Last week I touched on what I consider to be one of the third rails of creative writing. Non-writers, pundits, and scolds love wading in on this one, but the thoughtful writer approaches the topic with circumspection, in the manner of a politician asked about entitlement spending.

Is it ok to write about people who are not like you?

I’ve considered posting about this topic before, but have demurred. This argument tends to trigger ugly emotions on both sides, which I’d rather not be drawn into. I love intelligent arguments and debate, but this is the internet, and neither the time nor the place.

On the other hand, no one ever got rich being timid and if D-list rapper Macklemore can dance on stage in a fake scraggly beard and six-inch bulbous prosthetic nose while giving the Heil Hitler salute and still be considered a voice of moral clarity, I can survive giving an opinion on writing.

Writing the other

You’ll often see the topic phrased as “writing the other,” accompanied by a generous amount of pearl-clutching. You can almost see the italics and exclamation points appear over writers’ heads when they speak of The Other! Because this advice about “writing the other” is usually directed at the white, the hetero, the healthy, and the American, it by default frames the brown, the black, the gay, the disabled, and anyone outside the United States as “other.”

First of all, while I can’t speak for everyone, I do not accept my role as an other. I am not an exotic creature you have no hope of understanding. We may be different in many ways, but I hope those traits are far outnumbered by what we have in common. I hope that we can recognize that humans of all kinds have hopes, dreams, fears, beliefs, observations, and knowledge, even if they vary from person to person. We are not as different as some want us to believe.

Second, literally everyone on the planet – and every character you will write outside of your memoir – is an other. Louder for the back row: Everyone is other than you. You will never be born or grow up anywhere other than where you did. You will never know what it feels like to be another person. You cannot hear their thoughts, see through their eyes, or skinwalk in their body. You can only observe and intuit.

Those observations sound contradictory but are simultaneously true. The whole of humanity is a massive Venn diagram with a large central overlapping color surrounded by eight billion slivers.

Every character you write is an other and every one requires care, thoughtfulness, creativity, agency, soul, and heart, regardless of what they look like or where they were born. Generally, writers stick to what we know, so our characters often resemble ourselves but with differences and exaggerations. We play at the margins. Sometimes, though, you may be intrigued by a character who is very much not like you, someone in whom you recognize hopes and challenges and fears, but whose outer life is far removed from your own, by race, geography, wealth, or ability.

You can write about those characters. Their creation requires more expertise than characters whose lives resemble your own, but the basic skills are the same. You simply need to ramp up accordingly.

Many people will try to scare you away from this, and some will outright insist you cannot do it. They will tell you the work is too hard and that you are inherently incapable of getting it right. They will say your work takes opportunities from others and that your story is “not your story.” They will try to make you feel guilty for even thinking about it.

This is not writing advice. This is control. This is someone saying “I don’t want you do to this” or “I choose not to, and therefore you also cannot.”

I do not accept the premise of “not your story.” If the idea is in your head and you set aside your personal time and you write it down on paper or type it somewhere and you did not plagiarize, it is your story. It is not someone else’s story. Writing your story will never stop someone else from writing their story. In fact, there are almost no circumstances where this hypothetical other writer will ever hear about you or your story. As I often remind myself when I ponder the pitfalls of fame: You should be so lucky.

I’m reminded here of a funny story. It wasn’t intended as a funny story, but I am a great fan of irony.

A number of years ago on a writing podcast, the hosts and a guest discussed this concept of “writing the other.” I don’t recall the exact conversation, but at the end of the episode, there was a round-robin question to the effect of should-you or shouldn’t-you.

Falling into Column A, several of the hosts equivocated, saying you can but it’s very difficult to do well, so maybe you shouldn’t. The fourth host, a white American, chose Column B. She was adamant that writers (presumably white writers) should never try to write stories about people from other cultures, under any circumstances. I don’t remember if she used the exact word “impossible” but that was her tone.

Finally, they turned to the guest, a Chinese-born writer and the only non-white and non-American writer on the panel that week. His reply?

“I don’t care. People can write about whatever they want.”

Be wary of people who are perpetually offended on behalf of others. They are always offended  and almost always wrong. Often, the people we are told care about these things don’t care at all. They are too busy to worry about what you are doing.

But, as always, there is another side of the coin.

The social contract

I’ve made my stance clear many times: write whatever you want. Because my intent is to be encouraging, I tend not to examine the downside of creativity. And there are several: burnout, money issues, tedium, onerous time commitments, missed gatherings, loneliness, failure. There is also the social contract, which is:

When you engage in any kind of creative work and share it with others, you invite reactions. You control the work, you control whether or not to share it, but you can’t control the reactions. So, you can write whatever you want, but if you do a bad job, we can criticize it.

That’s it. That’s the agreement. Many people want to amend the first clause while retaining the second, but we don’t do that here. But, we also cannot avoid the second clause when we choose to go public.

No one can tell you what to think or how to spend your creative time. Many will try but they can only succeed if you let them. The choice is entirely yours. But if you do a poor job, you will be rightly criticized. This is true of any writing, but it is especially true in the modern world if you write poorly about people who are not like you, especially if you are published somewhere noteworthy or get a book contract. They really hate when that happens.

The challenges of writing

I wrote last week that the challenges of writing can all be solved with the good habits of writing. If you have an idea for a story about people who are different from you or a culture at a far remove from your own, it is your job to get it right. If you are worried that you won’t get it right, and that scares you, make a commitment to do the work. Read widely, ask for feedback, ask for help, and revise and rewrite, until you do get it right.

There are many places where you can find advice on research, interviews, and field trips, from broad principles on writing about different cultures to insights on specific people, places, and lives. It’s easier to find negative advice, but there is a lot of good as well.

As Mr. Rogers said: “Look for the helpers.”

I encourage you to ask the gut-check question: Are you willing to do the work? Are you willing to research, read, ask for feedback, listen to advice? Are you willing to write and edit and rewrite and edit again and rewrite some more?

