If there is advice for the young writer more often misunderstood than “write what you know” I don’t know what it is.

This adage is not inherently terrible, but it is incomplete, bordering on lazy, and once you’ve had time to ponder it, this starts to feel intentional. Imagine if half the Ten Commandments consisted merely of “Thou Shalt Not” without explanatory detail. Shalt not what? You’d have to suspect God was messing with you.

But this is what young writers are told, ad nauseum, and in fairness, it does work.

For some people.

John Grisham earned a law degree, which granted him inside knowledge of court rooms and the legal system. Ken Kesey worked a night shift as a nursing assistant on a psych ward, did time in prison, and volunteered for CIA-financed, government-run experiments with hallucinogenic drugs, including LSD and peyote, all of which may have had a little something to do with his writing One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

Herman Melville worked on a whaler, Mark Twain as a pilot on a riverboat, and Kurt Vonnegut survived the bombing of Dresden in a slaughterhouse marked number five. While serving as a nurse in World War I, Agatha Christie learned everything she knew about poisons. Richard Hooker (Richard Hornberger), author of MASH: A Novel About Three Army Doctors, was [spoiler] an Army doctor during the Korean War. Andy Weir’s hobbies include orbital mechanics, astronomy, and the history of human spaceflight.

Write what you know worked out great for them, but perhaps it’s less suited for us mortals. I don’t want to go to law school or prison and I’d prefer not to be captured by Germans and  fire-bombed, thank you very much. This is why god gave us fantasy novels and science fiction with very little science. I have a strong suspicion this is also why there are so many books whose protagonists are fiction writers, often struggling with writer’s block. Write what you know.

What do you know?

For writers making their very earliest efforts, understanding what you know is a reasonable place to start. Maybe you do have experience with the criminal justice system or medicine or military service that you might like to use in fiction. Good for you!

As an exercise – and warm-up for more interesting inquiries to come – make a list of things you know. For now, stick with the literal interpretation of knowledge. If you need to narrow this down, try this: If you were to teach a class on something, what would it be? Is there a topic or field of information that prompts you to nerd out? If you were training a new co-worker, what could you tell them? Certainly Agatha Christie could have taught a Poisons 101 class.

If you were writing your biography, which parts would be the most interesting? Perhaps you have an unconventional job experience or esoteric talent. You probably have a few skills or topics about which you have stored away a wealth of information. You may not have a law degree in your back pocket but you must have something.

Any gravediggers out there? Master seamstresses or bakery chefs? Jugglers, ventriloquists, magicians? Botanists, biologists, or scientists of any kind? Art historians, librarians?

Find something to brag about. Imagine this knowledge makes you one of the world’s most fascinating people. What would you say to Oprah? Write it down, even if you think it’s embarrassing. No one will read it.

Why isn’t this enough?

If you haven’t figured it out, a literal interpretation of write what you know will take your writing only so far. Writers – or maybe it was just me – may mistake write what you know with writing about information or about events that actually happened to us. We may think we are supposed to write about facts or that our characters should have the same jobs as we do, the same family makeup, the same ethnicity or background.

We look at great works of fiction and wonder “But how did he know that?” Of course we are curious about how and where other writers come by their ideas. Why wouldn’t we be?

If your list of what you know feels sparse, join the club. My next post is My Turn, and believe me, my list won’t be anything to write about.

Fortunately, we all know much more than we realize.

In the last My Turn post, I confessed writing this series as much for myself as for anyone. Specifically, for the version of myself that needed it a long time ago, the young man I have somewhat belatedly become fond of.

My nascent attempts at journaling failed because I saw nothing of note in my life. As a student in creative writing classes and workshops, I dutifully completed my exercises in observation and description, visiting places, making lists, but I never found stories in them.

For a long time, I struggled to find premises and then struggled even more to expand them into an actual story. Naturally, the premises had to be “cool” or “high concept”, but what I discovered is that the cooler the idea, the less story I had to hang upon it.

My teachers told me there were ideas everywhere, as if there were a premise tree outside waiting to be plucked. No one mentioned that I was supposed to care about what I wrote. Our conversations focused exclusively on the external idea and craft. We never touched on the internal writer, and the question of what we might want to say or why we should write at all.

Even when discussing theme, we never explored how to arrive at one or how we might query ourselves to uncover it. If the topic were broached at all, we were told to write about something we cared about, but I had another problem – I had been taught not to care too much about anything.

My few successful stories were personal, bordering on private. A slightly fictionalized version of an argument with my mom that revealed something deeper. An imagined future for myself and my best friend, another writer who I loved more than anyone. But these were not the kinds of stories we were supposed to want to write. They didn’t tackle big ideas. They weren’t universal. They didn’t address the human condition! As though my life was something less than human.

Someone I respected even said, “As writers mature, they stop writing about themselves.” Today, I would like to explain to her how wrong she was, but back then, that’s what we were supposed to do. And I had no problem with that, because I was ashamed of where I’d come from. Myself was the very last person I wanted to write about or be.

I grew up in a rural area, emotionally and physically sheltered, part of a fringe religion that discouraged too much interaction with outsiders. I have a hard time writing the word “childhood” because it wasn’t.

