What would you write if you were really honest with yourself?
Your reader doesn't know you. That's why you have to.
![](https://substackcdn.com/image/fetch/w_1456,c_limit,f_auto,q_auto:good,fl_progressive:steep/https%3A%2F%2Fsubstack-post-media.s3.amazonaws.com%2Fpublic%2Fimages%2F22de37f4-126f-4b65-89f0-2f9389f90651_3024x4032.jpeg)
☀️ There’s still time to register for the Summer Camp for Writers, a 3-week experience (July 13 - August 4, a BARGAIN at $450) full of generative classes, panels, accountability writing groups, and open-mic events. All events virtual and recorded in case you get stuck at the beach. Register at WritingCo-Lab.com. ☀️
Once I was asked to write an essay about being lonely. I immediately knew just what I would write about: the summer I was 20, when I backpacked around Europe by myself. I’d always meant to write about this particular adventure! I embarked on the writing project with the unearned confidence of a college kid sweating into the money belt Rick Steves told her to buy.
But as I wrote, things went awry. The essay kept wandering, forgetting to be about loneliness. Annoying! I pored over my travel journal and found one or two instances when I felt a little lonely, but mostly tales of the people I met on the road. I tried, draft after draft, to wrench the thing into shape.
Eventually, I realized that I couldn’t write an essay about being lonely on that trip because I hadn’t been lonely. I had in fact felt ecstatically connected, and had almost never actually been alone. It wasn’t the essay that was wrong, it was me. (I ended up publishing the essay that emerged in a travel magazine, and starting fresh for the loneliness essay.)
The problem was that I had been (inadvertently) dishonest about the truth of the experience. This was why I kept getting stuck when I tried to write about it.
Trying to write the wrong story did offer me some insights. However I had framed that backpacking trip in my head previously (so lonely and yet so brave!), when I really really thought about it, I had been buffered by a network of hostels, crowd-sourced travel tips, and new friends. In fact, the summer had been largely about meeting new people and reevaluating my existing relationships. One whole city was consumed by a burning crush on a girl who seemed more solidly straight than I knew was possible. That trip had also coincided with a big breakup from my long-time-boyfriend. These things were uncomfortable to think about, and so I’d tended to elide them from my memories of the summer.
Like so many first-draft essayists, I simply hadn’t allowed myself to do the necessary amount of reflection needed to be able be truthful on the page. Confront the essence of myself? Ehhh couldn’t I just make jokes about getting lost on the Eurail?
I’m willing to bet that if you’ve ever found yourself stuck in the process of drafting a piece of writing about something that happened to you, self-knowledge is a big part of what’s gumming up the works.
Often, we’re writing about something because we haven’t totally figured out what it meant, or why we can’t stop thinking about it. Writing early drafts of this kind of work is a process of discovery. You find out what the experience meant by how it shows up on the page. The key is, you have to pay attention to how it shows up on the page, even if — especially if! — it’s not behaving the way you want it to. In the words of E.M. Forster (or somebody?), “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?”
It’s taken me a while to see this pattern in my own work and that of my clients and students, but it’s one of those things that once you see it, you can’t unsee it: so often, someone will be trying to write one story (often in memoir/personal narrative, but it happens in fiction, too), and note, somewhat mystified, that another story keeps taking over.
No, I swear I’m not writing about my addict neighbor, I don’t even care about her, so I don’t know why she keeps showing up in what is supposed to be my essay about gardening at my new house!
Or — This is the story of how I’ve totally healed from that relationship with Tom, so it’s weird that it’s almost entirely about Tom and all the shitty things he did to me god what a dick!
Like me banging my head against my laptop wondering why my travel essay seemed to believe that my travel experience hadn’t been about what I had decided it was about.
The truth is that there’s something about writing that is a little eerie sometimes. Sometimes you don’t know a thing until you write it. And sometimes you think you’re telling one story but the story keeps being a different story. That’s the truth revealing itself. Yes, even when it’s an Inconvenient Truth™.
I think a lot of the time this happens when the author (like me with my travel essay) hasn’t done enough reflecting, or isn’t willing or able to look at themself, or the situation, clearly. This is usually what’s happening, by the way, when your early readers think a piece is about something totally different than you meant it to be. The truth shows itself eventually — the tell is often a wobble in tone, an overly strident voice, or passages of exposition in which the narrator is working really hard to convince us of their version of the story.
In the end, you have to remember that if you’re wanting to publish, that means you’re expecting a total stranger to spend their time and energy on reading your work. Why is the reader interested in what a dick Tom was? They’re probably not. Why is the reader interested in how your post-Tom-breakup healing process is more circuitous than you expected? Ah, because there’s some movement there, and some truth about the human condition, and maybe even something they can relate to — the pain, the confusion, the frustration, whatever it is.
Sometimes you’re not ready to write about something with utter self-reflective honesty, and that’s totally fine. Put that half-baked draft away and come back to it when you are ready. No need to give yourself a stress injury. But when you are ready, dive back in. Because while it can be hard psychological work to be honest with ourselves, it’s worth it in the end. It’ll make the writing stronger, and more worth a reader’s time. Oh yeah and it will help you to live honestly and fully which, I don’t know, seems like a pretty good goal.
I only have space left in my calendar for ~four~ full manuscript consults this year. My specialties are literary and upmarket/commercial novels and memoirs. My clients have gone on to sign with agents and publish with major publishing houses.
Do you have a book-length manuscript you need a developmental read or line edit of? Let’s see if we’d be a good fit: You can put some time on my calendar for a free 15-minute phone chat or write to me here.
Hi Amy! I joined substack yesterday and was happy to encounter one of your notes on my feed. I was a student in one of your writing workshops last spring in 2023. I wanted to express my deep gratitude for the amazing and memorable experience you led. I grew so much from your gentle, supportive and encouraging teaching style, which is evident all over this article. So many things you taught in that workshop have stuck with me, for example, "finding" the real story underneath events, like you write about here, and also how the best endings feel like surprise insights. Thank you so much once again, and I hope you're doing well :) (I tried to leave a comment on one of your notes, but I don't think it posted... if it did post, sorry for the repeat message, lol).
This is my main job as a teacher. What’s lurking underneath this draft? The essay underneath the essay.