I wish more writers asked these questions about every character and every story, but as we know, there are millions of people out there whose research begins and ends with a few TV programs. Don’t be like them, especially if you want to write a story about people or a culture you aren’t familiar with.

Full disclosure

The above may prompt the question of how I conduct myself in my own writing. That’s fair.

I live by the gut check questions.

For example, I spend a lot of time in Baltimore, Maryland, and if you know one thing about the city, it’s our crime rate. The annual murder rate per 100,000 has fallen by about two-thirds over the past few years and it’s still five times the national average. We’re a killing folk. And because I’m a writer and writers are scavengers, sometimes those killings—among other crimes—spark my imagination. An unusual setting, a tragic coincidence, a complicated relationship…any of these might trigger the itch.

“That would make a great story…”

But is it my story? If I write it, it is.

Am I willing to do the work? So far, the answer has been No. It’s hard for me to turn down a good story idea, but if I’m not willing to do the work, the answer has to be no.

Are gritty urban crime or mystery stories my forte? No. I love them, but I’ve never written any. It’s not a genre I’m passionate about.

Do I know anything about living in or being raised in a bad part of Baltimore? Do I know anything about the way people here live, talk, interact, dream, fight, survive? Not the slightest. I could write about the people and places of my childhood or where I live now, and will one day, but somewhere like West Baltimore? No.

Do I have the time and desire to visit those places, talk to people, observe the neighborhoods, interview community leaders? Not a strong desire, no. I’m capable, but not strongly motivated. I have plenty of stories I want to write, on subjects I’m passionate about researching, so pursuing a story like this would require setting aside my current projects to take a chance on a story in a genre I don’t normally write in. Maybe someday, but not now.

Do I have anything interesting to say or am I just intrigued by an idea? Your process will vary, but this is my Final Boss gut check. If I don’t have anything to say – a belief, an observation, a lesson learned – then I will never feel strongly enough about a story to do the work necessary to make it a good one. I might love to read that story, written by someone who is passionate and does have something to say, but I don’t want to write it.

During my Write with Me series, I wrote that your best ideas will come from somewhere inside you, and that’s as good a place as any to look for answers about whether you should or should not write about people who are not like you. Do you – as the writer – bring anything to the story or are you just a voyeur? Do your beliefs, observations, and opinions overlap with your subject? Do you feel a connection or some understanding, but need help with the details? The more effort you put into your passions, the easier it will become for you to make this gut check. You’ll know it when you feel it.

Again, I wish writers asked this question about every story they write, but it’s especially important here.

Bonus: What is on my research plate? The Troubles in Northern Ireland, ancient pagan art and religion, pre-industrial era confidence men and snake oil salesmen, small towns in Depression-era Arkansas, Pentecostalism in mid-century Appalachia. I’m ancestrally Irish and currently Appalachia adjacent, but other than that I’m not part of any of those places or cultures. However, my interest is there. I’m not writing dissertations, but I want to get it right. I’ll have help along the way and people who’ll tell me if I’ve taken the lazy route.

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A few weeks ago in my Write With Me series, I warned that there will always be people who want to tell you what you can and cannot do in your writing.

The internet has empowered millions of people to say, write, and publish whatever they want without gatekeepers, but also encouraged millions more who want to be the gatekeeper. These people have always been with us, though the faces have changed over the years. The people with publishing power used to control the levers and now the people who feel powerless want to assert their own kind of control.

This advice can be well-intentioned. I will concede that much. Sometimes it is not. It is frequently couched in presumptive language:

“You don’t want to…”

“You shouldn’t…”

“You wouldn’t want to…”

The speaker presents their advice as a factual statement about what you want, rather than a statement of their opinion about what they think you should want. The speaker also ducks responsibility for their opinions by framing them as consensus thought, with you on the outside.

You don’t want to be on the outside, do you? You’re one of us, aren’t you? You want to be on the inside, with the good people, where we don’t do those things, which coincidentally are things I personally don’t like.

I published that post just a few weeks ago and, as if I’d summoned it from the ether, a perfect example soon appeared online. This article on Writer’s Digest hides behind the gay community to tell you what you can’t do, which is a pretty safe position because no one wants to piss off the gays. As a gay guy and a writer, I feel qualified to weigh in.

As you might suspect, I have a contrary opinion.

The writer identifies a story trope that you don’t want to use because you wouldn’t want to be a bad writer, so I’m already in a mood. The trope? Gay/lesbian people being disproportionately more likely to be killed off in fiction, with their deaths seen as punishment for their sexuality or identity, rather than for story reasons.

This used to happen, and quite regularly. In the 1950s and 60s, popular novels with gay or lesbian characters almost always ended with suicide or a heterosexual conversion or one of each. Books like The Price of Salt, The City and the Pillar, and Giovanni’s Room were extreme outliers, and even Baldwin’s book concludes with a death. Morally, the ending of The City and the Pillar isn’t much better, but (spoiler) at least the gay protagonist doesn’t kill himself.

Anecdotally, we have heard that publishers refused to take books with gay/lesbian characters or insisted that their endings be altered to include radical change or punishment for the characters, usually death. Gay and lesbian characters literally (literarily?) were not allowed to live.

That was pretty messed up. That was also 70 years ago. As tropes go, the dead queer is about as modern as Zeus in a box on a winch.

Now I don’t read every book that’s published, but between my online gay and writing communities, I think I’d have heard if this were still a problem. The gays and the writers – not to mention the readers – aren’t known for being quiet about their complaints.

In fact, the article itself offers only two terribly outdated examples of the dead-gay/lesbian trope: Goldfinger, the James Bond novel (1959) and film (1964), in which a lesbian who falls in love with Pussy Galore is killed; and an episode of the sitcom All in the Family in which the drag queen character Beverly LaSalle is killed in a gay bashing (1977).