I survived to college and at my soonest opportunity quit church, got contact lenses, grew my hair out, pierced both ears, bought my own clothes, and pretended that awkward, poorly dressed, hapless, terrified kid ever existed. So not only did I not see the rich material life had given me, I drew a bright red line separating Now from the Before Times.

My life story at 19: I was born, and then I went to college.

And there were other layers of shame. This part gets dicier, but I promised to write with you. Let us throw caution aside and – as the phrase goes – get deep in the paint.

Other than anger, our family did not express emotions. I’m not sure that collectively we could have even named more than four. We were a family that kept secrets, from outsiders, extended family, and each other. I would be much older before I learned a few of the reasons for these secrets, and I suspect there are more. Our religion was insular, distrustful of outsiders and intolerant of anyone who even thought differently, much less behaved in a way that deviated from a narrow acceptable norm. And of course, we were a congregation of scolds and tattletales.

My parents treated anything short of perfection as a failure, including of character. Not only were they disappointed, they were certain we failed on purpose, as though we were capable of greatness but withheld it to embarrass them. No goal post was so far away that it couldn’t be reset when you neared it, and no good report from outside was ever good enough. I didn’t understand why my teachers liked me and my parents did not. “Angel in the street, devil at home,” mom said.

Our house was not a place to be free and creative. My parents talked up the kids who played sports or musical instruments – or memorized Bible verses – but didn’t know how to encourage what I liked: writing and drawing. My stories were dumb and my art wasn’t very good and why don’t I read good books instead of junk? Also, being a writer is a lonely life and there’s no money in it. Still, I did it anyway, alone in my room with the door shut. I learned to protect my creativity by hiding it, as though it were some shameful habit.

Look inside? I didn’t want to be there the first time.

Writing about this would have been painful, and also an emotional betrayal. Between church and home, I had been instilled with the fear of being discovered speaking out of turn. Secrets, shame, and fear of failure are paralytic to the creative mind.

In college, with my new clothes, plucky haircut, and pierced ears, you will likely not be surprised to learn that I also came out. In those days, this was generally not considered a good career move. See above re: religion, shame, deviation, perfection, but writ large over our entire society. And yes, the gays are cool now but back then the role models for a young writer were few and the places where we might publish as our authentic selves were fewer.

I had finally escaped the old life, only to find my new life had its own limitations. Before I’d even begun to figure it out, I was taught not to talk about this either. I had another secret, and this was the most deviant of all.

That’s not a happy beginning, but the story has a mostly happy ending. I’ve unlearned, rejected, and healed that shame, though of course it lingers. Like scar tissue, it is a reminder of an experience, but not something that pains me. As you can see, it’s easy to bring back, but frankly, my load was relatively light. It didn’t feel light to me, not when I was a kid, but I know people who have carried much worse.

I don’t share that to bring down the room, but to convey that I know whereof I speak. I understand the kind of complicated emotions and human dynamics that clog up our creative outlets. I understand why it’s hard to look inward or backwards, and why it might be tough to speak what you believe and feel.

Secrets, shame, conformity, perfectionism. They stop us from looking inward, but that’s where our best ideas, our best creative selves, are waiting.

These are things I wish I’d known.

I hereby grant all of us permission to write what we want, to adhere to whatever belief we want, and share whatever opinion we want. Still not sure about your strongest opinions and beliefs? We’re headed that direction. Next Monday, we’ll start with terrible advice and discuss why it’s terrible, and then we’ll start the journey inward.

I hope you’ll write with me.

“Where do you get your ideas?” the beginning writer asks. “What should I write?” The question is so common it has become a punchline in writer conversations. An unkind one, in my opinion, but I digress.

Of course, for the beginning writer, the question is vital. It is also more than one question.

Sometimes, this is a question about development. How did Margaret Atwood turn an idea about women lacking physical freedom and bodily autonomy into The Handmaid’s Tale? How did the concept of Germany winning World War II become Philip K. Dick’s The Man in the High Castle?

Sometimes, this is a question about the premise. How did Atwood come up with the concept of Gilead or PKD arrive at the premise of the Allies losing WWII? What made Andy Weir ponder an astronaut trapped alone on Mars (The Martian) or Susanna Clarke the scenario of two great magicians with opposing philosophies of sorcery (Jonathan Strange and Mr. Norrell)?

Both are great questions, important questions. The answers are long and specific to the writer and the story. If Atwood had the inclination to explain, I suspect we’d learn that the origin and gestation of The Handmaid’s Tale were wildly different than the development of Alias, Grace or The Edible Woman.

The answer to the question of premise is often opaque, involving platitudes like observation, brainstorming, or asking “what if…” Not that you shouldn’t do those things, but as advice goes, “observe” is a headline, not an article.

What the young writer needs is the long answer, which can’t be obtained during an author Q&A. For that answer, we have to go back a bit further in the process to examine the third question buried in “where do you get your ideas?”

That question is Where do I start?

The interior writer

The answer is inside.

As I wrote last time, writers often look for story ideas externally. Unfortunately, when writers seek inspiration solely from external sources – emphasis on solely – they will discover this method is hit or miss. A newspaper article, a friend’s secret, or a fairy tale turned on its head might produce a hot hook, but when we try to write through it, we falter. The story may fall apart at the midpoint or when we realize the catchy premise was the only good idea we had.

