The most important thing you know is what you feel.

Everyone has feelings of some kind. A person may experience them strongly or not, express them or not, feel them in their physical body or not, but they exist.

Emotions drive us, guide us, and trouble us. They can be confusing and annoying. They often get in the way of our ability to make good choices or pursue our goals. Emotions are valid but they also lie. People can live long lives without ever learning to moderate or even name their feelings, but they have them.

Unlike opinion or even factual knowledge, emotions are incontestable. If you feel sad, no one can tell you that you don’t. They might try, but they are wrong. Your feelings may occasionally lead you astray, but no one can tell dispute what you feel, even if there’s more going on than what’s apparent at first glance. Even when your feelings are confusing, they exist.

Understanding emotion is a vital component of creative writing, and the best place to start your search for understanding is within.

Why is this important?

“I’ve learned that people will forget what you said, people will forget what you did, but people will never forget how you made them feel.”
― Maya Angelou

Long after readers have finished your book or story, they might not remember every character name or plot turn, but they will remember how you made them feel. Readers often describe their favorite books not in context of craft but of the emotions they felt, such as a sense of hope, comfort, reassurance, or joy. A thriller or horror novel might evoke fear, excitement, awe, or power. Your science fiction novel might create feelings of wonder and optimism. A magazine article or blog post might make readers feel confident, like an insider, or even smug.

Feelings are the connective tissue of your fiction. A thrilling plot may fall flat if the reader doesn’t feel anything, but a commonplace premise can be elevated by a strong emotional underpinning.

“No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader.”
― Robert Frost

It follows that the better you understand your emotions and the more capable you become of mining them for your work, the better you will connect with your reader in fiction.

Where do you start?

It might help to have an inventory. There’s no need to recreate the wheel when you’ve probably seen the one below, which has been going around the internet for years. I wasn’t able to track down an original source to give proper credit. There are multiple versions, but this one is commonly used in educational and life coaching settings, and has appeared on numerous writing blogs.

When the various emotional states are parsed in this manner, it’s easy to see why emotions can be confusing. You may recognize you feel sad, but is your sadness triggered by guilt, helplessness, loneliness, or boredom? Names are important. As in any magical system, knowing the names of things gives you power over them. If not power, at least some understanding.

Earlier in this series, I started a conversation about the shame cycle and how it can inhibit our creativity. We are often taught that certain people, events, or ideas are not to be discussed, certainly not written about. Considering the above list, are there any emotions you were taught not to express?

Anger isn’t polite. Don’t appear too eager. Don’t get your hopes up. Never let them see you sweat. Don’t ask too many questions.

Were you taught that some of the emotions on the color wheel were unseemly, stupid, or even nonexistent? Did you get in trouble if one slipped out? What were the repercussions? Did you get grounded when you expressed anger? Were you teased when you showed fear?

How do you start?

It might be best to start simply. Most of us don’t spend a lot of time contemplating the nuances of emotion, so this exercise may feel awkward or even daunting. You may have to overcome conditioning that warned you against talking about your feelings.

Go around the wheel and write down the emotions that resonate. Write down whatever immediately comes to mind. You might recall a person or specific event that made you feel that way. There might be a person, object, or event that represents the emotion for you. Perhaps an era of your life was dominated by one emotion or one of the color sections. High school. Mom’s second marriage. Summer after graduation. The year on unemployment. Write that down.

There might even be one emotion that’s dominated your entire life.

“That’s my secret, Cap. I’m always angry.”
― Mark Ruffalo as Bruce Banner/The Hulk in The Avengers

Dig deeper

As you continue, you may find that the exercise gets progressively easier. When you write about one memory, another will attach itself and move forward. Keep writing.

If you’re struggling – writing about emotion can be hard – don’t pile on the pressure. Writing exercises aren’t a race. They’re practice. Go around the wheel and write down simple statements of emotional fact. You may have begun by simply filling in blanks.

I get angry when _____________.

__________ makes me feel sad.

I’m afraid of _______________.

I worry about _______________.

I feel disgusted by ____________.

You don’t need to write a statement for every emotion, only those that prompt you. When you’ve exhausted your list, go back and choose one to examine further.

What does this look like as a story?

Perhaps your fear statement was “I’m afraid of snakes.” This fear didn’t come from nowhere, but likely originated at a specific time and place, perhaps in your back yard or at school. Write down that memory and then explore it further.

The key to writing about abstract emotions is attaching them to something concrete – a person, object, or event. You might be tempted to find 27 words meaning fear, but instead describe the time, the place, and circumstances of your anger. Describe the physical sensations of your body without using the word fear. Write what you did or would have liked to do in the moment, again without identifying the emotion.

What was going on around your experience of fear? What triggered it? Who was there? Was anyone else afraid? Who wasn’t afraid? Were you comforted or teased? Did you tell anyone about the experience or your fear? Describe the setting and people in as much detail as possible. What other emotions come forward?