If your best examples of a trope occurred 50-60 years ago, it’s safe to say it’s no longer a trope. Worse – or better, actually, for my argument – they aren’t even good examples. Very few women of that era lived to see the end of a James Bond movie, so if you’re mad about a dead lesbian, you can chalk that up to the original series’ sexism and misogyny. The homophobia is practically an afterthought. In that light, you might even view the on-screen portrayal of a lesbian, even a doomed one, as quite egalitarian for 1964.

That’s a joke, but it’s not untrue. And if you ask me, killing off a fictional lesbian is not as offensive as naming a female character Pussy. But alas, RuPaul has inured the modern audience to misogynistic name puns, so that detail passed without remark.

The example of Beverly LaSalle even more badly undercuts the article’s own assertion. Beverly was portrayed with great empathy and was considerably fleshed out for a character that appeared only a few times over the course of several years. The character’s death was shocking, as it was intended to be. At no point did the writing suggest Beverly deserved what happens. It was, however, something that did happen in 1970s America and with horrifying frequency. The whole point of the episode was unfairness and bigotry. It took away someone viewers had grown to love and accept, and shoved their faces in the kind of violence people like Beverly – and me – had grown to expect, and it shook the core cast of characters, even the bigot.

Beverly’s death was intended to grab the audience and make them think. It was the polar opposite of the dead-gay trope. If anything, it took the trope and throttled it.

The article goes on to advise that you create fully developed characters with a reason to exist in your story and, if you have to kill them off, you do so with the right build-up, for a good story reason, not simply because you think they’re icky.

Which is what you should be doing for all your characters, not just the gay ones.

I understand it can be challenging to write about someone who is not like you. I approach it with caution myself. But scolding and avoiding are not the way to go. Every challenge you face in writing can be resolved with the good habits of writing.

Treat your characters like human beings. Avoid clichés. Don’t always send your story in the easy or obvious direction. Read voraciously. Ask for feedback. Ask for help. Do your homework. Don’t listen to anyone who tries to tell you what you can and cannot write, especially if their examples of bad writing are 50 years out of date.

After all that, if you still want to kill off a non-straight character of whatever kind, I give you my blessing. If anyone complains, tell them your gay writer friend said it was ok.

Just between us, I’ve known a lot of gay guys. Some of them would not be missed.

I have stories, believe me.

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It’s not too late to register for Manor Mill’s 2026 Writers Retreat on November 12 – 15 at the Oldfields School in Glencoe, MD. On Saturday, November 14, the retreat will welcome Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling historical fiction author, for a keynote address.

Presenters this year include: Constance Hays Matsumoto (Write Your Book With Purpose); Michelle Jabès Corpora (AMA on publishing); Marian Crotty (What Happens Next: Building Narrative Suspense); Candice Lola (Haunted Inheritance: How to Write Horror While Integrating Folklore); Matt Hohner (Good Morning, Good Night: The Aubade and the Nocturne); and more!

Building on two successful one-day programs in 2024 and 2025, the retreat expands this year to encompass two full days of networking and learning opportunities, and an option for guests to stay overnight to extend the event to four days.

The full Thursday–Sunday residential experience includes meals and special evening activities. Single day and Friday-Saturday non-residential tickets are also available. Overnight guests will enjoy lodging, all meals, all day sessions, all evening programs, and additional special activities from Thursday through Sunday. Day pass guests will enjoy all day sessions & lunch and can add on evening sessions and grab dinner on their own.

Past years have attracted both new and experienced writers working in all genres and forms. Over the course of the weekend, you’ll explore a rich range of topics: craft and technique, querying and submissions, marketing, promotion, and much more.

For event location, itinerary, and reservations, click here!

Manor Mill is a restored pre-revolutionary grist mill that houses a fine arts gallery, classes, a live music venue, ceramics studio and workshops, just over the hill from the Monkton Hotel in Baltimore County, MD.

Founded in 1867, Oldfields School is an independent all-girls day and boarding school serving grades 9 through 12. Its mission is to embrace each student’s authentic self, educate through collaboration, empower the individual voice, and inspire confidence and continual growth, leading to a life of purpose.

I hope you found this series helpful, or perhaps interesting. It helped me, so at least I’ve satisfied my audience of one. Each week, examining the myriad facets of what I know made me feel more connected to my writing and more committed to putting as much of myself as needed into every story, to the best of my abilities. Each time I’ve concluded a post, I’ve walked away with something to consider for my work in progress.

Am I investing my writing with my observations, beliefs, and opinions, or am I walking through the story without leaving footprints?

Am I writing about what truly interests me? Am I being specific? Does my writing have my personality? Am I writing bravely or am I holding back?

Would readers feel they know me, if all they knew was my writing?

Consider the writers we love. I’ve named a few before: Kurt Vonnegut, Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison, Octavia Butler, James Baldwin. Your list may include Anne Rice, Chuck Tingle, Truman Capote, or Anne Tyler.

We don’t merely love these writers; we feel we know them. I can hear Kurt Vonnegut sharing avuncular advice on writing and life. I’ve imagined conversations with Margaret Atwood over tea and with James Baldwin over dinner at a French restaurant, before we retire to his apartment to listen to his record albums. I bet a lot of writers have similar fantasy conversations with the writers they love.

Heady company, I know, but all writers emulate, so you may as well choose the best. I may never write nearly as well as any of them, but if you read any of my work, I’d like you to know me.

I wish I had known this when I was a young writer, but I also suspect I would not have been ready for the lesson. Revealing too much of myself would have felt dangerous. I was also in the midst of rejecting my self – or reinventing myself, to put it more kindly for my younger version. He was trying. I was not inauthentic, but I was guarded.

And I had some heavy armor. It takes some chutzpah to emotionally dissociate from a repressive family and religious community and come out as something anathema. I had the wherewithal to defend one or two areas of my life, but I couldn’t take fire from all sides. I walled off a few areas. It would be a long time before I integrated the nerd stuff or – god forbid – the politically incorrect. I didn’t want the people who loved the new me to stop doing so.