The problem? Despite a great premise, you had no reason to write that story. You had no driving force, and when a story lacks drive, it falls apart.

As readers, we discover a book like The Handmaid’s Tale or The Martian, and wonder where the authors got these great ideas. Why did they want to write about Gilead or Mars? But consider this: What if neither was particularly interested in Gilead or Mars?

That sounds nuts, I know. They wrote whole books about them. Atwood wrote two. Andy Weir’s first three books are set in outer space. But I suggest that neither Gilead nor Mars were the driving force of these novels. Surely Atwood didn’t sit around daydreaming about Gilead, thinking “Wouldn’t that be cool?” There’s a reason we’ll never see a novel set in Gilead from the man’s point of view.

Rather, Gilead and Mars were the methods the authors used to convey something they found inside themselves.

Margaret Atwood writes about women’s roles and identities, societal restrictions, autonomy, inner strength, and individuality. You can call this many things – her opinions, themes, philosophy, but these central ideas are what drive her writing. The specific story concept is built on top. In the Gilead novels, Atwood created a repressive, patriarchal culture as her method to explore the idea that intrigued her.

What was Andy Weir’s idea? Weir has mentioned being intrigued by the idea of an astronaut trapped alone in outer space. However, I suspect the story started to come together – to feel real to him – when he came up with the central organizing idea.

Here’s a quote from early in the novel:

At some point everything is going to go south on you. Everything is going to go south and you’re going to say ‘This is it. This is how I end.’ Now you can either accept that or you can get to work. That’s all it is. You just begin. You do the math, you solve one problem. Then you solve the next one, and then the next and if you solve enough problems you get to come home.

Andy Weir’s central idea for The Martian reflects his belief about the best way to live: You face your problems and solve them one by one. The driving idea of the story is survival and an astronaut stranded on Mars was the method for exploring it.

Along the way, both authors found that external idea. Atwood certainly had plenty of real-world examples of Gilead to inspire her. Weir had a hobbyist interest in orbital mechanics, astronomy, and the history of spaceflight, and had played with the concept of humans stranded on Mars in his webcomic, Casey and Andy.

But where they found their specific story premises – Gilead and Mars – is far less relevant than why and how they pursued them. Certainly, the methods (external) were both of longstanding interest to the authors, but without the point of view (internal), the novels would not have become what we know today. I argue that the method was far less important than the driving force behind the story.

Don’t believe me? Read that quote from The Martian again. It’s the central theme of the novel, the premise that drives every moment of the plot. I’ll wait.

Did you see the words Mars or astronaut in that paragraph? Remove that idea from The Martian – and all the ways it cascades through the novel – and the result would be a decent, but much blander, version of the novel, a techie page-turner, but not something to stir your emotions. This belief drives the narrator, who in turn drives the story. However, separated from the method, that idea still sounds exciting. Can you imagine that quote in the voice of a soldier, someone recently unemployed or divorced, a convict arriving at prison, a politician facing a scandal? Read it again.

That bit of dialogue is the heart of the novel, and it came from inside the author. You have some of that inside you, as well. You only need to find it.

Ideas

The process of creation can feel mystifying. For a long time, I wasn’t sure I had “it” – that special something that makes the difference between a writer and a non-writer, or a great writer and a story hack. But I wasn’t missing anything. I just kept looking outside myself, when the answer was inside all along.

This mindset requires an expansive and perhaps idiosyncratic definition of ideas. The writing zeitgeist tends to focus on the narrow view – the idea is what’s interesting, the reader hook. A boy wizard, a man dressed like a bat, horny hockey players, a clown that eats children. But none of those are actually interesting without the elements the author brings to them. Observations, experiences, opinions, biases, life lessons, and strongly held beliefs. Give your attention to the latter and the former will take care of themselves.

If you’re not sure what to write or where to begin, start by asking why you want to write and what you want to tell us. Once you understand that, you’ll find it easier to find ideas that excite you. In fact, I’ll argue you’ll have more ideas than you can ever write.

If you aren’t sure what your passions are or your beliefs or your themes, that’s ok. We’re heading in that direction. But first, let’s talk about what’s stopping us from accessing our raw material and ultimately our story ideas. This isn’t therapy, so I’ll be brief.

Shame

Shame comes in many colors. Nearly every writer I know has dealt with shame involving the creative process. Parents discourage artistic pursuits in favor of academics or sports. Our efforts are judged against best-in-class artists. Your friends want to know how your life is going, until you start talking about your novel in progress. Everyone loves music, movies, and books…until you want to create some.

Families keep secrets. You may feel shame around cultural or societal taboos. Your faith may discourage you from writing about certain topics or writing about them in a raw or honest way. Trauma and enforced silence keep us from connecting with our passions and even our thoughts.

The problem is not that you lack ideas. The problem is that you have rich material that you have been trained not to talk about.

So what do you lack?

Permission

• Permission to write badly
• Permission to write what someone else thinks you shouldn’t
• Permission to sound like yourself
• Permission to not write the Great [Your Nationality Here] Novel
• Permission to write small, personal stories
• Permission to write about things that are ugly or sad
• Permission to write only for yourself
• Permission to skip the get-together scheduled during your writing time
• Permission to call yourself a writer

Like your ideas, permission comes from within. The only things between you and your writing are your time, your thoughts, your creativity, and your desire. That’s it. And those are all within your control.

