September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

The Question Behind the Question

This month, we’re exploring The Stories We Carry, and this week we’re exploring The Books That Changed Us, which prompted Monday’s question: Can a book genuinely change who we are?

The responses I received for this question are still coming in, with most respondents saying yes, a book can change us… but with a few conditions.

According to your responses so far, a reader first needs to be receptive to a book and its ideas and perspectives before it can change them, though this is usually implied when a reader decides to sit down and read a book. Second, the book needs to more or less find the reader at the right time in their lives, when its ideas and perspectives will resonate with them and allow them to explore something that’s already in their minds or hearts. And third, the reader must be open to reflecting on the contents of the book they’re reading, or be unable to avoid doing so, which can solidify their personal transformation, though that change will likely not happen overnight but gradually.

I was thrilled this question really got you all thinking and talking about the value of books, as it inspires me in so many ways, and reassures me that the power of books and the stories we tell and carry aren’t going anywhere! Because above all, you were adamant in your responses that books have the power to move us in some meaningful and lasting capacities.

Yet your responses to this week’s question have also uncovered something essential about books and reading: A book probably won’t do much for us if we don’t meet it at least halfway. Meaning that a book only has whatever value we decide to ascribe to it, once it has offered us its bare bones and lifeblood.

A book itself isn’t guaranteed to change us simply because we have read it, in other words. We also have to meet it with some degree of openness to wrestle with its ideas, allow its perspectives to challenge our assumptions, and reflect on what we encounter while reading it. And even then, transformation via reading rarely arrives all at once and still isn’t guaranteed. Sometimes the ideas and perspectives in a book can sit dormant in our memory for years before the right moment or interaction in our lives unlocks something we remember reading in it.

Which is probably why the books that change us rarely feel like explicit instruction manuals. Instead, they tend to feel more like personal encounters that silently weave their way into our psyches and lifestyles.

Still, what exactly gives certain books the power to remain with us humans, sometimes for centuries or generations? And is it possible to explore the anatomy of such powerful books, so that we can encounter them more often on purpose and understand them a little better?

Well, today’s post will attempt to do just that, as it will explore the anatomy of the books that have changed us. First, however, we must make sure we’re not only open to exploring the metaphor that follows, but that we’re open to allowing books to change us at all.

As you continue to read, feel free to join the Dialoguers Chat at any time.

Join the Dialoguers Chat

Permission to Let a Book Change You

Before a book can change us, we have to first give ourselves permission to allow it to enter the conversation we are already having with ourselves, one another, and the world. And what better way to do that than to remember what some revered authors have said before regarding the power books have and why it’s so valuable and important to cling to.

The excerpts that follow are simple yet worth holding onto as we continue to explore the books that changed us and the stories we carry and why this week.

Toni Morrison put the possibility that books have to change us plainly: “Books change your mind.”

Ursula K. Le Guin wrote, “We read books to find out who we are.”

Margaret Atwood observed, “A word after a word after a word is power.”

Maya Angelou described literature as possessing a “life-giving power.”

Zora Neale Hurston gave us the unforgettable instruction to “jump at de sun.”

James Baldwin described the transformative discovery that can happen when reading when he said, “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.”

Emily Dickinson wrote a poem that begins with the line, “There is no Frigate like a Book.”

And Virginia Woolf captured something fundamental about the reader’s role when she wrote, “I am made and remade continually.”

Though the writers above differ in their language, they point toward the same possibility, and how reading becomes a powerful and meaningful encounter between the person who wrote a book, the person who reads it, and the life each brings to its pages. An encounter that might even be powerful enough to elicit change.

Yet what, exactly, makes that encounter work and become not only functional and transactional but powerful enough to elicit change in a reader? And can looking at the anatomy of a book, its core features, help us get closer to an answer? Perhaps…

The Anatomy of Books That Change Us

A book, like a body, has moving components and systems that work together. Its core story or narrative gives it movement while its characters give it a human pulse and its language carries its perspective and voice, while its structure provides its shape and its literary elements become things remembered and preserved, as its reader simultaneously supplies the consciousness and life force that brings the whole thing to life and gives it a greater purpose.

🦴The Skeleton: The Structure That Holds the Story Together

The skeleton gives a body its shape and allows everything else attached to it to connect and function and protects the vital systems and organs in the body.

