Writing What Matters Most to You

Do you live your writing—whatever you choose to write about is what you believe? Do your values show up on the page? If you rage about injustice, does the topic travel into your story?

I’ve been wondering about this. About our human need to express ourselves creatively, to have the freedom to talk about what matters most to us. Good and necessary, in my opinion.

But, a catch. Or several.

In school, we’re taught to “shape” our writing. We’re told to keep the reader in mind. We’re told to keep a judicial distance. Maybe check our more extreme emotions at the door. Keep the horror we’ve experienced diluted so the reader doesn’t run.

How many times have I worked with a writer who felt this constraint! Who was afraid of scaring a reader with her life’s graphic details. Who changed a tone then couldn’t sell her piece to readers who loved her “other” voice. Who became concerned about reader reaction more than anything else.

Me too, as it turns out. Often enough to notice a story stuck in the throat, choked off by concern about how it’s going to change the way people view me.

Don’t keep quiet. We writers need freedom to express. That’s certain.

But there’s also the maturing of how we express, what openings we create for a reader to join our important conversation.

That’s the tricky line we walk. Learning to write well, to express fully and satisfyingly the values and beliefs that are most important to us, while we also engage the reader (so we’re not talking to ourselves in the mirror).

I see this process as two distinct stages.

The first is sleuthing out what we truly believe, what matters most. Not as easy as it sounds. Beliefs surface to our awareness in layers, peeled like an onion as we experience one life turn then another. A belief about what’s a worthwhile friendship might take years to develop. A belief about justice or equality another decade. Or maybe we’re confronted with unexpected trauma, a near-death illness or profound loss. It kicks us into a different consciousness, and we realize some truth long buried.

Some layers are tough, justifiably protecting vulnerability underneath. Rage might hide sadness; anger is an easier, more effective armor and sadness leaves us too vulnerable.

Enough of these containment shields? Our most important values stay buried for years. That’s one reason I write: to uncover my own layers. To find out what really matters to me.

Dessert was an occasion at our house when I was growing up. My father loved his sweets. My mother’s apple pie was top favorite. Dad, mellowed by a piece of warm homemade pie, tolerated more of my persistent questions. I found him a fascinating man: smart and scholarly, a college drop-out, impatient with his jobs, involved with computer technology in its infancy. He struggled to be a father in the 1950s, to keep money coming in. His tastes and Southern refinement clashed with our cash-poor lifestyle, but food was one landscape where we both felt at home. Those conversations at the dinner table, especially over dessert, are rich memories.

If there was no homemade pie, if a sour mood or a long day’s commute or poor relations with his boss rattled him, he’d cut me off. “That’s not dinner-table conversation.” I heard this enough times to learn reluctant containment of wilder ideas and edgy thoughts.

But food was modeled as an acceptable topic—that pie! When I happened on a career, I felt at home as a cook, cooking teacher, then food journalist. I wrote for magazines and newspapers. I crafted a weekly syndicated cooking column for twelve years. Embedded in each 600-word offering was always a small anecdote, sculpted for a readers like my dad who preferred the sweet stuff.

I kept my personal opinions and my more savory life out of it.

Only one reader wrote me care of one of my syndicated papers to complain bitterly about my view on some ingredient—I don’t remember which—and my obvious ignorance about cooking. Overall, writing about food remained acceptable “dinner-table conversation” and a safe way to be a writer in the world.

We grow, though. I grew tired of the safety of this genre. This was long before food-slinging celebrity chefs. I was just someone who loved to cook and eat. But I was accumulating edgier things to say in my writing than how to make the perfect lemon mousse.

Around that time, I became very affected by a friend’s story of falling in love with a black musician. She was white, living in New Orleans in the sixties under the terrible hardship of miscegenation laws (they weren’t repealed until 1972). She told me about nights in jail, the struggle to love outside acceptable norms. An area of life I didn’t understand personally back then, this idea of loving whomever you love, despite society’s “rules.” Her dilemma brought up deep feelings in me, and I longed to explore them in my writing.