I won’t sugar coat – this can be a tough obstacle. Unlearning what you’ve been taught, especially what you been taught by shame, isn’t easy. Giving yourself permission to be yourself – or even simply to be – does not come naturally for everyone. If this describes you, take baby steps. Start with permission to write badly and to sound like yourself. Work up to permission to write about family secrets.

If you are more open to it, take the leap. Look in your metaphorical mirror and give that person permission to write whatever comes to mind, as badly as needed, and repeat.

What next?

For the next 20 weeks or so, I won’t be talking about finding premises or developing those premises into stories or novels. Rather, we’ll examine the simple quandary of wanting to write but not knowing where to start. By the end, you’ll have twenty or so first steps you can take.

As we go, I hope to point you places where you might find your raw material and start to build a solid foundation from which to write with purpose. As a bonus, when you lay this foundation you may find it easier to spot story ideas in the wild, ask those brainstorming questions, and develop your premises into complete tales. You may also start to hear what will become your voice.

We’ll start by discussing where your internal ideas come from and then explore concrete exercises for putting them on the page. Next week I’ll share some bad advice and tell you why it’s bad, and then we’ll get to the good stuff, where I’ll try to point you in the direction of material you will feel passionately about.

Spoiler alert: We’re going to spend a lot of time looking inward.

Bonus: It’s cheaper than therapy.

For now, think about permission and how much more you need for yourself. Maybe you’re raring to go or maybe you’ll need some time to think about it. Regardless of where you stand today, remember: most of your writing will not be published. Most may not be shared with anyone else. Not all your ideas will turn into stories or completed pieces. You may have good reasons not to write about a topic or to not pursue a story idea. But do consider the idea and strive to give yourself both permission and grace.

Homework

Other than your writing, I don’t intend to assign homework at the end of every post, but I may suggest some reading here and there. This time, I want to share three writers who have given me permission to write small, intimate vignettes and autobiographical fiction. None of these suggestions contain traditional, Big Idea-driven stories. All of them focus on the kind of small moments we experience every day, but don’t recognize as story material. All of them are lovely. All of them are art.

In Heating and Cooling, Beth Ann Fennelly writes 52 micro-memoirs, some lasting no more than a half-page paragraph, sharing brief moments of her childhood and adult life. Topics include an annoying couple on an airplane, memories of a starring role in a fourth grade play, and a doctor appointment with her mom. As much poetry as prose, Fennelly lands both beauty and humor in a few sentences.

Harvey Pekar’s writing leans minimalist, and focuses on autobiography and memoir form. Often lasting no more than a single page, Pekar’s stories might follow his fictionalized self on a trip to the record store, recount a brief conversation in an elevator, or break down one of his many appearances on the David Letterman show. He made a whole career of documenting moments most of us miss, long before social media culture taught the more generations their every step or facial expression deserved to be recorded.

Raymond Carver’s writing has been described as minimalist and as dirty realism, though he generally rejected labels. For our purposes, I’m most interested in how Carver eschews tidy endings and answered questions. Often, his stories, even his longer ones, linger in the arena of vignette or character study. Situations do not resolve. Stories may end with a key character simply walking off the page or two characters deciding to call it a night without any conclusion or realization about their problems. You don’t need to have a grand character arc to write a story. Sometimes, simply following people in their difficulty is enough.

As you’ll see in these works, a piece of writing does not have to be lengthy or complex to be memorable or meaningful. Observations, experiences, memories, or idylls are all stories of a kind. They are all writing. I hope you find them encouraging and inspiring, and will look for similar moments in your own lives. I hope you’ll write them down.

I hope a beginner or frustrated non-beginner might benefit from this series of posts about getting started as a writer, but I am also doing this for myself.

Today, I have more ideas than I could possibly turn into stories before I croak. I also aspire to say something through those ideas and stories and, regardless of any eventual readership, it’s important for me to do so. I write for me. Anyone else is a bonus reader.

In my younger days, I was not so confident or self-contained. I struggled with what to say and how to say it. I had ideas for stories, many of them slightly used, and because they were borrowed, they didn’t inspire any great writing. My unique experiences – family, school, growing up – felt boring and meaningless. The parts that might have made for good dramatic fiction were too difficult to write about.

I didn’t have a voice. Or rather, I had a voice, but I hated it and was certain other people would hate it too. I had not lived any kind of exciting life. In fact, I’d describe my childhood as cloistered, bordering on suffocating. I grew up in a religious culture that romanticized journal writing and I tried once or twice to keep one, but the very few entries I managed ran no longer than two dozen words and were limited to details like Went to school today. Had a math quiz. I bored even myself. And if the occasional high-emotion moment did occur at school, it was of the type I did not wish to recall, especially for future generations.

College opened my horizons exponentially, but I still found no connection between the authors I now loved and the life I’d lived up to then. I was no great existentialist thinker or Czech absurdist dying of consumption. I had not lived through either World War or even Viet Nam. I had no great insights about being gay in the middle of the AIDS crisis, and I was gay in the middle of the AIDS crisis. I saw no link between the creative work I loved and what I knew. I had nothing to say about anything important. There was only one course of action.