In literature, a book’s structure performs a similar function. It outlines the narrative and information of a book and indicates what will be included in it and what shape the book will take. It determines things like what comes first, what remains hidden or excluded, what reappears, what comes last, and where the reader will stand in relation to the story itself via points of view, narrative themes, chapter lengths, etc.

Consider One Thousand and One Nights. Its most famous structural feature is the frame of its main narrative, which is a narrative that includes other narratives. In it, Scheherazade tells stories to Shahryar, and those stories contain other stories. The collection therefore creates a literary body with stories nested inside stories, each narrative becoming part of a larger surviving story. The structure, or skeleton, of this work matters because Scheherazade does not simply tell a story. She keeps storytelling itself alive in the stories that she tells that include other stories that include other stories…

The Homeric epics give us another kind of skeleton to look at as an example. The Odyssey organizes its enormous journey around Odysseus’s return to Ithaca, while the narrative also moves backward and forward through remembered events and stories told by characters. The journey home, then, becomes both the physical structure and the emotional structure of the poem and Odysseus’s memory and sense of identity.

Then there is Beloved, whose structure deliberately refuses a straightforward chronological progression. Events from Sethe’s past emerge gradually through memories, shifting perspectives, repetitions, and returns. The reader has to assemble the history in the novel rather than receive it as a finished chronological account. And the effect is significant, as the form or structure (or skeleton) of the novel does not merely describe fractured memory, it makes the reader experience the work of understanding then reconstructing it themselves.

🫀The Heart: The Emotional Pulse of the Story

The heart keeps the body moving, alive, and vibrant. And the heart of a story does the same, giving its narrative and structure a pulse, a heartbeat, that keeps it alive and capable of human resonance.

In Jane Eyre, that pulse comes partly from Jane’s insistence that her inner life matters. When she refuses to reduce herself to someone else’s expectations, the novel turns questions of love, independence, morality, class, and gender into experiences we can feel and relate to rather than merely discuss.

Their Eyes Were Watching God gives us another powerful example of a story with a strong pulse that is conveyed via vibrant imagery. Janie’s emotional life develops through relationships, loss, independence, and her changing understanding of what she wants from life. And the pear tree scene early in the novel becomes an important image of the kind of harmony and love she longs to experience, while the later hurricane violently disrupts the world she has built.

The heart of a book, or its pulse, is not necessarily its happiest or saddest moment, but its central emotional theme or question that keeps beating underneath everything else going on to keep readers engaged.

⚡The Nervous System: Voice and Perspective Carry the Signals of a Story

A body’s nervous system receives, processes, and transmits information. And the narrative voice in every story performs a comparable literary function, as it determines what reaches us, how quickly it reaches us, when, and whose words we are allowed to experience.

In Beloved, the narrative moves among different perspectives, including Sethe, Denver, Paul D, Stamp Paid, and Beloved. Later sections give Sethe, Denver, and Beloved distinct first-person monologues, and their voices eventually overlap. And this matters because the novel refuses to reduce its central moral crisis to one perspective, so readers are exposed to a more inclusive and complex perspective.

Sethe’s decision to kill her child cannot be understood fully through a singular outside judgment alone. The reader encounters her reasoning, her daughter’s experience, the community’s response, and the perspectives of others who carry their own memories of slavery, as well, so the nervous system of the novel keeps sending readers somewhere else to get a complete perspective of what happens and why. Just when we think we understand an event, another consciousness changes the signal of what to pay attention to.

Slavery systematically stripped enslaved people of their voices and reduced their histories to singular, external legal or journalistic records (like the newspaper clipping Schoolteacher carries). By shifting perspectives among Sethe, Paul D, Denver, Stamp Paid, and the community, Morrison wrests the narrative control away from the oppressor, signaling a shift in voice and perspective for the reader to grapple with and explore.

🪞The Skin: The Surface of the Story Leading to What’s Underneath

Skin forms the body’s boundary with the outside world. It protects what lies beneath, touches things outside it, and carries visible evidence of experiences that may remain hidden. A book has its own literary skin via its language, style, imagery, sensory details, setting, and visual presentations of words on its pages that give us our first physical and emotional contact with the work. This surface may seem like the least substantial part of a book, but it determines how the story will ultimately feel when we enter it and encounter it on a deeper level.

