spouse and children what you might be able to let slide for a season.
Sometimes you’ll let the cleaning stuff slide, sometimes you’ll let the cooking slide and just eat picnic dinners for a season, sometimes you won’t be the one signing all the school papers. Sometimes you won’t worry about organizing the garage right now, because there’s too much on your plate anyway. Sometimes you’ll stop attending that Wednesday night meeting because you need the time elsewhere. It’s okay to let some things slide for a time.
Do I need to say it again? It’s okay to let some things slide. You don’t have to do it all.
3. Delegate.
Some of the tasks that are on our plates we can delegate to others. My boys know how to hold a dusting wand, which means they can start doing this job for me. It may not look like I want it to look when it’s all said and done, but that’s okay. Help is help. And they’re helping me pursue my dream by taking my place dusting, whatever that looks like.
4. Make a “no” list.
This is helpful when you’re a yes person like me. Here’s the typical formula: If someone asks me to do something for them, I answer yes. I don’t like disappointing people. I have a hard time saying no. If you make a list of all the things to which you’d have to answer “no,” if asked, the list will help guide your decisions in every situation. Goals can also help with this, if you’re not so keen on making a “no” list.
5. Take a day off.
Determine whether a day off here and there is something you can do and still get back into the rhythm of creating. (We don’t have to say no to everything that doesn’t serve our purpose. There’s room for fun.)
Like I said, at the end of last year, I decided that I was going to volunteer at my boys’ Christmas parties. There were three of them in school at the time, and I had to divide my time among the three of them, but we had a grand time. I was able to plan for that volunteering and then adjust my workload accordingly. It meant I had to work a little harder on the week before, but it was totally worth it.
Week’s prompt:
Write a poem that is really a wish list for all the things you feel like you need in order to launch a writing career.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
We have such a vault of stories as parents. Every day we are interacting with our kids, and we are listening in on conversations, and we are growing more and more as storytellers, because we get to be immersed in stories all the time.
I only have to take a look around at my kids to know that we are immersed in stories at every hour of every day. Not only are they constantly talking, but they are constantly telling me stories about their lives, if I am brave enough (and patient enough) to listen.
One of my novels came out of a conversation with my 9-year-old about these Power Buddies he had created. They have elemental powers, and he would play with kids on the playground, pretending to be Power Buddies, and he had all their backstories figured out, how they became Power Buddies, and then we decided to brainstorm nine of them, and write a trilogy about how they saved the world. My 9-year-old is one of the most creative people I’ve ever brainstormed with, because he had absolutely no inhibition at all. He didn’t know rules, so he would just toss out random plot twists, and I took notes on them all. It was amazing the way I could connect them after I had sat with them for a time.
Would that have happened if this amazing 9-year-old was not in my life? Would there be such thing as a Power Buddies series (still in the rough draft stages)? I don’t know.
We have all sorts of stories living inside us, begging to get out. We have stories about childbirth or child disappointment or child victory or child rearing or child struggling. We have stories about the way a boy feels about homework and the way a house smells when it’s filled with sweaty boys and the way we feel when we look at them.
[Tweet “So much of life could live in our writing if we looked at the world through a child’s eyes.”]
So much of my life ends up in my stories, partly because I write mostly kid-lit, but also because the most interesting parts of my life are the relationships my boys have with each other and the way they sometimes love a brother and sometimes don’t and the things they say to each other and the dreams they have and the imaginations they carry.
Sometimes, when I’m eavesdropping, my kids will say something that makes me want to write an essay. Sometimes they are the inspiration behind an entire book (last year’s NaNoWriMo came out of a conversation with my first-grader about a kid in his class who drools and doesn’t say much.). Sometimes they give me little snippets of real life that I’ll insert into a story to make it funny or authentic or interesting.
As parents, we are surrounded by stories, and sometimes that can get really hard to see, because of all the logistics—all the baths and all the dinners and all the caring for these children. The logistics can pulls us into that place where it feels like we’re doing nothing else but taking care of them; how could we possibly write with all these responsibilities?
But would our writing be better without our children?
I don’t think mine would.
I tried to write novels before I had my children, and, yeah, I was younger and less experienced, but children opened in me a depth of understanding and joy that I’ve never known. I learned how to really get into the shoes of another person, where before I just entertained the idea. I learned how to see the beauty of the world, where before it was clouded behind familiarity. I learned how to see from the heart and eyes of a child, and this has made my writing richer.
My children have made me brave. They have made me more compassionate. They have changed me in ways that are hard to explain. And the stories and writing I did before I had children are nothing compared to the kind I do now.
So don’t ever believe the lie that you could do more if you’d had more time to write yesterday instead of going to your son’s school play. Because the time we get to spend with our children is time that will translate into richer words and better stories and deeper understanding.