I had to become someone else.

This was wrong. Not only was that not the only course of action, it was the completely wrong course of action. Every time I thought I moved forward in my writing, I actually went backwards. Every time I learned something new about craft, I knew less about myself. I avoided being who I was, which made it impossible for me to become the person I could be.

Today, that high school or college kid might read my writing and think I’m doing pretty well. And I am. But old me looks back at those boys and wishes I could tell them they are important. That they don’t have to pretend to be someone else or hide any part of themselves to be loved.

I’d tell them to write like no one will read it, because that’s the truth. I’d explain that maybe life is shitty and confusing, but it’s still ok to write about it, along with any hurtful or humiliating things people have done, and in fact, writing is your best path towards healing and understanding. Anne Lamott famously said that if people wanted you to write warmly about them, they should have behaved better. This applies to you to. It’s ok to write about the days when you weren’t doing your best.

I’d like to tell them that what they say is original because it’s theirs, unique because it is theirs, and that no one else will ever be able to say exactly what they say in the way they say it, and that is enough. That is all they need. I would beg them to not waste their time trying to be anyone but themselves, because that is who they are going to be eventually anyway.

But I can’t go back there, so I’m going to tell you.

Ground Rules

I hate giving advice I don’t follow, so I will write with you as we go.

As I point you to places where you might find your raw material, I’ll share some of mine. If I suggest a writing prompt that might help you get started writing, I will try the same trick and post my results. When I talk about the roadblocks and pitfalls, I’ll tell you about the times I ran head-first into them.

The writing life ain’t all cakes and cream. I find it helpful to know that other people hit hard times, and I think you will too.

For the next few months, I’m going to talk about writing, specifically the foundational step of starting to write. You have the desire, but now what? What should I write about? Where do ideas come from? Many writers wrestle with these questions without realizing they already have the answers, if they simply knew where to look for them. I struggled with them, and since I’m not a unicorn, I assume there are more of you out there with the same conundrum.

Where do we find inspiration? In the traditional workshop setting, writers are taught to look for ideas outside themselves or externally. You might have been given writing prompts or told that story ideas can be found in the local Sunday newspaper. When you found none, you might have thrown the paper down in disgust and vowed to move to another, more interesting city. You might have been inspired by a book or film, or been tempted to steal a juicy story that happened to someone else. This might have worked, but more often it didn’t.

For every borrowed idea that succeeds, you will have at least 25 that are weak, uninspired, or derivative, because the idea itself is external to you. Put another way, you found the idea, but it didn’t come from you.

The problem is that we are taught the idea will present itself, so we expect to see the neon arrow pointing at the Great Idea. Sometimes, you may spot an idea in the wild, and please use whatever material you find this way, but it won’t happen often. And when it doesn’t, we feel deficient. Our gurus told us that ideas are everywhere, so there must be something wrong with our brains. Maybe we’re not up to the job.

I argue – and wish I had known – that the best ideas, the stories that drive you, that you must write, come from within. They are internal. And when we can’t find any, that’s still where we need to look, only more deeply and thoroughly. That’s where the obstacle hides.

In Bird by Bird, Anne Lamott wrote “Anyone who survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of his or her life.” I didn’t believe that when I read it for the first time 30+ years ago. With added mileage and context, I believe it now. You have more material in your head than you will be able to write in your lifetime, if only you could identify it as material.

Through the rest of this blog series, I’m not going to talk about writing stories or even generating story ideas, but on discovering your base raw material. That might sound like three words for the same thing, but it’s not. Crafting premises and transforming them into a story are actually entirely different topics.

Instead, I’ll suggest places to look for your raw material and exercises to help you dig for it. Occasionally, I will write with you, to demonstrate my thoughts in action. By sharing what I know, I hope I can help you cut down on that 30+ year learning curve.

And maybe, you’ll find your own ideas and some stories worth telling.

Who am I writing for?

I’m writing for anyone who wonders how to get started or even to feel inspired, more connected to their writing and their voice, regardless of your age or writing experience. We all have to start somewhere, and while a lot of us start in our youth, I know many writers who came to it in their second or third act.

Longtime writers who feel uninspired or disconnected from their work may also find something of value. When you feel lost, sometimes the best place to look is inside.

If you don’t believe you already have enough material for the rest of your life, or believe your thoughts are mediocre or dull, or believe no one would be interested in your voice, I’m writing with you in mind and I would like to say: You do. They aren’t. We are.

This is what I wish I’d known.

Ground Rules

Before we begin, let’s set some ground rules and also let’s make this as painless as possible by setting only one rule, the only one you absolutely must follow.

You must write.

That’s it. The #1 (and Only) Rule of Writing is that you must do it. It’s not enough to want to do it, think about doing it, or complain about doing it. You must sit still and engage in the physical act of writing.

That’s it. That’s all the rules.

As you study, you will read a lot of advice camouflaged as rules. Some of this advice is very good, but much of it is based on the preferences of the person sharing it. Even if you find that 10 out of 10 writers agree that a piece of advice is very, very good, so good in fact that it should be a rule chipped into stone, you will also find a separate cadre of creative people who do not abide by this advice and have written successfully while ignoring it.