Their Eyes Were Watching God offers a powerful example. Hurston’s movement between narrative prose and the distinctive speech of her characters gives the novel its particular texture and sound. The style choices and language in the novel do more than communicate what happens, they create a world we can hear and then experience. One Thousand and One Nights has an entirely different skin, shifting among tales of adventure, romance, deception, wonder, and the supernatural. Its changing styles and storytelling voices become part of the pleasure of entering its world, while the familiar formulas and patterns of fairy tales it relies on give those stories a recognizable literary surface before deeper meanings emerge.

The skin can also carry the marks of what lies underneath it. In Beloved, the scars on Sethe’s back are literal evidence of violence, but Morrison also makes them part of the novel’s literary language of memory, history, survival, and the body. Shakespeare achieves something similar through recurring physical imagery in Macbeth, where blood becomes a visible sign of guilt that characters try, unsuccessfully, to wash away. In both works, what appears on the surface points toward something much deeper happening inside the characters and the works themselves.

Literary skin, then, is not merely decoration or what we see. It is the layer through which we first touch a book’s world, recognize its voice, sense its atmosphere, and begin to see clues for what lies beneath its surface. Like human skin, it both protects and reveals, and sometimes itself bears the marks that tell us what the body has survived beyond those things that are only skin deep.

👀The Eyes: Symbols Teach Us Where to Look in a Story

Our eyes direct our attention and help us notice what matters, as well as what we can overlook when we aren’t paying close enough attention. And a book can tell us where to look via its symbols, which act as points of visual and imaginative focus, directing us toward ideas that may be larger than the objects or symbols themselves. They teach us where to look in a book, and repeated encounters with them can teach us how to see what they represent more clearly.

In the Odyssey, the sea is more than the physical space Odysseus must cross. It repeatedly places him between home and everything that threatens to keep him from it, making the journey itself a sustained image of separation, endurance, and return. Jane Eyre uses fire and the red room in similarly memorable ways. The red room is a literal room in which Jane experiences fear and isolation, but its emotional significance reaches beyond its walls, while fire repeatedly appears at moments of danger, passion, destruction, and change. The objects and images become visual markers that guide our attention toward the forces shaping Jane’s life.

Shakespeare gives us another powerful example in Macbeth. The dagger Macbeth sees before murdering Duncan draws our attention toward the boundary between thought and action, and the blood that follows makes guilt increasingly difficult to separate from the physical world. In Beloved, the scarred tree-like pattern on Sethe’s back directs our attention toward the relationship between the body and memory, turning a physical mark into an enduring reminder of what slavery has done to her and her family tree.

A symbol, like the eye, does not simply receive information, it directs our attention. It tells us, sometimes quietly and sometimes insistently, “look here.” And the longer we remain with a work, the more those symbols and images can accumulate meaning. A door becomes more than a door while a journey becomes more than chronological travel, and a scar becomes much more than a physical mark. Symbols train our attention until we begin seeing the larger story behind them and what they’re teaching us to notice.

🗣️The Voice Box: Dialogue Gives the Book Its Sound and Its Voice

A voice box allows the body to produce sound, but those sounds only become meaningful through rhythm, tone, breath, emphasis, and the particular qualities of an individual voice. A book has a literary voice box, too. Dialogue, diction, rhythm, syntax, punctuation, and the movement between spoken and narrative language give a work its sound, even when we read it silently. They allow us to hear not only what characters say, but something about who they are, where they come from, what they value, and what they cannot quite bring themselves to say.

Consider the witches’ opening exchange in Shakespeare’s Macbeth, “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.” The compressed rhythm, repetition, and paradox immediately disturb our expectations about appearances and moral agendas and ideals. Shakespeare makes the language itself feel unstable before Macbeth has even appeared. Later, the contrast between the witches’ speech and the language of Macbeth and Lady Macbeth creates different registers of persuasion, ambition, fear, and guilt. The voices don’t simply deliver the plot but help create the moral atmosphere of the play.

Their Eyes Were Watching God makes a different but equally deliberate use of sound. Hurston distinguishes the narrative voice from the speech of her characters, incorporating the rhythms and idioms of Black Southern speech into their dialogue. That choice gives the people of Eatonville and the Everglades a distinctive presence on the page. We are not simply told that these characters have a particular culture and community, we hear it in the language they use with one another. The novel’s voice therefore becomes part of its representation of identity, place, intimacy, humor, conflict, and belonging.

The same principle appears across literature. The repeated formulas and storytelling exchanges of One Thousand and One Nights remind us that these stories originate in the act of storytelling and listening. The speeches and soliloquies of Shakespeare allow characters to reveal thoughts they cannot, or will not, share with others. In a novel such as Beloved, shifts between narrative voice, remembered speech, and interior monologue create different ways of experiencing memory and trauma.