Years passed. I began writing a story about a young girl, Molly, who falls in love in her sixteenth summer with her best female friend, seventeen-year-old Zoe. I wrote like a dervish. I read scenes aloud to a small group of friends. I knew so little about writing fiction so my desire to do well by this novel took me back to grad school for my MFA. Eventually, the manuscript was published, in 2009. My deep beliefs were readable by the world.

I knew, like me, Molly’s conflict about loving whomever she wanted to love was in her own heart, less in her family or friends’ view of her. Falling in love with Zoe shocked her to the core. Changed her own view of what it meant to be “normal.” Kids her age have little trouble with gender fluidity now, but in the early 2000’s when I was writing this, that wasn’t true. I wrote the story for two reasons: because I loved the characters and wanted to do well by them too and because I wanted to explore a young girl’s self-made limitations about love. Love is love, I knew that to be true. I took the risk of saying so in my writing.

In my second novel, due out in October, I chose three female protagonists, from three generations. Two are gay, one is straight. All struggle equally with familial and romantic relationships, with loyalty and what it means to be an outcast, with what I call “found family”—the tribe you choose when your own family doesn’t fill you up enough. I chose to present them all as human beings, not differentiate between the desires and disappointments of gay couples and straight ones, although I know well there are differences. I didn’t want any political agenda to dominate the book. I am political about gay rights, especially this month, but I had other important things to say in this story.

Share Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This new book took ten long years to write. I had lots of onion layers to peel off before I found my next core truth and learned how to tell it.

This week, the first reviews from Publisher’s Weekly and Kirkus, the trade big boys, came in. I’ll share these down the line, when the book is ready to come out in the world. All I can say now is that the reviews were thrillingly positive. And the reviewers, bless them, saw my three women as human beings struggling with familial and romantic relationships, not specifically those of the gay or straight lifestyle. My goals were met.

I call my first novel an exercise in learning what I wanted to write about. What air I wanted to breathe, creatively.

The second has been about the craft of integrating my deepest beliefs into story and having that story touch readers. Those emails from the reviewers this week confirmed I’d achieved this, to some extent.

Truthfully, that integration is the hardest part. And here’s a story to show you why.

Reaching out to an unknown reader is like stretching across a gulf. You don’t really know if anyone’s going to reach back. I’m going to break one of my rules this week and talk anonymously about a client who did not succeed at this (I’ve changed details to keep his privacy). His story is a perfect example of why I believe writers struggle with integrating their core beliefs, the things they most want to write about, with their writing.

This writer passed the first gate: he knew what he wanted to write about. He’d lived through a horrific experience that happened to him as a young child. Or so he told me.

He also told me the manuscript was in early draft, still rough; it needed structure help. He came to me because I’m a structure geek.

We agreed that he’d send me a chapter each week, and I’d read and give comments, with the goal to refine the writing. He assured me he’d been through the manuscript multiple times and the writing needed only a bit of tweaking. “It’s a memoir,” he said, but he wouldn’t tell me much more about it.

The first chapters were benign. Not extremely well written, but I didn’t expect that at this early stage. I gave him suggestions, he rewrote and resubmitted.

I have great appreciation for early drafts. For most of us, it’s a way in to the meaning of the story—what we want to say as well as what we want the reader to take away. We may have an agenda, say, that certain kinds of parents are abusive and others are kind. In early drafts, this agenda will feel to the reader like a soapbox, presented more than integrated. That’s totally normal. Characters may be depicted in extremes, profoundly evil or good, depending on this agenda (the writer’s emotions). If they grew up with a mentally ill parent, first attempts at telling the story of childhood often show the parent as irredeemable. Stereotyped. We need to vomit onto the page all the bile of that relationship, all the bitter memories, the pain and trauma, before we step back and begin to assess the writing as a story, which has a need to communicate, not just therapize.