Every writer – every writer – has their own approach to creativity and the work they produce. There is no single correct way to explore or express your creativity. Eight billion people on this planet have the capacity for creative expression and each of us goes about it differently.

I wish someone had told me that.

I will argue that it’s important to understand the rules of writing, including how they work and why we have them, so that you can break them intelligently and with flair, but none of them are inviolate.

Except for Rule #1. You don’t have to publish, you don’t have to show it to anyone. It doesn’t even have to be good writing, not yet. But you must put it down.

Seriously. This is all you have to do.

Caveat

As with any writing about the craft of writing, your mileage may vary. Not all advice works for every writer or for every story. Engage with the content and material in any way that makes the most sense for you. If a suggestion is not relevant to your creative work or doesn’t jibe with your vision, ignore it.

In the interest of brevity, I will phrase my observations and advice with direct statements. Please accept all of my statements as opinion, even where they don’t begin with “In my opinion…”

Now let’s write.

We are almost midway through 2026 so this is a good time for a reintroduction. For those joining the blog in progress, I am Will.

Over the years, I’ve written a little bit of everything – short stories, plays, poems, journalism, a few novels. I’ve been blogging regularly since 2023, the year I recklessly challenged myself to post something every day for a full year, simply to see if I could do it. I did. I’ve scaled back, but the forced compliance with daily posting helped me develop confidence, topics, and a voice. I wouldn’t do it again anytime soon, but my Blog Year was a sharp turn in my writing road. I was doing it for me, and that was important.

Over that time, my writing improved. I write faster, with more surety. I’ve shored up some of my weak spots and have a better eye for my flaws. I have a stronger grasp on what I want to say and feel confident that it’s worth saying. I feel I have something to contribute, which is new for me.

But with this growth has come regret. There are writing concepts – particularly around the art of writing, theme, and voice – that I wish I’d understood when I was younger. I wasted a lot of time feeling like I didn’t have anything to say, that I hadn’t any original or even interesting thoughts. I wondered how some writers seemed to have high concept ideas spilling out of their fingertips, when every story I wrote felt trite or went nowhere. I believed my life itself was boring, that I needed some grand experience or learned wisdom before I could create something worthwhile. I thought I needed to sound like Someone, with a capital S. That particular Someone was not me and yet all the other Someones I tried to be did not fit. I wanted so badly to write something great, but felt I had nothing to work with.

I know better now. I’m a stronger writer today because I have written a few million words and because I continue studying and practicing craft. Craft takes time, and you never stop learning.

But it should not have taken me all those years to understand that life had already given me everything I needed for the art of writing, the answer to the question of what to write about and why and why it’s important and what that should sound like. I had it already when I was 20 but I didn’t know that I did.

As I’ve devoted more time to my creative work these last few years, I haven’t discovered anything new but I’ve learned to recognize what I already have, all the experiences and emotions I believed were inconsequential. I’ve learned to trust those experiences. I have learned to love them, even the parts that are shameful or sad, which are the parts that need our love most of all. I hope that what I write might entertain or move or comfort or inspire someone, but even if it doesn’t, it’s still worth the writing. Even if I’m my only reader, it’s worth it.

I wish I had realized I had all this when I was younger. I wish someone had taught me how to see it. I wish my books and teachers had spent some time on the writer, and not merely on the writing.

And it occurred to me: Maybe someone else would be interested in hearing what I’ve learned. Perhaps there are other young – or not young – writers who would benefit from having this conversation now, instead of waiting ten or twenty or forty years for the realization to arrive.

Maybe I should write this down.

So next week, we begin.

Write with me.

Who are your literary forebears?

The Oglala Lakota holy man Nicholas Black Elk (1863–1950) taught that humanity is fundamentally interconnected with all creation, and that we are united by a Great Spirit that lives within every aspect of the natural world—people, animals, the waters, and the green.

Whether we recognize it or not, writers are also interconnected with other writers, our living peers and those who came before. Every writer is first a reader, and then becomes a reader inspired to emulation. We each have a unique, unreproducible voice, but we are also part of a stream of writers that includes authors we have read and many we have not, but whose work shaped our culture and ways of writing, and showed what was possible in our creative world.

Where do you fit in this long storytelling tradition? Just for fun, trace your writing lineage along whatever branches you choose – writers in your genre, writers who look like you, writers who have a similar background. Imagine yourself as one part of this great whole and feel their work inside you as well.

When I consider the writers who inspired me to become a writer or leant something to my POV or tone of voice, a few names come to mind:

• Alex Raymond
• Charles Schulz
• Franz Kafka
• Max Frisch
• Ethan Mordden
• Marge Piercy
• Patricia Highsmith
• John Irving
• Sylvia Plath

That may seem a disjointed – and possibly unhinged – collection of writers, but each of them left a mark, from my love of epic fiction to my bent towards melancholy and empathy for characters for whom life never quite seems to work out. They helped me explore questions of identity, sexuality, violence, and politics, and influenced my habit of (mostly) true confession.

There are others – John Preston, Andre Gide, Agatha Christie, Margaret Atwood, too many poets to name – but those who made the list either are a special influence or were simply the first of their type to enter my world. There are others I wish I could name – Ray Bradbury, John Waters, Kurt Vonnegut – but as much as I love them, I can’t hear their echoes in my voice.