A book’s language, voice, and literal dialogue are therefore composed of much more than its vocabulary. Indeed, a book’s voice is its own unique voiceprint, created through a rhythm, a register, a breath, and a personality of its own. And when that literary voice is strong enough, we can continue to hear it long after we have stopped reading.

🧠 The Memory: What a Story Stores for Later

The brain allows the body and mind to retain what has happened via memory, but it also allows the past to resurface, alter the meaning of things, and connect seemingly separate experiences. Books have memory systems of their own, which include recurring images, repeated phrases, remembered stories, echoes of earlier literature, flashbacks, and narrative returns that allow something introduced early in a work to acquire new significance later. What we encounter on one page may remain dormant until another page, or even another reading, years later awakens it.

Beloved makes this memory function central. Memories of Sweet Home and Sethe’s escape to Cincinnati emerge gradually, while Beloved’s presence makes the past feel almost physically present within 124. Morrison’s fragmented chronology and repeated returns require the reader to piece together what has happened, making the act of remembering part of the experience of reading the novel. One Thousand and One Nights preserves memory differently, as stories survive through retelling, nesting, interruption, and continuation. And folklore in general works much the same way, when a story lives because someone remembers it well enough to tell it again, while each generation reshapes it for the next.

Literary memory also connects one book to those that came before it. Shakespeare carries forward mythology, history, folklore, and earlier literature. Fairy tales preserve narrative patterns that continue to reappear throughout history. Modern writers reinterpret ancient stories for new audiences. And like the brain’s ability to store experience and retrieve it when needed, literature keeps the past available for the present, which might be one of storytelling’s oldest forms of immortality— a story survives because someone, somewhere, remembers enough of it, and cares enough about it, to tell it again.

🤲 The Hands: What the Story Leaves Us to Do

Hands allow the body to touch, make, hold, alter, and act. When reading, our hands literally open the book, turn its pages, underline its sentences, return to its passages, and eventually close it. Literary hands reach further, however, as they represent the point where what we have read can leave the page and enter our lives, if we want it to. A story may move us emotionally or intellectually, but its influence becomes tangible when it affects what we choose to do, which is still inevitably up to us.

Jane Eyre asks us to consider the cost of maintaining dignity and moral independence. Beloved asks us to confront a history that cannot simply be buried or forgotten. The Odyssey asks what homecoming means after a person has been changed by everything that happened between their departure and return. And Macbeth shows an ambition moving from thought into action and then into mortal consequence. None of these works perform the final action they recommend or explore for us, but each leaves the reader with questions about their own lives and choices which only they can answer and determine for themselves.

This is where the anatomy of the book finally meets the anatomy of the reader. A book can place an idea in our minds and metaphorical hands, but only we can decide what to do with it and our literal hands. The stories we encounter can move us, but what we decide to do, or not do, once we are moved, is up to us, and it is our hands that must carry what we have learned or experienced in the stories we encounter into the real world. We are the only ones that can ultimately change a belief, reconsider a judgment, begin a difficult conversation, make a different choice, complete a necessary action, or simply see another person from a new perspective in the real world.

Dialogue Wrap-Up: How the Anatomy of Books Change Us

So, can a book genuinely change who we are? Well… it seems like all the responses we explored in Monday’s post can be true at once, especially once we consider a book’s anatomy and that anatomy’s effect on us.

Yes, a book can completely become part of our internal landscape. One of its characters can become a permanent reference point for us while one of its sentences can give us language for an experience we had trouble articulating, and or its core story could alter the way we understand ourselves or someone else. Etc.

Yes, a book can change us, albeit conditionally, because that transformation depends on the meeting that occurs between a book and its reader. A reader’s openness creates the possibility it can change them, their reflection gives it depth, their experiences give it context, and the timing of when they encounter it can determine whether the words on its pages pass through them or take root.

At the same time, however, a book can simply mirror us, though such recognition may be where change begins. Jane Eyre can reflect our desire for dignity, Janie’s journey can illuminate our longing for a life of our own, and Odysseus’s struggle to return home can make us reconsider what home means after we have changed. Sometimes discovering ourselves in a story feels like transformation because we finally have language for something that was already within us.