But I wish better for you.

The people who love you won’t stop loving you because of your writing, so I hope you’ll be bold. I hope you write what you want, authentically, without market testing or focus groups, because someone in the world needs to hear what you have to say.

Your voice won’t develop in one day or one story. But when your writing begins with something inside you – a question, a belief, an observation, or even a joke – you will begin to emerge on the page, no matter your genre or topic. When you have something to say to your reader, you will approach your work with intention. You will write with more clarity and focus. You will choose your words carefully so that you don’t miscommunicate. You will tell your story in a way that guides the reader to the conclusion you want them to reach. You will master your craft. I also believe that writing with purpose is more motivating. When you know what you want to say, when your creative self-expression is on fire, you will find your way to your chair.

So, write without filters. Write about your weird hobbies and interests. Write what you feel. Write what you’ve witnessed. Write what you’ve done and what’s been done to you. Write what makes you angry and what makes you laugh. Tell us what you’ve learned and what you believe.

Write what you know.

Enjoy this blog?

Subscribing is always free, but you can help me build my library!

I’ve put together a wish list of books on writing, history, research, and other subjects that feed my writing. If you’d like to support my work, pick one off the list and help me add another book to the shelf.

Send me a book!

You can also support the blog by reposting or forwarding this post to someone who might like it. I’d love to meet them!

What could a kid raised on television, root vegetables, and neglect possibly have to write in his journal? You’d be surprised.

It’s a bit scary, bordering on horrifying, how much writing material we can find in our childhood, when we know how to look for it. In only a few posts in this series, I wrote about an emotionally-confined, secret-keeping family; a repressive religion; feelings of being othered and isolated; broken friendships; domestic violence; loyalty tests; community silence, and inter-family, inter-generational grudges, among other topics. And that’s just the early years!

Ok, maybe you had a happy family <eyeroll emoji> but your family undoubtedly experienced stress, sadness, and the unexpected. You also had neighbors and people at church and extended family and kids at school and teachers, and you might have had people you knew through activities like sports, music, scouting, or 4H. Certainly their lives were not perfect, even if you only glimpsed them in part.

No one escapes childhood unscathed. You had fears and disappointments, unrequited crushes, embarrassments, and humiliations. You had questions you couldn’t answer until you reached adulthood, if then.

If you can find that many experiences and emotions in the compact space and time of your childhood, imagine what’s waiting in your adult memories. Consider what’s happening around you, right now. If you want to write, you don’t need high-octane premises. You need you.

It’s my turn again, the last one for now. In Monday’s post, I already shared two stories from middle school (approximately ages 12 to 13), one an unjust and humbling experience, the other unjust and traumatic, both of which happened to other people.

I also could have written about being in the middle school gymnasium in sex-segregated gym class for team basketball, the boys in yellow t-shirts and maroon shorts, and sneakers and tube socks that revealed both social class and mobility. Sears-brand Keds and socks with stripes the color of the wrong football team meant at minimum some teasing and at worst a trip down a few rungs of the social ladder. I couldn’t do anything about my sneakers, but even knowing nothing about football, I could confirm the acceptability of my socks before wearing them. No match to any team at all, preferably single color stripes, blue or black, was ideal. Some two-color combinations were acceptable, and orange and teal were stuffed in the back of my dresser until I outgrew them, because everyone knew the Miami Dolphins sucked.

Don’t blame me. I didn’t make the rules.

I remember a kid who lived around the way in my community, a place that decades later is still too sparsely populated to be called a town. Until I was about 7 or 8, our houses didn’t even have numbers, though our mailboxes did. Our address was Mail Route 2 Box 272.

Hank was a redneck kid with a thick southern accent whose participation in gym class could be described as good-naturedly abstinent. He neither raised a fuss about joining in on activities nor actively engaged in them. About half the time, he dressed in street clothes. I believe if Hank changed into his gym uniform and touched grass, the coaches considered it a victory.

We were inside, playing team basketball, so this would have been sometime between November and February. Astoundingly, Hank was dressed for gym. A group of us were waiting on the bleachers as other teams played their round. Hank wasn’t a particularly talkative guy, but wasn’t unfriendly, but that day he sat quietly on the lowest bleacher, knees spread, arms on his thighs, head dunked. As Hank was a conscientious objector to physical activity, this did not seem unusual, until one of my friends nudged me and directed my attention his way. The group quieted and above the din of dribbling and squeaking sneaker soles, Hank mumbled, “My hands are blue. My hands are blue,” over and over, as he slowly rotated his hands.

He didn’t respond when we called him name or shook his shoulder. We formed a protective ring around him, because we knew this was something adults should not witness. In retrospect, I see this was an essentially meaningless gesture, because they never noticed what we needed them to, not even a 13 year old with his head bobbing, mumbling nonsense, entirely out of his gourd.

Despite our concern, we did not ask for help. We hastily concluded Hank was “on something” and we were pretty sure it was “pills.” Pills were a big deal then. Every television drama and a few sitcoms aired episodes about people in trouble because of pills, taking them or selling them. There was no discussion, only immediate silent concurrence that we had to hide this. If Hank were caught with pills, he would get in trouble, suspended or possibly expelled. It did not occur to us that he might be on something besides pills, or in the middle of a very bad trip or possibly an overdose. TV had not yet prepared us for that. Somehow we made it through gym class without having to nudge Hank through a basketball game, though frankly, he could have sat out the whole hour and none of the teachers would have remarked on it. By the time we headed back to the locker room, his head had cleared enough for him to function, but he was still pretty stoned.

I could also have written about my pseudo-girlfriend in sixth grade. Girlfriend because I liked her a lot, and because the proximity of our surnames in the alphabet meant we sat together in a bunch of classes, and we did the same after school activities, so I saw her all the time. Pseudo because I was socially much younger than my twelve years, so the boyfriend/girlfriend thing was a non-factor, and she wasn’t a member of our church, so even being friends was a dicey choice, and I’m pretty sure she would have laughed at me if I asked.