In this hypothetical example, a kid finding a snake in the backyard might feel fear first, then a sense of violation, as the safety of home is called into question. If no adults are around, the child might feel helpless or abandoned. In a school setting, the child might be worried being teased for being afraid of a snake. They might feel isolated if their emotional response doesn’t mirror their friend’s, or they might be ashamed of themselves for not being brave.

Emotions travel in packs. We tend to feel the broad emotion first – happy, sad, angry, disgust, fear, surprise – and only later whittle that down to the nuanced feeling. We often feel two or three things at once, as in the above example – worry, isolation, shame. Pro tip: Emotions amplify each other. Fear compounded by shame is much stronger than fear alone.

When you zero in on an emotion, focus on concrete detail, look for the sub-layer or amplifying emotions, and see how rich your writing becomes, even at this early stage.

In an earlier post, I made the distinction between what we write and what we write about. In the above example, being scared by a snake is the story, but feeling helpless, abandoned, embarrassed, or ashamed is what the story is about.

Why are you always talking about childhood?

Good question.

I’ve already quoted Anne Lamott saying that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of their lives. In If You Want to Write, Brenda Ueland also wrote of asking her students to write about their childhood memories.

“And I asked for childhood experiences for this reason. A child experiences things from his true self (creatively) and not from his theoretical self (dutifully), i.e., the self he thinks he ought to be. This is why childhood memories are the most living and sparkling and true.”
― Brenda Ueland, If You Want to Write

Childhood emotions are powerful. Our early years are a cascading series of new experiences, including emotional. If we put thought into it, we could likely point to our first remembered encounter with fear, affection, or offense. These new experiences land harder. They feel bigger. A first experience with shame may be confusing, because it comes with no warning or explanation. We don’t know what it means and we might not even have a name for it.

Why? Kids are bombarded with new feelings, but can’t put them into context. They don’t have any practice moderating their emotions, or emotional traffic signals to put them on pause or slow them down. Kids don’t yet have negative experiences to add melancholy to their first feelings of love, so crushes loom larger. They don’t have memories of overcoming difficulty to leaven their first big disappointment, so failing can seem catastrophic.

Children also lack filters. An emotion bubbles up, so an emotion is expressed, no matter how inappropriate. Ueland shares a story about a child who had witnessed a funeral and wished her grandfather would die so that she could go to one. In her innocence, the girl had no context for death or what it would mean for her grandfather to actually die. She only knew that people dressed up for funerals and brought flowers, and decided she’d like to attend one. An adult expressing this wish would give even the most open-minded person pause.

As adults, we tend to forget what it was like to be a kid. Many find children unfathomable, unknowable, illogical, perplexing. But the truth is kids are emotion engines. If they are unfathomable, unknowable, illogical, and perplexing, so is life, and this is how they experience it.

That’s not to say we don’t have big feelings in adulthood, but in my experience, these emotional highs tend to be more complex, often combining multiple and even conflicting emotions. In childhood, our foundational emotions are more pure. As you write what you feel, look for those big childhood memories. Don’t add nuance or context, or apologize for your younger self’s selfishness, naivete, or melodrama. Remember what those pure experiences felt like, and add context later.

When you want to feel emotional fire, go back. When you want to make sense of emotions, come forward.

What do you mean by context?

Context comes with experience and understanding. Adults have feelings too but unless we are under extreme duress, we do a better job regulating them. We can control our anger so that we don’t get fired from our jobs or get into a fistfight. We swallow our pride to apologize, even if we don’t mean it this time.

Here is a thought experiment. Imagine you are at a shopping mall with your mom. Maybe your mom is not in the picture, for whatever reason, but imagine. Pick another person in your life who served as a trusted adult.

Imagine you have separated and agreed to meet at a specific place in the mall at a specific time. If your mom is a few minutes late, even fifteen minutes late, you are not likely to worry. If you are window shopping or otherwise entertaining yourself, you might not even notice. Experience has taught you that people can run a little late. Your mom may have lost track of time or might be waiting in a long checkout line.

Now imagine you are a child, eight or twelve years old. Your mom said to meet her at noon at by a certain exit and she is late. How does child-you feel? In your experience, your mom is never late. She has drilled into you the importance of punctuality. She may have levied a mild threat of punishment if you did not adhere to the agreed upon time.

For the first few minutes, you might not think anything of it, but after five minutes or ten, you might start to worry. Time goes by much more slowly for children than adults, so a ten minute delay may feel like hours, especially if fear starts to gnaw. If you were an imaginative child – as I was – you might think something bad has happened. Maybe she forgot you had come along and drove home without you. Maybe your mom is hurt. Maybe some ailment has befallen her, or maybe something has happened to her – some person has happened to her – as you have heard on the news happening to other women.