Whom do you consider part of your writer’s family tree? Do you extend off a single branch or were you – like me – cross-pollinated from multiple sources?

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In his weekly newsletters, James Clear (Atomic Habits) shares three quotes to motivate and inspire his readers to expand their view of the world and work towards their best possible life.

Here is a recent quote that I liked very much:

Many of the best things in life are endless.

Being in a great relationship. Staying fit and healthy. Doing work that fulfills you. Being a good parent, coach, or teacher.

Stop worrying about accomplishing these things and instead focus on building a life where you continually practice them.

The important stuff has no finish line.

Improving your craft as a writer and becoming the best version of your self is endless.

I hope you never finish.

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Writers are archaeologists, constantly digging into the past. Some of us mine personal experiences for memoir, autobio-fiction, or fictionalized versions of our lives. Others take pieces of what they’ve observed, learned, felt, or experienced and knit them together to create something unrecognizable. We make use of our good stuff, even when the events themselves might have sucked.

Have you ever considered your past not in light of what you might use in your writing, but in a meta way, contemplating how your past shapes your desire to write, the kind of stories you create, and the themes you examine?

100 writers can take the same premise and create 100 different stories. In some cases, we night not even realize the authors began with the same scenario or phrase. Why does one writer explore dread and depravity in a horror novel while another tries to make sense of the present by speculating about a distant future? Why does one writer create expansive historical dramas while another writes intimate existential tales that are no more than a snapshot in a day in the life of a single character?

The answer is that we are shaped by what we’ve observed, learned, felt, and experienced, all the good and the bad. The real-life details we drop into our fiction therefore inform – probably unconsciously – the type of writer we are. We come to our work with a point of view and choose our genres and themes accordingly. We assert: This is what it means to be alive. This is how we experience and understand life. Here is a lens that will help you navigate and understand existence.

Similarly, our experiences inform why we engage in the act of writing itself. We need an outlet for our feelings. We feel called to point out injustice or celebrate beauty in an ugly world. We want to entertain. We want to reveal. We want to escape. We want to control the process and the outcome. We need a happy ending. We want to have a conversation. We need to be heard. We need to feel alive.

Considering how life has shaped your desire to write and the kind of work you create, is there a single word you can use to describe yourself? You might express this as I am ­­­­­­­­__________ or perhaps as I need ­­­­­­­­__________. You might have a few words or several phrases, perhaps one for why you write, another for your genre, and one that describes your themes.

To the question of why I write, my first phrase is I need to know.

I grew up in a family that did not communicate. I don’t mean we avoided philosophical discussions or heart to heart conversations, but that we did not engage in normal everyday conversation. Our parents didn’t ask us about anything. They didn’t tell us anything. Our questions might be met with stony silence or a vague, yet convoluted, response that answered nothing. They didn’t give us advice on how to navigate life. As my sister often jokes, they didn’t teach us to say “please” and “thank you”. They kept secrets and expected us to do the same. We were not to discuss what went on in our house.

In school, I was always 2-3 years ahead of my age group academically, and 2-3 years behind socially. Observing the other kids, it was clear they knew things I didn’t. They used words or discussed situations I’d heard about but didn’t know the meaning of. But I couldn’t ask anyone for this information. The kids would have laughed and the adults wouldn’t have answered. Most of the time, I didn’t know the questions to ask. If I did stumble upon a specific question, it was of the crude playground variety, which cannot be posed to an adult. I was smart enough to know that much.

Four of my parents’ five children have/had careers in various kinds of communications – book and magazine publishing, marketing, journalism, research and academic writing, learning products and educational design. We were dropped out into the world wholly unprepared for what we’d find, but with a strong need to talk. To be heard. To communicate.

I write because I need to know things, and there’s no one to ask. I write to view the world from different angles. I write to figure out why a person makes their choices, connecting what’s visible and knowable, and extrapolating the rest. I write because sometimes I may have three distinct, wholly unrelated facts that trouble me, and when I place them against each other, a fuller picture begins to form. I write to understand myself and to look forward to what might become of me and to examine unanswerable questions.

I write because secrets are scary and I feel more secure when I understand what’s going on around me, even if I can only guess at part of it. I know where I fit in. I can imagine what someone else may be going through. If I don’t have facts, at least I have theories. I can work with that.

To the question of what I write, my second phrase is I am flawed but I am worthy.

I don’t write through a lens of any particular genre. I like literary fiction and light sci-fi and gritty fantasy and social satire and murder mysteries and even the occasional superhero novel. When I was younger, I leaned heavily into literary fiction. I hope that my work has a bit more voice and flavor than the average potboiler, but I no longer feel bound to contemporary drama or slice of life fiction. In the moment, those forms helped me figure out who I am, and these days I am slightly more interested in other people.

However, my protagonists are of a type. They are not always likeable. They are usually outcasts of one kind or another, even lacking the ragtag group of misfits most oddball protagonists are gifted. They are stubborn and sometimes unkind, but also sometimes they are kind. Their attempts to do good often backfire or fall short. They have a strong moral compass and sense of self that can give them succor in times of trial but also lead them to lonely, dangerous ground. They have a code. They have faith. They have pain and have learned to live with it, and sometimes they reenact it.

