For writing's sake

Preface to A Guide to Getting the Truth on the Page

New to this series? Start here.

When I tell people I’m a writer (something it took me most of my life to get brave enough to declare), a very reasonable response is, “What kind of writer are you?” Here in the San Francisco Bay Area, where everyone is up to something intimidatingly impressive, my answer can be a little baffling.

I’m not a novelist or a screenwriter or an academic or a journalist. I don’t write for the sake of informing people, or entertaining people, or even changing people. I’m not after the story or the answer or the influence. There are no elaborate tales queuing at the gates of my mind, waiting their turn to make their way through me into the zeitgeist.

Writing isn’t a vehicle to some higher end for me. Writing is the end. The physical act of it is a wonder all its own. Like, have you ever written with a felt-tip pen across a page that has just enough sheen and is angled just so toward the light that you can watch the ink as it takes a full second to dry? Have you noticed your preference for a particular writing instrument simply by how it feels gliding across the paper? Do you prefer something totally smooth and rolly, or maybe a bit of grit and resistance is your thing?

I drool over college-ruled composition books and, since I was old enough to have my own spending money, have been on a joyfully fruitless hunt for the perfect pen. I love making marks on pages. If I’m not writing-writing I’m doodling up a storm in the margins.

I love, too, what I’m doing at this very moment: sitting up in bed early on a Sunday morning with my coffee, husband and dogs snoozing beside me, letting the words quietly march through my fingers, typing ever more rapidly as the caffeine makes its way into my bloodstream. Watching in wonder as the words pile up on the page.

Writing is also how I make sense of and in the world. My talking self has never been as articulate as my writing self. A quiet and tentative resident on this loud, bombastic planet, it’s always been hard for me to get an idea in edgewise and, when I do, the words often come out poorly timed, mixed up, all wrong, caught in a log-jam between my brain and vocal cords. I need space and time to work out my thoughts. I need the page.

These are all clear-cut truths for me; however, in my work with people, I’ve found that it’s so in some way for a lot of us. For one thing, the act of writing reframes thought and life and memory in a way that is truer, more alive, and often quite surprising. It drops us down into our guts, out into eternity, directly into the truth. There are surely many academic theories as to why that is. I’m less interested in those than in the truth of the thing. The doing proves plenty for me, and it’s that—the doing—that we’ll be up to in these pages.

What we won’t be doing is ‘honing our craft.’ This isn’t an instruction manual on how to get ‘better’ at writing. There are plenty of those out there, but truthfully, I haven’t learned much from them. My own facility with writing comes not from instructions on how to accomplish it, but rather from (a) doing lots of it and (b) ingesting good writing itself. Absorption and practice. I mainline stories and memoirs, but when it comes to the mechanics of writing and all that jazz, I honestly don’t have the attention span. Most healing and productive for me has always been to just get words on a page, not defer to the experts or best practices as to how they should be laid out.

So instead of a whole bunch of expert wisdom in these pages, you’ll find a whole bunch of examples from my own life (as well as a few from fellow writers). This is for the reasons above, and also because I want to demonstrate how I’m inviting you to write. To wit: write about yourself. Write honestly, messily, nakedly. Indulge yourself in a study of your navel, of your past, of your deepest desires. Overshare. Nobody’s going to see this if you don’t want them to. (We’ll talk about sharing and receiving work in a way that is safe.)

If I haven’t been formally schooled by the masters, why am I so convinced that this works? For a few years now, I’ve led a group of writers who graciously agreed to meet with me on Zoom for 90 minutes every week to write and share. At some point I began calling the process Soul Writing, because that—the soul—seemed to be the source of the powerful stuff that comes through.

There’s a particular vibration in the body when we write something that originates in the soul. My hope is that by the end of this you’ll be in deeper contact with your own vibration, your own soul, your own voice, and that you’ll let that feeling guide you onward in writing the resplendent, gritty, messy, exquisite, truth of your aliveness. Maybe even living that way too.

We’re not producing anything in this process (though I have to say, quite often pieces come out fully formed and publishable). We’re simply starting with what we know, or think we know, and writing our way into what we’ve forgotten, what we’ve buried, or what we’ve yet to discover. In our writing groups, our friends witness all of this in a way that honors its journey from the ethers onto the page. This sort of welcome—like that of a newborn infant— gives the writing a much greater chance of thriving in the world.

This book is an entree into all of this. I’ll offer some ways I’ve seen this happen, what makes it powerful, and how to do it yourself. It’s not for the faint of heart, but the results can be transformative—especially if you use this material, not just read it. The process is simple, and it’s one into which I’ll invite you throughout this book.

So if you’ve picked up this little stack of pages to find out how to ‘get better at writing’—well, maybe don’t abandon it in the neighborhood Little Free Library just yet. Though it’s not “Ten Steps to Having Your Short Story Printed in the New Yorker,” that could be one result eventually. By that point, however, my hope is that it won’t be as important because by then you will have connected, via the sacred gift of writing, to your own essence. You might stand a little taller in the world, aligned as you are with your own soul, awake as you are to your gifts, and aware as you are of your own resonant voice. You might realize you can write.

For now, have fun. Write for writing’s sake. Write for the delight at the bouquets of words that spill over in your hands, for the creation you didn’t know you were capable of, for the joy of making marks on paper—making your mark in the world—while you still have the breath to do so.

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NEXT - Chapter One: How we write (we just do)