[Tweet “Our art is made richer by our children and our engagement with children.”]
We have an endless well of stories as parents, and no one else is going to tell it exactly like we would. The world needs our stories as much as it needs anyone’s.
So let’s tell them.
How to pull the stories from your life
1. Glean from journals.
I journal every day. Whether it’s a memory that has flared up, or whether it’s just a mundane writing about what we did today, I record it all. Journaling is so great for stories, because it’s authentic. We don’t even have to tell the stories as if they’re true; we can use our experience for our fiction stories, too. Just craft a story around an event, something that made an impact on you emotionally. Tell the truth and watch the world be changed by the way you tell it.
2. Sit down with children and have a storytelling war.
Kids are the greatest when it comes to telling stories. Our family has these storytelling cubes called Story Cubes that we often break out after dinner’s over and we sit around the table telling stories. Sometimes I jot down premises that I think would make great stories, and they aren’t always just from me. Sometimes they’re from my children. Sometimes I help them write their own stories.
Storytelling is a great practice for family life. Not only does it strengthen the bonds between parents and their children, but it challenges everyone to use their creativity and tell the most gripping tale, together.
3. Next time you have a late night or someone can’t sleep or a baby is demanding a lot of attention, write a story about it.
We can help heal ourselves and all our feelings—of frustration or fear or disappointment—by writing. We can share those writings we craft in the heat of an emotion, or we can keep them private and safe. It doesn’t matter. The very act of writing is a healing act.
4. Write a scene from a real-life parenting scene.
Mine would be a comedy. What would yours be?
Use your scene in a book. Some of the best characters we can craft are ones who have stories like ours, and we can use our experiences in these books to make them more realistic. When I think of Judy Blume’s Fudge books, the character Fudge was one of the most believable characters, because I had seen him in my kids a thousand times. Mischievous and lovable. Playful and matter-of-fact. Blume was clearly soaking up the children in her life (he was based on her son, Lawrence).
This week’s prompt:
Write an essay about the first thing that comes to mind when you hear the word snake.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
Writing, at the very heart of it, is a bearing witness to the events of a life, to the thoughts of a writer, to the struggles and setbacks and the hopes and dreams of humanity.
That’s why it’s important to tell the truth in our writing.
We look around our world today, and we can see all the places where truth-telling is not, in fact, celebrated. There is social media, where we curate a world that works best for us. There is ourselves, which we curate, too, so that others will like or admire us. There are blogs and stories and marketing and ads and testimonials that have only the faintest ring of truth.
I like to tell the truth. I use truth-telling in my fiction and nonfiction, because I believe that the world needs more brave baring. It’s not unusual that someone in my life will say, “Maybe you shouldn’t talk about that,” because they’re afraid of what it might share about me personally, but the only way to unlock the chains of the people in this world is to bear witness the best way we know how: telling our own stories.
People, especially in this world, want to know they’re not alone, and we can do that, as writers, by opening our lives and letting them see us. And because there are so few people doing it, because our world is a shiny, pretty world, we can be sure that people will be drawn to the truth we’re telling.
When I feel that resistance (should I share this story about when I yelled at my kids?) I always bring it back to this: Sometimes it’s just nice to know we’re not alone.
It’s nice to know that other people have the same kind of struggles and the same issues and the same darkness in their hearts, that we are not as alone as we thought.
Sure, we’re encouraged to put our best foot forward, show all the beset parts of life, because who wants to follow a person who’s tripping up along the road?
I want to tell the whole truth. I want people to see themselves in my writing, and that means that if I’m not telling the truth about life, they won’t be able to find that thread of sameness. They won’t connect. And because I don’t offer something that’s of inarguable value, like a 5-step checklist for self publishing, if they don’t connect, if the stories I tell don’t ring true, you can bet those readers won’t come back.
In the world of fiction, we tend to want to coddle our heroes. We want them to come out okay in the end, but sometimes they need a little rumbling and rough treatment to come out even better. If we’re not willing to let them go there, we’re not going to connect with our audience, because no one wants to read a story about a brother who just loves his special needs brother so much and everything is great and there’s nothing at all that could improve in his world.
In the same way, in our nonfiction world, no one wants to read about people who have it all put together and never make mistakes and love their kids every minute of every day, because that’s always in our faces, everywhere we turn.
[Tweet “People are desperate to find something real. Something authentic. Something honest. We must tell our stories.”]
It’s not easy to do this as writers. Because we have to put our hearts out there, and there is no assurance of what people will do with our hearts once they’re out in the great big world, but if we know who we are, we’re not going to be as affected as we might be if we’re still searching. Maybe we’ll rumble a little with shame, because we all have places in our stories where we have let shame lock us in chains, but when we do, we get to share about that, too, and we get to let people see us, and we get to engage in real and genuine community.