Often, the initial writing is armored with the stronger, less vulnerable, emotions like rage or intense fear. It’s rare I find an early draft contains real vulnerability—it hasn’t matured enough yet. So, as I read chapters from my client’s manuscript, I waited for the real story to emerge.

It happened in chapter 4. The child is kidnapped and held for weeks by a serial killer.

I do not believe in book banning, not on the shelves or in my own teaching and editing work. I accept all topics; I believe in each writer’s freedom to write what matters most, which is the point of this story. But I admit I was unprepared when the benign morphed into sudden and graphic horror. And it wasn’t even the trauma that threw me—I’ve read worse. It was the rant behind the scenes. It felt as if this writer was creating a world of horror, ostensibly one he’d lived through, solely for an agenda.

I consulted with a colleague; we searched online for facts about the incidents this writer described. There must be documentation, reports, or records, but we found nothing. I confronted the writer. He said he was under a vow of secrecy not to disclose the facts to anyone, except in this tell-all.

I had to think carefully about my role now, as his editor. What could I bring to the table? As the rant grew, I began to doubt the verity of the facts of the memoir. I felt increasingly troubled for him, as a person, unable to imagine the strength it took to survive such trauma, if that trauma truly existed—because the way he was telling the story now left me in growing doubt. I was distanced from the story by the confusing facts, the almost hallucinatory elements, the lack of layers of emotion.

I remember reading a Substack by novelist Mary Gaitskill, who taught at a college where her students wrote about suicide or self-harm. So many of them, as I remember, she became troubled. I felt in a similar place. What could I do, as a writing teacher and editor, to help this writer? I no longer really cared if his story was completely fictionalized, completely in his head, and he was confused about the line between true life and made-up. But he hadn’t a clue how to bring variations of emotion into it. Rage was the only color, revenge the only goal, it seemed.

What had he learned? What were we supposed to feel, as readers? What would make me a convinced reader, not a doubting one, if that’s what he was after?

Over the next weeks, I tried to think of ways to broaden the story—perhaps telling us more of his childhood would help us understand the why, the meaning of what he wanted to share. That didn’t work, in fact it seemed to enflame him. He told me he wanted to see justice done. He thought the blunt edge of his history would be enough to engage a reader’s sympathies. I’m sorry to say, not mine.

Surviving trauma changes you. I know this. I don’t come from an abusive childhood, with all that good pie. I hit my trauma later in life with two bouts of cancer. Each life-threatening experience, whenever it occurs, brings its attendant horrors. It took me many years to process my own enough to write about them with perspective.

Maturing the story, gaining distance, gives us the freedom to write convincingly and bring the reader into the conversation. This is the second stage of writing what matters most. It’s not embraced willingly by all writers—like my client, some just want to download onto the page and let it be enough. I ended up telling him goodbye; I passed him on to another editor, who told him to get serious help. I was glad to hear this, and I wished I’d been less hopeful and more practical about where he was at.

This two-step process—finding what is most important to you, what you most want to write about, and maturing your perspective until it has enough variation of emotion to bring a reader into the conversation—takes time. I believe the best writing comes from it.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This week, start with the first step I described about: explore what matters most to you and what you most want to bring into your writing, to create a more authentic thread between your creativity and your life.

Try a values list or a values collage. A list could be a free write using the prompt, “What matters most to me is . . .” and letting yourself fly with it. You might enter inconsequential items as well as profound ones—all are welcome. If you want to try the random-brain approach, print or gather images that mean a lot to you. Sometimes I just gather colors or objects from my home in a corner, like a small altar to my personal loves in life. Or I’ll cut and paste a collection of photos and images, then write for twenty minutes about what I see.

The second part of this exercise can be eye-opening. Find a recent piece of writing, even journaling, and with a highlighter underscore any mention or hint of these valued items or beliefs when they appear on the page in some form. When you find that your writing completely avoids what you truly care about, ask yourself what you could bring in. Not on a soapbox, but in an integrated way. Even a favorite color, food, passion.

A simple way to see if your creative work is aligned with what matters most to you. And adjust it if it’s not, if you wish.