And the real world’s influence over us cannot be ignored or undermined either. Eventually, every insight we encounter in a book must leave its pages if it’s to actually change us in the real world. A novel cannot make a difficult decision, repair a relationship, challenge an injustice, forgive a wrong, or accept the consequences of an action for us. Those things belong to our own lived experience outside of books, even if the books themselves serve as catalysts.

Still, literature and life have never existed as entirely separate worlds and will continue to be in conversation with and influence each other.

The structure of One Thousand and One Nights demonstrates how a story can preserve another story, then another, allowing the act of storytelling to become part of what the reader remembers. The Homeric epics turn journeys into questions about identity, loyalty, loss, and homecoming. Shakespeare makes thought visible through action, giving ambition, jealousy, guilt, and power bodies, voices, images, and consequences. Fairy tales preserve patterns of departure, danger, transformation, and return that continue to surface in stories we tell today, too.

In Jane Eyre, a woman’s insistence on her own dignity becomes inseparable from the choices she makes. In Their Eyes Were Watching God, Janie’s movement toward self-definition unfolds through relationships, loss, independence, and her changing understanding of what she wants from life. In Beloved, memory refuses to remain strictly in the past as history enters the body, the home, relationships, and even the structure of the narrative.

And that is where the anatomy of a book becomes more than a metaphor.

A book’s skeleton gives its story a form we can follow and understand. Its heart creates emotional resonance within us. Its nervous system carries the perspective and signals we need to follow. Its skin can bear the marks of its characters’ experiences and inner stories. Its symbols and literary devices direct our attention toward what matters. Its voiceprint also gives it a unique resonance. Its memory allows images, stories, and histories to return to us. Its hands can reach beyond the page and into the reader’s eventual choices and actions. And none of its parts work alone.

A beautifully constructed story may leave us untouched if it doesn’t have a solid heartbeat. A single sentence may follow us for decades but never land without a direct signal. And so on.

Time changes the equation, too.

The book we read at fifteen is not necessarily the book we read at thirty-five. A character who once seemed impossibly distant may become recognizable. A passage we once skipped may suddenly stop us in our tracks. An ending that once felt inevitable may look entirely different after we have experienced loss, love, ambition, failure, parenthood, aging, etc.

The pages of the books we read remain still, but we don’t. Which might be why the stories we carry can continue changing us long after we believe we have finished reading them.

A book does not need to transform our entire life to have transformed something in us either. It might alter a question we ask, complicate a certainty we once held, make another person’s experience imaginable, or give us a metaphor we can carry into an entirely different circumstance.

Sometimes the change a book offers is dramatic. But more often than not, it’s almost imperceptible. A thought takes hold. A question lingers. An image resurfaces. A character leaves a lasting impression. Then, years later, something happens in our own lives, and we suddenly understand why a particular book stayed with us.

Which gets to the heart of our original question, as it seems after much reflection and dialogue that a book can change us, but not entirely alone.

The writer creates the world in a book and gives it a body. The body of the work can be broken down and understood and experienced via its anatomy as the reader encounters it and what it brings to life, while bringing their own living body and mind to the encounter too. And life and experience decide what happens next…

I want to know what you think.

Tell me: What book changed you, and what part of its anatomy inspired the change?

Was it the structure that made you see something in a different way? A character who became impossible to forget? A voice that gave you another way of experiencing and noticing the world? An image, symbol, or sentence that stayed with you? Or did the book simply find you at the right moment in your life?

Join the ongoing conversation in the Dialoguers Chat and tell us about the book you still carry, and the part of it that became part of you.

Whether you join to share your responses, ask more thought-provoking questions, or connect with other writers and support their work, we look forward to your contributions and insight!

Join the Dialoguers Chat

Leave a comment

Share

Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry

This week’s Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Can a book genuinely change who we are?

Reading Notes: Station Eleven

What My Favorite Books Say About Me

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee to say thanks

ICYM August’s Theme, The Creative Life

Go more in depth with The Creative Life Writing Collection

September’s The Stories We Carry Writing Collection is coming soon!

Popular Posts from Week 4: Preparing for What Comes Next

Writing Prompts for What Comes Next in Your Creative Life

“Did we ever…?”