[Tweet “Readers see their lives mirrored in our own, because we’re all pretty much the same. it’s the gift of humanity.”]
It’s not easy to tell the truth. To open our robes. To let the light in. But the bravery of our vulnerability will help others be brave.
Vulnerability is a little like walking out on a plank and stepping over the side, not knowing what’s waiting beneath it, but when we fall and go all the way under, we learn that we can swim here, too, in the barest of places. And eventually it will get easier. Eventually we will be addicted—because there is a relief, too, to telling the truth. We don’t have to keep up a ruse. We don’t have to pretend. We don’t have to be someone outside of who we are. How wonderful.
I can be part of the healing of humanity when I bare myself. I can let people know about my feelings and how I overcame this or that or how I didn’t at all, and, instead, failed in the hardest way. How I’m stuck. How I’m sad. How I’m determined to make it back out again. And in my telling, people find that they can feel and think and do the same.
[Tweet “The world needs more truth tellers.”]
How to be a truth teller:
1. Separate your art from your self.
Of course there will be people who come out in flocks to tell you all the things that are wrong with you after you bare your truth. But if we are fully centered and confident in who we are, we will know that their words don’t have any staying power. Sure, they may knock us down for a minute, but they’re not going to keep us down. They will hurt. Of course they will. I have some of the thinnest skin around. When people write ugly comments about the truths I’ve bared, I feel the flush of shame wash over me every time. But if we’re willing to rumble with that story and turn it around in our heads, we are better for it. We are known, and we, most importantly, know ourselves.
2. Start small.
We can start with small truths. How hard it is to write. How we sometimes get frustrated at our children for making it that much harder. How the baby wouldn’t sleep last night and we started feeling like maybe this would never work, ever, because how can you even write a coherent sentence when you haven’t had a decent three hours of sleep? Ease yourself into telling your truth and tell the smaller, easier things first.
I once shared an essay about how I wished I was expecting a girl instead of another boy, and I got quit a bit of lash back in some private places, but it was my truth, and there were also thousands who wrote to tell me that they were so glad for my honesty, because it made them feel less alone. If we’re interested in changing the world and helping others along in their journey, we’re going to have to get real.
3. Journal it first.
Sometimes it helps to journal our truth first, before we even come close to sharing it. Sometimes we have to settle ourselves into our truth, because maybe it was a little unexpected, that way we felt. When I’ve been journaling, sometimes I can look back and see the ways my mind has changed, and that helps me get some distance from the situation and share it, because I know that my mindset has changed and the ugly words people may say to Me Today are not about Me Today at all. That truth is still important, because there are people who are in the place we were yesterday, and they will find value in our truth-telling.
4. Start a confessional.
Not publicly, of course (unless you’re really feeling brave). Write your confessions in a journal and tuck it away in a private place. Pick and choose from this, and see what you might be able to share with others. It’s true that some people don’t enjoy sharing the darkest secrets of their lives (and, also, some stories are not ours to tell), but even if we can’t share all the deepest and darkest secrets, we can try to share more than just what’s all peachy and golden in our lives. The world has enough of that. I just have to look through my Facebook feed to remember.
5. Never tell the truth for the wrong reasons.
These would be reasons like vengeance or anger or to try to prove a point. We have to be careful when we’re telling our truths that we don’t have some ulterior motive in mind. We should only choose to tell the truth so that others will find their own healing in words. I always try to tell my truths with the deepest love in my heart for all the people involved. The best kind of truth telling is truth spoken in great love.
Unfortunately, no one can tell you what or how much to share or not share. You have to make that decision yourself. Only share what you’re comfortable with. Only share what you can share in love. Only share the story that is yours to tell.
Leave the rest alone.
This week’s prompt:
Write a story about an embarrassing moment as if you are a character in a book.
by Rachel Toalson | This Writer Life
[Tweet “One of the worst enemies of a writer is the need to produce perfect art.”]
Of course we want to produce perfect art. It is, after all, what we’re sending out into the world, and we can’t just send something out that has glaring mistakes and smells of poor execution and looks like a 5-year-old got a wild hair. Of course we will try our hardest to make something beautiful and legendary. Of course we will do everything we possibly can to make sure the world notices and agrees, Yes. This is good.
We’ll spend days that turn into weeks that turn into years revising and touching up and fixing this one little thing right here because it’s still not quite right, still not quite perfect. But the reality is, if we want to move forward in our writing career, we are going to have to put a stopping point somewhere. We are eventually going to have to launch our writing out into the world.
Don’t get me wrong. Revision is a grand thing. I love revision, even though it takes me much longer to revise than it does to simply write. But if all we ever do is revise until that old story we felt so passionately about is lost under this newer, maybe-better-maybe-not story, we won’t be moving anywhere. We will stagnate. We will be writers with thousands of unfinished manuscripts we never had the courage to stamp “finished” on.