My heroes fuck up. They might lash out in anger or act selfishly. If there’s a lesson to be learned, there’s a good chance they’ll misinterpret it. Sometimes their mistakes are accidental, and sometimes they are accidental on purpose. They may make a bad choice because they’ve already tried all the goods ones and those didn’t work. Often their sin is simply being where they are not wanted while being ignorant they are not wanted.

My heroes get lost. They don’t belong. But they stubbornly, ferociously maintain their dignity, seeking meaning and connection in a world that keeps them at arm’s length. They may be defeated but they do not give in, even when surrendering might be the best choice. When doubling down is an option, they’ll take it. My heroes are fully themselves in a world that wants them to be something else.

The type of story world is irrelevant. Only their role matters. These are not stories I could have written when I was younger. These are tales of scars.

I write about lost, messy people because I am sometimes lost and messy. Perdidi, perdidi, et iterum perdidam. I fuck up, I have fucked up, and I will fuck up again. Perhaps not as grandly as my fictional protagonists, but still. Like them, I can act out in anger or selfishness. I can be capricious. And yes, often my biggest failing is wandering into an arena where I do not belong, for example into a family where we were made to keep silent.

Mistakes do not define us. We are more than the sum of our worst hours. And being different does not render us less than. It doesn’t matter that we are flawed. It doesn’t matter that people don’t like us. We are worthy and we have stories.

Do you have a word or phrase in mind? Or a few words? Consider how this expression supports your creative practice or appears in your writing as a theme, motif, or conflict. Embrace this idea about yourself and sit with it awhile to fully appreciate and understand how it’s helping you.

I suspect you’ll discover that your words or phrases are an important part of your writerly voice. This strong concept of yourself comes through in the kind of stories you choose to write, the themes you explore, and how you craft your sentences and scenes. Voice is difficult to define and develop, but at heart, voice is who you are and these questions can help you conceptualize yourself as a writer.

Take a few moments to celebrate yourself. These inquiries go to the core of who you are and why you create. They are part of what makes you you. These concepts are why your stories are uniquely your own.

Whatever you write, no one can do it like you can.

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The great danger for most of us is not that our aim is too high and we miss it, but that it is too low and we reach it. —Michelangelo

This past year or so, I’ve been working to reactivate my moribund capacity to dream big. Bear witness: I’ve never given up on writing. I love writing. It brings me joy, it keeps me sane. I am myself when I write. I have stories and stories and stories – some of them not finished and some not particularly good – packed away.

But I long ago gave up on making money writing short stories or novels, what we used to call having a career in writing. I’m old enough to remember an era when novelists earned real advances. And if the halcyon days when F. Scott Fitzgerald could buy a mansion selling short fiction died with him, in the 1980s and 90s a story might still be worth the time it took to write it. However, I learned early on that this gold wasn’t intended to pan out, for a variety of reasons.

Other dreams died harder. When I started college, I envisioned late night discussion on art and literature, opportunities for creative collaborations, DIY theater and open mics in old warehouses and smoky bars. Aside from some rare moments, this life also didn’t manifest, also for a variety of reasons. Though tempted, I’ll resist oversharing. Life, bad choices, bad luck. That’s all it was really.

So I trimmed back. I shrank my dreams. But the funny thing about dreams is that they can never be too small. There will always be more to cut. The less space you make for them, the less they need. When you don’t ask for much, the world is very happy to accommodate. This is also true of lovers.

But it’s time for me to light a small fire under those dreams. Not the money dreams. I’m not mental. Ok, yes, I have an Oscar speech ready, but I’m not crazy. But the others? Good friendships and camaraderie with fellow writers, long talks about craft and story theory, creative team-ups, sharing my work, creating things in the real world? Those dreams are worth cultivating.

A year ago, I took a few baby steps towards that life I’d always envisioned. I wondered if I were too late, if the curtain had come down before I found my seat. But on the other hand, I’m a smart guy. I learn from mistakes. Not always quickly, but I work it out. I thought it was worth a shot.

So far, so good.

I’m having bigger dreams now. Not the big dreams of my youth, but bigger than I allowed myself even a few years ago. And the funny thing about dreams is that they can never be too big. There is always room to grow. The more space you give them, the more they need. The dreams I have today are modest, but I’m giving them their room and I’m confident they will expand.

And the greatest part? Every day when I sit down to write, I feel inspired. I’m ready. I’m anxious to get to work on whatever is next. I’m excited to meet with my writers group every month and – being greedy – am thinking about ways I can have more.

I’ve said before that I feel like I’m starting Act I at an age when I should be on Act III or IV. But also, I’m a bit wiser now, a lot more jealous of my time. I’m more focused. I have a stronger vision of myself, a lot less ego, and the rewards I’m chasing are internal. I appreciate this experience so much more. As a man once said, This is the best drink of water after the longest drought in my life.

We should all dream big. What dreams would inspire you to create something every day? What would you do if you spent your life creating at your highest level?

Think of your biggest creative dream – no matter how crazy – and how it would feel to commit to fulfilling it. What does your most outrageous and positive writing life look like? What would you be doing if you were living all-out?

If you were confident you could not fail, what would you do?

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