Imagine the difference in how you might feel as an adult and how you’d feel as that child. Scanning faces and bodies for your familiar mom. Wondering if you should go look for her. Wondering who will help. Is there a security guard? Will the people working in the shops help you or not take you seriously? Can the other shoppers be trusted?

When you consider your feelings, write freely and with vigor about whatever comes to mind. Follow your feelings to wherever they lead. But when you have your list of feelings to consider, also look back as far as you can, to times in your childhood when you felt these emotions for the first time or most strongly.

I knew going in this post would be tough, but I promised to write with you. Since I suggested you write down what you know, I will also do the homework.

FML.

Early in my writing life, as a student, I was Very Serious about write what you know. Write about your life. Write about things you know a lot about. I took this to heart and because I have a bad habit of being literal minded, I did not look for a nuanced interpretation. In my defense, my writing teachers presented this advice in its most basic form, suggesting that students write about our jobs or an interesting relative or that one time at band camp.

If a writer was supposed to write what you know, by god, that’s what I was going to do. But I had a problem.

I didn’t know shit.

I’d never experienced that one time at band camp. I was never a very social kid and thanks to my parents, we were estranged from nearly every member of both sides of our extended family. I didn’t have any special skills. I had just started a crappy retail job to pay for college. I wrote a lot of anecdotes about my family, my college campus, and my job, but nothing that moved me.

Today, I have another problem.

I still don’t know shit.

My life was and is boring. I’m risk averse. I don’t sky dive. I don’t have addiction issues. I’ve never lived in my car. I don’t own a gun. I don’t involve myself as a third player in other people’s relationships. I show up for work and pay my bills on time, even when I don’t feel like it. I do not want to live in interesting times.

I’m severely lacking in basic survival skills. I function in the kitchen, but neither cook nor bake to any great effect. I cannot perform the work of a carpenter, plumber, interior designer, contractor, or electrician. I have no specialized background of the type that lends itself to drama – lawyer, doctor, police officer, cowboy. I cannot write with any accuracy about the life a stripper or the Village People.

I’m useless with cars. I hate gardening. I have killed a cactus.

The arts? I write, but as well noted, the trope of the writer writing about the struggles of the writer has been beaten to death. I have acted in small roles in garage productions and enjoy painting and drawing, but could not teach you anything special about theater or art. I know nothing about music other than what I like and I cannot sing. I don’t care about fashion.

I attended college, but could not afford to live on campus and had to work to pay my way, so I missed all of what should have been formative experiences, both the grand and mundane (and humiliating). I’ve done a lot of volunteer work, for community centers, small theater companies. I’ve shepherded loved ones through health issues and helped care for two elderly parents. But while these were things I did, I don’t feel sufficiently proficient in any of them to assert that I know them, to the extent I could deploy them in fiction.

Because that’s what write what you know means, right? You know enough about a topic to portray it in fiction, to give the reader a sense of place and time, to create verisimilitude. You create moments of recognition. A reader with similar experiences will appreciate your authenticity, and may recognize events that have occurred in their lives. You could teach this class.

Do I know anything?

I know a little bit about a lot of things. I hoard trivia and nuggets of information. As a kid, I was an avid comic book reader and so today I’m able to catch the references and easter eggs in superhero movies that a lot of people miss. I’m available for parties!

I know a little bit about art, a bit more about writing. I have eclectic tastes in film and music but can speak reasonably intelligently about various artists and artistic movements, but could not teach a class. I can tell you about federal government contract law and regulations, but I’d rather you not ask. I’m good with Excel. I’m reasonably proficient at desktop publishing and podcasting.

So far, I’m failing to see any relevance to fiction.

My jobs?

Comic store clerk, bank teller, department store stockroom, receptionist, very low paid intermittent newspaper writer, call center goon, call center goon, call center goon, book store clerk, call center management staff, client account manager, arts & crafts store clerk, writer, content developer, webinar creator, podcaster, managing editor, project manager.

Once I got my feet under me, my jobs got progressively better, but I’ve not reached the height of any large corporation nor run for office nor worked for a politician for pay or as a significant volunteer. I am no cutthroat. When I was younger, I applied for work that would have provided some grist for write what you know – roller skating rink disc jockey, community center activities manager, 911 dispatcher – but alas, I have the in-person charm of a call center goon.

If I were serious about the writing thing, I should have gotten a job at Waffle House, but instead I know a lot about cubicles, stupid corporate HR policies, angry customers, federal contract law, and again, comic books. Unless there’s a clamor for an inside look at stacking dishes in a department store kitchenware department or talking to angry electric company customers, I’m not going to get far. Worse, I’ve been working from home for the last 20 years, so I don’t even have the chance to observe interesting characters in the wild.

As you can see, if I limit myself to writing what I know – facts and skills and various bits of know-how – I am well and truly fucked. Fortunately, the definition of knowledge is expansive.

I wish I had known that.

Today, I know so many other things.

Thank god.

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?

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

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.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

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