I know writers who have been sitting on manuscripts for years, because they’re still revising. They’re afraid of letting a public see something that they think is imperfect. They’re afraid of good enough.
The thing is, most to the authors who actually make a living at this writing thing launch projects that are good enough. And most of the writers I know (including myself) look back at their earlier work and can point to every single thing they would change to make it better now. We are always growing an evolving and improving as writers, which means that what we produce today is much different than what we will produce five years from now.
[Tweet “We have to let our works of art go. We have to let them out into the world. They are good enough.”]
There is something fantastically beautiful about looking back at earlier works and marking the evolution of our lives as writers, how much we have grown and changed and (hopefully) improved over the years. We’ll never be able to do that if we’re hiding our half-finished manuscripts in a file cabinet or a secret drawer or in a buried box out back. We have to write “The End.”
Here’s how I like to think of it: The world is not served by our hidden manuscripts. But it can be served by our good enough manuscripts. I know it’s scary. Sending a book out into the world is one of the most vulnerable things we can do, because sometimes it isn’t received well, and we aren’t sure what we’ll do if it’s not. And sometimes people don’t even care, so it just sits on shelves and gathers dust and no one ever picks it up to see if what’s inside might resonate with their deepest places. And sometimes we can see every single part where we would have changed a word or a sentence or a plot line mere days after publication, proof that we probably weren’t ready for this and shouldn’t have done it in the first place, until we had fixed that one thing.
The truth is, we’re always going to find something that needs fixing in our manuscripts. I’ve launched three books into the world now, and I don’t even want to go back and read them, not yet, because I know that what I’ll find will make me want to take them off the market, and I can’t do that as a writer. I have to be moving forward. The only way I can move forward is to publish.
I have to be okay with good enough.
This need to produce perfect art will keep us from writing faster, and I believe that the faster we write, the closer we will find ourselves to our true “voice” and not someone else’s we’re imitating (which makes it harder to write, too). We’re not overthinking things when we’re writing fast. And the faster we write, the less likely it is that our internal editor will hijack all our progress. It’s a forward-motion cycle that can also turn into a downward spiral, if we let that perfection-demanding voice in.
It’s important to produce good art, but it’s not so important that we don’t let ourselves just get that crappy draft out. Revision is a magical process, when all the random words become better-aligned words, a collection of paragraphs and pass that look like it could really be SOMETHING. Sometimes it doesn’t take much to make it pretty and finished. Sometimes it takes more work than we ever thought it would, because some stories are harder to tell than others. But the point is that even those stories that take a lot of work could demand a whole life of work, until we put a stopping point on what we’re doing.
If we’re overthinking, trying too hard to be perfect, all we’re really doing is killing the story. We’re trying too hard. Most of us intuitively know how stories work. Most of us know how to tell them in an effective way.
So we should trust ourselves to do it.
How to let go of the need to produce perfect art
1. Set yourself a deadline.
Sometimes it helps to know that the project has an ending date, that you must have all your writing done by the end of that deadline. I usually give myself a month or so to write the rough draft, depending on my projected word count. And then I give myself no more than three months to turn that rough into a final draft, because I know if I give myself more time than that, I’ll overthink it. My art isn’t that great when I’m overthinking.
Deadlines can work in many different ways. You can set an actual date—March 31, 2016, say. Or you can set a deadline like “no more than 30 days.” Whatever works for you.
2. Read a story critically.
Mary Karr, a memoirist, claims that what has helped her become a better writer is examining the writings of other memoirists. She keeps a reading journal where she copies passages and writes commentary about places she likes or techniques that were effective. When we train ourselves to start reading this way, we’ll also notice the places that stick out as don’t-like passages. The discipline of analyzing other people’s stories will help us more quickly analyze our own. Stories also help deepen the pool of story inspiration, giving us all kinds of resources to draw from.
3. Ban perfectionism.
I know it’s hard. I’m a closet perfectionist, and right before a book launch, I always hear the same voice telling me it’s not good enough. It’s not even good.
Perfectionism will drive us crazy. We have to loosen its grip on our throats, because it will not serve us in any way. It will only set up unrealistic expectations, and it will show us how to improve our work until the very end of time. We’ll never move forward if we’re constantly looking back.
4. Put down the red pen.
It sure is tempting to go back and look at a manuscript “one more time,” but if you find yourself sneaking back to them, give yourself a number of drafts. If it’s not fixed by this particular draft, then that’s it. That’s all you get. Limiting the number of tries we have helps us to just let it go.
5. Launch and move on.
Let your project do its work. Let it shine for a couple of days. And then get started on your next work, because it will most likely be better than the last.