Reading Notes: Possession

Popular Posts from Week 3: The Messy Middle

Writing Prompts for Navigating ‘The Messy Middle’

Continuing Without a Trace

Reading Notes: The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Popular Posts from Week 2: Creative Habits

Immersive Storytelling Mode and the ArXiv

Reading Notes: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

The Habits That Help Me and My Creative Life Most

Popular Posts from Week 1: Making Space

A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library

How to Make Space and Time for Your Creative Life

The Creative Life as Play and Work

If you want to explore past themes, paid subscribers also have access to the full archive, including previous writing prompts, discussions, and reading lists, as well as full access to the community chat and Daily Drafters Exclusives writing collections.

Get 30-Day Free Trial

Share Daily Drafts & Dialogues

© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

September Theme: The Stories We Carry

Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

Week 1: The Books That Changed Us

👋Welcome to our first dialogue in September!

This month, our drafts and dialogues will be centered around the theme, The Stories We Carry. And throughout the month, we’ll be asking ourselves a deceptively simple question: Why do certain stories stay with us?

To kickstart the month, we’re exploring The Books That Changed Us, focusing on the ways stories have affected our work, our lives, and the creators we’re becoming, in both profound and surprising ways.

Yet before we start reflecting on the specific books that have stayed with us over the years, I think it’s worth pausing for a moment to consider whether books can genuinely change who we are at all, because how is such a thing possible?

Of course, avid readers and storytellers such as us want to believe that stories are unlimited in their capacity to move us and change us, and our world as a result, especially right now. Especially me! It’s no coincidence that I’ve written about this topic (the power of storytelling) multiple times in the past and will likely do so again in the future.

But if stories can truly change us, how do they change us?

And is it possible to harness and control such a thing on purpose? Or is this lay belief we have in the power of storytelling just based on wishful thinking, or some unpredictable force we’ll never be able to define let alone manage or control?

Sure, we all know that serendipitous feeling of reading a book at the exact time we need to read it in our lives. That book that helped us navigate grief or a new stage in life or a difficult relationship or something else that was hard to face or overcome. That book that helped us feel seen and cared for, or that simply entertained us, when we felt maligned or alone. That book that made us laugh or have hope when we were in a state of despair. And so on.

But do those cherished reading experiences mean that books themselves actually have the power to change who we are at our core?

Full disclosure: I don’t see this dialogue ending with a clear-cut answer with irrefutable empirical data, even where such data may exist in bits and pieces. Yet at the same time, I do wholeheartedly believe that there is only one answer that makes sense, to me at least. Which is why I know this topic and question is worth exploring further.

Regardless of what your initial answer or instinct is when responding to today’s question, I hope it spurs some much-needed reflection and discussion regarding the affect and effects of the books that have the potential, dare I say the ineffable yet distinct power, to move us… maybe even change us… in profound and life-altering ways.

Participate in today’s poll, then take a moment to consider today’s question and the different responses to it outlined below. Then let us know more about what you think in this month’s Dialoguers Chat as you continue to reflect. As always, remember that there are no strict ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers, only those answers that will help us more authentically navigate this dialogue.

Cast your vote, then keep reading. You may find yourself agreeing with one answer at first then questioning it at the end, as you continue to engage in reflection and dialogue.

Join the Dialoguers Chat

Drafting this Dialogue: The Books That… Change Us?

Yes, completely. A book can genuinely change who we are.

There is a powerful case to be made that books can transform us in ways that reach far beyond their entertainment value or the information they teach us. A compelling story that reaches us at the right time in our lives can introduce a possibility we had never considered, challenge a belief we had never questioned, or give us language for something we were feeling deeply but struggling to articulate.

Fiction can allow us to inhabit another person’s consciousness and take a walk in their shoes and worldview, while nonfiction can give us an entirely new framework for understanding ourselves, others, and the world. So, in this sense, reading the right book at the right time can expand the boundaries of what we know and who we believe we are and can be within its framework or perspective.

The type of personal transformation a book offers is often gradual, however, and doesn’t necessarily turn us into a different person overnight. More often, a book first changes the direction of our attention, slowly altering what we notice, what we value, what questions we ask, or what we believe is possible, as well as what we want to read next.

Yet one book can also become a before-and-after marker in a person’s life. We may remember where we were when we read a book that affected us deeply, precisely what we were struggling with when we read it, and how the world or people in the world looked slightly different to us when we finished reading it. And those books can become part of our personal history because their ideas, characters, images, perspectives, and questions become part of the person we are becoming as we carry them forward.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

• A book can introduce an idea that fundamentally changes the way we understand ourselves or the world around us.