Terry was short, feisty, cute, and Italian. She took no shit, gave good advice on getting out of trouble (“Lie, dummy!”), and was the only person who teased me with affection. We talked about our families and other kids and teachers we hated and if she laughed at my foibles and embarrassments, she did so in a way that made them easier to bear, not worse. She might have made me blush, but she never made me feel ashamed. More than anyone, she helped me past the social ineptness that hindered the middle school years I was woefully unprepared for. I was two years ahead of my grade academically and two years behind socially, and she did her best to help me catch up. There was only so much she could do, but whatever agility I gained was primarily due to her.

By seventh and eighth grade, we didn’t have as many classes together and Terry mostly replaced after school activities with a social life. That social life involved her older sister and her friends, high school guys and I suspect older than high school guys, who had their own cars and access to alcohol and drugs. Terry once showed me the bottles of pills she kept in her purse. Pills again. Whatever they were, they got her through the school day, and I never heard that she hallucinated or crashed, so she must have had a better handle on what she took than Hank. I do remember times she seemed a bit spaced out, but that also could have been due to a hangover or lack of sleep.

Terry continued educating me, once regaling me with a hilarious-to-her story about skull babies, pausing briefly at my blank stare to explain in whispered tones that a skull baby was a girl who gave head. I might have been dumb, but I was smart enough to pretend I knew what that meant.

I was also smart enough not to question her about drinking, pill-popping, and hanging out with high school and older than high school guys. Even if I wasn’t sure what head was, I could guess that sex was happening, now or in the very near future. Looking back with an adult’s jaundiced eye, I can see the change in the way Terry carried herself from one year to the next. If I had to guess, the display of pills and story about skull babies possibly occurred before, but not too much before, though there’s a good chance skull-babying was already happening.

Though the scenario was not as immediately urgent as Hank’s, it’s another instance where the code of silence won out. But who would I have told? A trusted adult? I didn’t know any. And what would I have told them? Something about pills I couldn’t identify and high school guys I couldn’t name doing things I hadn’t witnessed and couldn’t say where or when they occurred? Not to mention, Terry would have killed me if she’d gotten caught at school with pills, whatever they were, as I would have been the obvious narc.

Today, telling an educational professional about a thirteen year old girl getting drunk, popping pills, and riding in cars with adults might elicit a reaction. Back then? Not so much. Our teachers told us stories about the Rolling Stones having teenage girls on their tour jets and laughed about it. If anything bad had happened to Terry, they certainly would have agreed she’d asked for it.

So there’s two more short memories of childhood. We’ve continued the theme of loyalty and the code of silence, but progressed beyond family dynamics and church drama and adult dysfunction to find illicit drug use, underage drinking, and sex that was at best reckless and at worst statutory rape, and adults who couldn’t have cared less about it. And it all happened when I was only 13, at the very cusp of my teenage years.

I had another vignette lined up, but this has post has already gone on and on. Maybe if enough of you ask for it, I’ll post that one in a few weeks too.

Enjoy this blog?

Subscribing is always free, but you can help me build my library!

I’ve put together a wish list of books on writing, history, research, and other subjects that feed my writing. If you’d like to support my work, pick one off the list and help me add another book to the shelf.

Send me a book!

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If you’ve been following this blog series on finding your writing ideas in the life you already have, you may have gotten the impression I’d like you to start journaling. This is correct.

You might hate journaling. You might think you suck at it. I did hate it and did suck at it. You can read about that here. My childhood wasn’t especially happy and it wasn’t even interestingly unhappy. I never believed my thoughts or experiences were worth writing about.

The adults in my life also didn’t do a good job selling journaling as a concept. We only ever heard about the journals and diaries of famous people or someone who had lived through a perilous time. What did a kid growing up in rural Maryland, with no special talent in art, music, or sports, who – like most of my generation – was raised on television, root vegetables, and neglect, have to write about? It was hard enough competing against regular kids. How could I ever measure up to Anne Frank?

Our lives didn’t vary much from day to day – school, home, tv, dinner. It didn’t occur to me to write down what we did in class or how my teachers looked or sounded, or who I liked or didn’t and why. I never thought about remembering my parents’ dinner conversations, though a few stand out, such as my mom’s insistence that Jimmy Carter was a communist plant sent to destroy America from within. These things have a way of gripping the mind.

Today, of course, I wish I had written that down, a document of my school days, no matter how tedious or poorly written. I wished I’d saved some of my funny drawings or a particularly good book report. I wish I’d written about the time my best friend got sick in the cafeteria and how the lunch ladies made him clean it up before he was allowed to go to the office, or about the fist fight between the redneck bully and the six-foot tall black girl who’d caught a racial slur in the hallway one too many times. Even without having it written down, I can still hear her books slapping the tile floor and see the headlock she threw on him and their arms swinging in close quarters and how red that boy’s face was when teachers finally pulled them apart, partly from anger and exertion, but also from enough fear and humiliation to be deliciously satisfying to at least one observer who’d been on the receiving end of his shit.

Today, I love those memories, even the ugly ones. Back then, I was afraid of them and the feelings they elicited. They didn’t sound like something that belonged in a journal. I didn’t understand I was allowed to write about what I observed and experienced, even if no one else would find it interesting, even if it was a bad thing. I could write about other people and what happened to them, and how I felt about all of it.

