My generative writing classes are all about helping writers tell the stories they need to tell. Join the next session of Writing for Mothers on the Verge, which starts on 10/18 and meets Wednesday afternoons for an hour on Zoom. Past students have called the class “endlessly fascinating” and “addictive.” 😈
Something I frequently see in early drafts of any genre is a pattern of skipping the crux of the story. The main moment, the key narrative hinge of the action, doesn’t get dramatized, or else gets skipped over completely, stays unwritten and floats wordlessly in the ether of white space between sections, like a ghost haunting the manuscript. Often this missing scene is just the symptom — what’s actually happening is that the writer is writing around something that hurts.
Someone in workshop will say, “Something about this feels a little flat,” or even more devastatingly, “It’s a nice piece of writing.”
Nice? Who wants to read something that’s “nice”? AI can spit out something “nice.” (Sorry, I should have prefaced that with a content warning.) I don’t know about you, but I read to be surprised, to see things in a new way, to encounter some insight that will make my brain twinkle.
But it’s tempting to write something nice, of course it is. Especially for women, I think, and especially especially for mothers. (Sometimes it feels like the same debate has been pointlessly circling the internet since its inception, and it goes something like: moms saying hey this feels complicated, and people responding oh could you please shut up, and so on ad infinitum.)
Anyway. A nice essay won’t bother anyone. Hard to totally humiliate yourself in a nice short story (although… challenge accepted).
Often, however, we’re writing because we want to dig into the truth of an experience, or tell a story that’s bubbling beneath the surface of everyday life. In these cases, we’re not looking for nice. We’re looking for True. And the tricky thing is, to write this way you often have to be willing to take a risk. You might make yourself look stupid, or even bad. Which is admittedly very unpleasant.
Eventually, inevitably, the writer of the nice piece will say, “I can’t figure out why I’m stuck.”
I know why they’re stuck. They’re stuck because they won’t — or can’t — really go there. They are unwilling to head into the meat of the story. To confront what the story is really, really about.
What I don’t know is how to get them to do this, or if it will be, for them, a worthwhile endeavor.
Because writing around the hurt makes good sense, actually. We don’t like to awaken old injuries. In memoir or personal essay, for one thing, it’s likely that any scene the piece requires is going to involve another person, and sometimes we don’t feel comfortable writing about other people for various reasons, some of which are quite valid. If a writer is writing about trauma, it might be an actively bad idea to order them, in a casual evening writing workshop, to march headfirst once more into the breach. They have to be psychologically ready for what they might find there.
In fiction I think there’s a similarly self-protective reflex, though the stakes are sometimes a touch lower for the writer. Here, the issue is sometimes more like a faltering of nerve. It’s hard to write the most important scene in a story or novel because what if it goes poorly? What if you cannot, actually, write it?! Isn’t it better to let the reader imagine it how they want it, so that you aren’t at risk of fucking it up? (No. But I do get it.)
I’ve been on a real Annie Ernaux kick, and I’m currently reading A Girl’s Story, in which she writes about the summer when she was 18 and looking for love, and found something only very elliptically related to it. She writes the kind of raw memoir that’s often just a few edits away from her own original journals, and I can’t get enough of them. Here’s a passage from A Girl’s Story, about the process of writing the book itself, some 40+ years after the events she was writing about:
“No other writing project seems to me as—I wouldn’t say luminous, or new, and certainly not joyful, but vital: it allows me to rise above time. The thought of ‘just enjoying life’ is unbearable. Every moment lived without a writing project resembles the last.”
Sis is intense and I am here for it. “The thought of ‘just enjoying life’ is unbearable”?? This is my kind of person. Wow, could we have fun meeting up for a drink and hating fun together! But I digress.
What strikes me while reading A Girl’s Story is how utterly un-vain the writing is. Skeptics of the form might wonder at this, but I really think that when it’s done right, which is to say fearlessly, memoir involves so much humility. Ernaux writes about herself, yes. But I don’t think there’s anything inherently egotistic about writing about your own life. In fact, to write about your own life, you have to be willing to get naked with your readers, so to speak, which is to say: you have to be honest. And in so much of our lives, the way we present ourselves to others, whether that’s on social media or on a date or in the family Christmas letter if anyone still does those, is not very honest.
Of course, it’s not enough just to be honest. There’s a contract implicit in any literary work: readers give you their time and attention, and you make it worth their while with an interesting story, artful writing, some insights they can take back to their own lives. Ernaux writes in the first part of A Girl’s Story about some earlier failed attempts at making sense of this story, about how it took her many tries over the years to figure out how to shape it into a book that makes sense and says what she wants it to say.
So yes, to write about your life — whether you’re an Ernaux-type pruning your own journals into book-shape, or whether you’re creating fictional character inhabited by the Truths you know about Life if not the truths of your everyday life — you have to think about your readers. But you also really have to go there. Write the scene, even if it seems challenging.
What’s the story you don’t tell, the truth you gloss over, because it’s too embarrassing/unpleasant/weird? What would write if you weren’t afraid of anything? Be honest. Say the real thing.
Once you start writing this way, I can’t guarantee it’ll be fun, or easy, or nice. But I don’t think you’ll find yourself getting stuck.
Would you like me to answer your question in my next newsletter? Ask me about, well, whatever really, but I guess I was thinking it might be about some writing you’re getting stuck on, or a block you’re trying to work through. But it can be anything about writing, really. Email me at unstickyourwriting @ gmail.com
Do you have a manuscript that needs an edit, or a writing project that’s stuck? I’m currently taking on new coaching clients and book-length projects for January. I also review query letters, book proposals, pitches, and submission packages. Put some time on my calendar for a free 15-minute call.
LOVE Annie Ernaux. I often re-read her work when I'm at loose ends
This really dislodged something for me, and I'm really, really grateful for you putting it into words! I've been wondering lately why there's so much discomfort while writing -- surely I must be doing something wrong?
But you're really right about this: honesty and truth are really difficult to achieve even in writing (art in general, really). And yet... all of us consumers of art really flock to this kind of authenticity, don't we? We love it when someone *else* is vulnerable.
Definitely a lot of food for thought. Thank you for writing this piece again!