It’s been years since I’ve thought about my friend puking or that glorious fist fight, but that’s the key to getting started with journaling. You start with what you have, something small. This often comes unbidden, a random thought that becomes a memory that takes you to a specific place, like a decrepit brick middle school without air conditioning and often without heat, where you spent three of the shittiest years of your life, and you follow that memory into a cafeteria thick with adult indifference and then to a hallway crowded with kids between classes and you remember a very tall and quiet black girl, a girl who carried her books against her chest like a shield, who never walked with anyone, not even other girls, or spoke or laughed with them, and who, like you, walked with her head bent down, avoiding eye contact, willing herself invisible, a girl you noticed all the time because it was impossible not to notice her but also because you were so different but inexplicably so very similar, and you never knew what to do with this observation, this sense that you knew her better that you actually did, which left you sad and confused, and you remember the day she had enough.

You might find these memories don’t pop up when you sit down with a journal. Memories are stubborn that way. I’ve developed the habit of writing them as they come, on paper, phone note, or in an email. Even when I’m busy at work, I can spare five minutes to write down something good. This is an excellent reason to keep a stack of 3 x 5 cards handy.

It helps to start with something specific, a place, a person, an event, and then allow that memory to lead to the next and the next and the next. In her book Syllabus, cartoonist Lynda Barry suggests a simple exercise that can help you identify the kind of objects that trigger deep emotional memories.

Syllabus is a memoir-like writing manual centered around Barry’s instructions for her college-level creativity class. In the first class session, Barry gives her students a noun and tells them to write down the first ten memories they associate with that word. Then, each student picks the memory that piques the most interest and expands upon it, answering specific questions: where they are, the time of day, their age, who else is there, what they notice. Over the course of the class, students use observation and writing exercises to create their own lists of nouns and use memories like these to create short comics.

To ease her students into the exercise, Barry starts with a simple word: Car.

This is a great word for memory work, because cars are ubiquitous. Even if your family didn’t have one, you knew someone who did or you’ve seen them on television and in films. Most likely, you don’t remember your first car ride, because it occurred so early in your childhood, and you couldn’t possibly count the number of times you’ve climbed in and out of one.

But individual cars…those you remember. To start the exercise, make a quick list of ten memories involving the word car. You might write down specific cars: the family car, your uncle’s clunker, the first car you bought with your own money, the car you envied, the mail truck, the car that ran over your pet. You can choose Matchbox cars, pinewood derby cars, or even the Batmobile. You can write about your experiences with cars, something that happened in, on, or around a car that stands out: a special conversation, an intimate moment, breaking down, having an accident, getting a ticket, being lost in a strange place, your first road trip.

When you have your list, pick one that jogs the most intense memories. Don’t think about what someone else might choose or find interesting. Pick the one that stirs you. Write down everything you see in your mind’s eye. Don’t worry about narrative – start with notes and lists and get down as much as you can, the colors and details, the people, your age, the time of the year, what happened. If strong feelings are involved, write those down.

When you exhaust your thoughts, turn these notes into a short first-person narrative. You don’t need a great opening line, nor do you need to craft a story. Put the memory on paper as it comes to you and let it be what it is. If your first car memory triggers another story about the same car or a memory about a different car, keep going.

Repeat this exercise with other cars on your list or start a new list with a different noun. As you go about your day, make note of what you encounter and observe to create a list of nouns that you can use for this exercise. It doesn’t matter what – go with what you notice and what rings a bell inside you.

Don’t look for “interesting” things to write about. In fact, you might get more from mundane topics. I haven’t had a novel’s worth of peak experiences, but I’ve been in a lot of cars. I bet I could find ten memories about the grocery store or doing laundry, and at least one of them would remind me of a significant time in my life, which would prompt more memories, as well as ideas that connect something as tedious as doing laundry to deeper emotions, a mistake, a learning experience, or possibly even a time I felt loved and at peace.

I like this exercise because it gives us something tangible to start with. I also like it because it doesn’t automatically lead to venting or bad memories. Journaling has a way of bringing out bad feelings, and in fact, the angry journal is a staple of life and fiction. It’s safer to write down what we don’t want to say out loud. This is valuable, but my hope for you is that you don’t get lost in negativity. Family, exes, and employers very likely trigger strong memories, but don’t let the bad ones drag you down. And they will.

If you use your writing journal solely as a dumping ground, you may unintentionally create a habit of opening it only when you feel bad or angry. You might resist going back to it, because it’s packed with ugly memories. You should write the bad things. They are going to happen anyway, so you might as well use them. But don’t forget the neutral and the good.

And that’s what I really like about Lynda Barry’s exercise. Nouns are neutral. There is nothing inherently positive or negative in a car or a pond or a church pew. Your first car might be attached to a sad story but not the next one. You may have fallen out of one tree, but climbed another.

If that exercise doesn’t grab you, start somewhere else. Writing is the land of Do What You Want. Start with what you know and feel and observe and believe. Write about your ten favorite cartoon characters or Swedish pop stars or football players or flowers or recipes. I’ve spent the last few months suggesting places for you to find ideas that are already inside you. I hope you got something out of it.

In time, as you prime the well, you’ll find your memories begin to volunteer. Sometimes they’ll compete for your attention and you’ll have to choose which to write first. With practice, you’ll tap that vein and it will stay open and the gold will rise up, so much good stuff you won’t know what to do with it all.

Plus you always have an excuse to buy a new notebook. Win-win.

Enjoy this blog?

Subscribing is always free, but you can help me build my library!

I’ve put together a wish list of books on writing, history, research, and other subjects that feed my writing. If you’d like to support my work, pick one off the list and help me add another book to the shelf.

Send me a book!

You can also support the blog by reposting or forwarding this post to someone who might like it. I’d love to meet them!

The Manor Mill arts community will hold its 2026 Writers Retreat on November 12 – 15 at the Oldfields School in Glencoe, MD. On Saturday, November 14, the retreat will welcome Stephanie Dray, New York Times bestselling historical fiction author, for a keynote address.

Building on two successful one-day programs in 2024 and 2025, the retreat expands this year to encompass two full days of networking and learning opportunities, and an option for guests to stay overnight to extend the event to four days.

The full Thursday–Sunday residential experience includes meals and special evening activities. Single day and Friday-Saturday non-residential tickets are also available. Overnight guests will enjoy lodging, all meals, all day sessions, all evening programs, and additional special activities from Thursday through Sunday. Day pass guests will enjoy all day sessions & lunch and can add on evening sessions and grab dinner on their own.

Past years have attracted both new and experienced writers working in all genres and forms. Over the course of the weekend, you’ll explore a rich range of topics: craft and technique, querying and submissions, marketing, promotion, and much more.

For event location, itinerary, and reservations, click here! Manor Mill is offering early bird pricing until September 8 for day passes and residencies.

Manor Mill is a restored pre-revolutionary grist mill that houses a fine arts gallery, classes, a live music venue, ceramics studio and workshops, just over the hill from the Monkton Hotel in Baltimore County, MD.

Founded in 1867, Oldfields School is an independent all-girls day and boarding school serving grades 9 through 12. Its mission is to embrace each student’s authentic self, educate through collaboration, empower the individual voice, and inspire confidence and continual growth, leading to a life of purpose.

Last year, I attended a workshop on the Business of Writing. The seminar touched on a variety of areas affecting a writer’s business, including taxes, copyright, income streams, etc., but the largest portion of the discussion focused on establishing a brand.

I don’t like the word “brand” as it sounds a bit soulless to me. Inauthentic. McDonald’s is a brand. I prefer terms like persona or personality. Identity. Message. At the time, I likened the idea of an online persona to hosting a dance club. As the owner, you can choose whatever music you like, but eventually you need to advertise the vibe. Otherwise, your country & western bar might attract customers looking for a rave, and no one has any fun.

Most of the other writers at the workshop had their brand. Science fiction military thrillers. Anthropology-themed murder mysteries. Young adult fantasy. Memoir.

At the time, I was part way into my novel in progress and had other projects on deck, but didn’t have a finished book. I had 20+ published collections as an anthology editor, but that’s a) the past and b) other people’s writing. I couldn’t point to a tangible product as an example of what I do.

My deeper problem is that I don’t write in any particular genre. I write characters and stories, and the genre reveals itself as I go. I don’t mean that pretentiously, as if genre is irrelevant or a secondary consideration. I love genre fiction!

But I love all the genres and want to write in all of them, and the characters who intrigue me tend to suggest where they’d like to reside. A man who beheads people for money is going to look pretty silly in a contemporary novel, but he’s at home in a fantasy setting.

So, yes, at the time of the workshop I was working on a fantasy novel, but my next projects were – in order to be determined – a murder mystery, a contemporary novel with a religious theme, historical sci-fi, road trip crime, historical romance murder mystery, contemporary social satire, and a historical road trip ghost story.

In other words, a branding nightmare.

But the thing is…I don’t care.

I write what I want.

As do the writers I admire.

Among my favorite writers:

• Margaret Atwood (speculative, historical, contemporary, fantasy, and science fiction, plus poetry and nonfiction)
• Alan Moore (superheroes, fantasy, horror, science fiction, erotica, humor, social satire, historical fiction, in addition to poetry, essays, songs, comics, and prose)
• Ray Bradbury (crime, science fiction, fantasy, speculative fiction)
• Octavia Butler (fantasy, science fiction, time travel, horror)
• Marge Piercy (contemporary, historical, speculative, and science fiction, plus poetry and nonfiction).

If you know any of those writers, you know their brand. If you pick up a novel by any of them, you know what you’re getting, even if you don’t know exactly which genre you’ll be reading. We might haphazardly lump Butler, Bradbury, and Moore into a broad category of genre fiction, and pigeonhole Atwood and Piercy as “women’s fiction” but their readers know there’s more to their work.

What ties their work together? Their knowledge and feelings, their observations, their experiences, their obsessions and beliefs. Their brand is comprised of their themes and their questions and what they want us to know about life. All the stuff you have inside you already.

For each of those writers, their name is their own genre.

I do love writers who stay within a well-traveled lane: Patricia Highsmith (psychological thriller), John Irving (contemporary fiction set in New England), Anne Tyler (contemporary fiction set in Baltimore), Tana French (murder mysteries set in Ireland), Kurt Vonnegut (absurdist science fiction). There is something to be said for going deep, for mining the same land to find new ore.

But I am not them. I am also not Margaret Atwood, Alan Moore, Ray Bradbury, Octavia Butler, or Marge Piercy, but they are the writers who most inspire me.

I don’t plan to stick to any genre or even any form. I also write short stories. I have been journaling quite a bit over the past few years and have plenty of mud to fling. Like a few of my recent blog posts, some of these stories may be confessional creative non-fiction. Some may be the truth disguised in fiction so that the people involved wouldn’t recognize themselves.

I have written poetry and would like to write some plays before I die. I would be happy to see one produced in an empty garage. That’s enough for me. I like comics too and would love to publish a few before I die, but artists aren’t cheap.

I will write what I want. For now, that means this blog, which I love writing so much more than I ever thought I could, and my novel in progress, which is nearing the finish line. After that, I’ll start on whatever jumps out at me from my list. Contrary to everything I just wrote above, I have ideas for two more fantasy novels set in the same story world and will probably move over to one of those. I’m really excited to work on the murder mystery and the contemporary novel with a religious theme, though. But in the end, it doesn’t matter.

I’ll write what I want.

I’ve been looking forward to this post.

As you are getting started as a writer, looking for ideas or exploring what you’d like to write about, there is one piece of advice I would like you to elevate above all others.

Write whatever you want.

Write about people you know. Write about people you don’t know. Write in any genre. Write from real life. Write fantastical worlds. Write about your niche interest. Confess your sins and weaknesses. Write a play. Write a poem. Write a comic book script.

Oh, did someone say that comic book writing isn’t serious writing? Fuck ‘em.

Did someone say literary fiction and poetry are pretentious? Fuck them, too.

Did someone complain you use too many swears? Guess what!

Is your work is too confessional or too abstract? What do you say?

Write whatever you want.

There will be people who tell you not to reveal family secrets. They will tell you not to confess too much. They’ll tell you to worry about what people say on social media and how the market will react.

Ignore them. Write about the bad people in your life. Write about family secrets. Write about the time you were the bad person, and the secret you hope never comes out. Brag about the time you got it right and admit when you screwed up or hurt someone.

You may reach a point when you’d like advice on obscuring real events and real people, especially if you want to keep peace in your family or maintain your reputation as a good person, but first you must write it all down. There is nothing off-limits.

Your characters don’t have to be likeable. They can be violent and selfish and use bad language. The words protagonist and hero are often used interchangeably, but they aren’t synonyms. The main character can be amoral, self-centered, tricky, and mean. There will be times you need advice on bringing your reader into a story about an unpalatable individual, but first you must write it all down.

You can write about people who don’t look like you. You can write entire novels about characters who only look like you. You can write solely from your life or you can explore diverse experiences. Your cast of characters can be monochrome or rainbow-colored. You may want to show your work to a knowledgeable person who can tell you what you did well and what you got wrong, but first you must write it all down.

You will encounter an endless line of people who’ll say you can or cannot do this, or that you must or must not do that. In my experience, these people will scold you no matter what you do, so do what you like.

There will always be people who want to tell you what you can’t do.

I’m here to say: You can do anything.

The choice is entirely yours.

This should be an easy one. The entire premise of this blog series is telling you what I want you to know. I want you to know what I’ve learned about writing and being authentic. I want you to know this knowledge was mostly gained through trial and error and failure. Lots of failure. I hope to help you avoid repeating my lengthy learning curve, so that your start your writing life with permission and confidence to do as you please.

I want you to know there’s nothing more important or emotionally fulfilling than being and expressing your authentic self. In my blog the past few years, I’ve shared the following quotes more than once:

“There is only one like you in the whole world. There’s never been anyone exactly like you before, and there will never be again.”
– Mr. Rogers

“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.”
– Gospel of Thomas

I want you to know that what you feel, observe, experience, and believe are worth writing about. You don’t need a hot premise or grand insight or epic tale. Those are nice to have, perhaps even necessary if you want to sell some books, but your most important raw material is already inside you.

A former co-worker once joked that a recent meeting lasted long enough for everything to be said and for everyone to get the chance to say it. This is also true of writing. If you believe someone else has already said what you’d like to say, you are correct. It’s all been said before. But no one has said it from your perspective, in the way that you’ll say it.

The stories will continue until everything has been said and everyone has had a chance to say it.

Your story or novel or blog may reach an audience that hasn’t heard it before, or readers who need to hear this story from your point of view, in your voice. I may read a bit of philosophy or advice nine times without absorbing it, but experience an a-ha moment when a tenth person says the same thing in a different way that connects with my experience and way of thinking.

I’m asking you to be that tenth person.

No one owns a monopoly on ideas. Write to the people who are interested in what you have to say. If someone isn’t interested, they aren’t your audience.

Here’s a confession: While writing these posts, I’ve hit those same roadblocks. I know I’m not breaking new ground here. I’m sure someone else has said this before and probably said it better. I worried I was wasting my time and possibly embarrassing myself.

But I reminded myself – I’m not writing for the people who have read all this before. I’m not writing for people who have more ideas than they can handle. I set out to write about how we embark on creative work and why and how we struggle. I wanted to talk to other writers who, like me, thought they hadn’t anything interesting to write about, and I wanted to help them find what they already had.

I haven’t said anything new, but I hope I said it differently, and I’m confident I said it my way. That’s what I want for you.

There is no guaranteed outcome. Not everyone can write well. You may have an audience of zero. That is beside the point. Your creativity is yours to express. If you want to write, write.

That is what I want you to know.

Fiction

I don’t intentionally send messages with my fiction, but as I noted, it is not possible for a human to write without any point of view. If you have read AI-generated writing, you have noticed that it feels lifeless. AI can mimic strong sentence structure and style, it can choose great vocabulary words, but it has no point of view. It is incapable of creating feeling. When it tries, its best work is melodrama. I suspect someone fed AI quite a bit of Paul Harvey. You probably don’t know who that is, but look him up and tell me I’m wrong.

Humans have experiences and beliefs that influence our writing. Consider even the most bland, by-the-numbers action thriller. Every one of those stories includes the familiar scene of dithering bureaucrats or some functionary trying to bind the hero in red tape, and inevitably, the hero ignores them. What message is the writer sending? Taking action saves the day. Without that message, you’d have a different story, if any story at all.

I write characters who haven’t quite figured out life. They mess up. They zig when they should zag. They have questions that can’t be answered but they keep looking. Given the choice to change and grow or hold the line, they hold the line. They might have their goal in hand but set it down because they don’t trust victory. They run when they should stay and stay when they should run. They know better and do it anyway.

Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, including this writer, is purely coincidental, I assure you.

Considering my fiction, what do I want my readers to know? Again, I looked to my current and upcoming projects for clues.

• You can do your best and still fail. Join the club.
• Not everyone gets a happy ending or the ending they want. In fact, most people don’t. Character arcs and unambiguous resolutions and hero’s journey are fiction. There is always a day after. But that works in your favor too, because your bad day doesn’t have to be your last day. A new story starts tomorrow.
• Learning from your mistakes is a lot harder than it appears in books. Human beings need a lot more than 300 pages. Sometimes a lifetime isn’t enough.
• Being yourself is your most important work, but this requires that you know yourself. Do the work. Never live a life someone else imagines for you.
• Bloom where you’re planted is good advice, but if you have the choice, uproot. Find better soil, a beautiful view, and great neighbors.
• Trust your gut.
• Choose your moral values and stick to them. When you feel lost, let them guide you. You may not always win, but you will be right in your soul.
• You are worth it, and you can be redeemed.