• “Books are knowledge. Books are reflection. Books change your mind.” — Toni Morrison

• A powerful story can make another person’s experience feel emotionally real enough to change how we respond to people in our own lives.

• A book can give us the courage to make a decision that we might not otherwise have considered.

• “We read books to find out who we are. What other people, real or imaginary, do and think and feel —or have done and thought and felt; or might do and think and feel— is an essential guide to our understanding of what we ourselves are and may become.” — Ursula K. Le Guin

• The books that transform us often meet us at a particular moment when we are already searching for something we cannot yet name or fully understand.

• A book can change not only what we think, but also what we notice, value, question, and imagine.

• “You live several lives while reading.” — William Styron.

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

• Can you identify a book that changed a decision you made in your life, even if that decision was made years after you read the book?

• What is the difference between being temporarily inspired by a book and being genuinely transformed by it?

• Can a book change us if we strongly disagree with its author or characters?

• Does the timing of when we read a book matter more than what’s in the book itself?

• If a book changes how we see the world but never changes how we behave, has it truly changed us?

Yes, conditionally. A book can change who we are, but with a few conditions.

A book may contain transformative ideas or perspectives but reading it does not guarantee that it will transform its reader. The reader brings a particular history, set of beliefs, emotional states, and level of readiness and understanding to every book they sit down to read. Which makes the reader’s experience and perspective as important, if not more important, than whatever is contained in the book itself.

The same story can profoundly affect one person and barely register with another due to the different perspectives its readers bring to the table. The same reader may even experience the same book differently at different stages in their life. For example, what feels irrelevant to a reader at twenty may feel essential to that same reader when they read the same book at forty because they have become a different kind of reader with different life experiences and perspectives.

Transformation in this context also requires something beyond mere intellectual awareness and literary pattern recognition. A book can offer a new way of writing and or thinking, but readers themselves must decide whether to examine its ideas, wrestle with the questions and perspectives it poses, and whether or not they want to continue carrying the story being told in the book with them.

Readers bring their own instincts, reasoning, and conclusions to what they read, but can also remain unmotivated or unreceptive to exploring everything a book can offer them. In other words, a book may open a door to its readers, but the readers themselves still have to decide to walk through it. So, in this sense, books can be catalysts for change without being the sole cause of it.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

• A book can offer the possibility of transformation, but the reader must be willing to examine what the book is asking of them or presenting to them first.

• We are more likely to be changed by a book when its ideas intersect with questions we are already asking in our own lives.

• “Reading changes our lives, and our lives change our reading.” — Maryanne Wolf

• Reading actively (by taking notes and asking questions about what we’re reading), rather than simply consuming a story or book, makes it more likely that that story or book will influence our thinking, and maybe even who we are.

• A transformative book often requires us to revisit its ideas after we have had time to test them against our own experiences and beliefs.

• “The only advice ... that one person can give another about reading is to take no advice, to follow your own instincts.” — Virginia Woolf

• The real-world actions we take after reading may determine whether a powerful insight in a book or story becomes a lasting change in our lives and who we are.

• “Reading and thoughtfulness and openness are the best way ... to begin to address the richness that is in each of us.” — Julia Alvarez

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

• What makes you receptive to a book’s message at one point in your life but resistant or ambivalent to it at another?

• Does reading with the intention of changing something about yourself or what you believe make transformation more likely, or does it interfere with the experience?

• What responsibility does the reader have for turning insight from a book into real-world action?

• Can a book be transformative even if you reject some or most of its central ideas and perspectives?

• What conditions need to be present in your life before a book can truly reach you or transform you?

  ---

No, a book can only mirror us as we already are inside.

Books don’t fundamentally change us at all. Instead, their greatest power lies in helping us recognize and harness what is already within us and what we already believe or want to come true.

When a book feels unnervingly personal, it’s probably because the author has somehow held up a mirror to something that we already believe or understand, allowing us to see ourselves more clearly for a moment in time through their words. A book or story read at the right time can give shape to an emotion we already feel, provide language for an experience we have endured yet struggled to understand, or reveal a deeply held value we have sensed but never been able to consciously articulate before.

From this perspective, the apparent transformation we experience happens because the book awakens something deep within us, not because it generates a new narrative outside ourselves to follow. In other words, the capacity for empathy, curiosity, courage, grief, ambition, wonder, etc. was already present within us, and the story or book we read simply allowed those qualities to surface as we read it.

Even when a book seems to introduce us to an entirely new perspective, what it’s really doing is revealing our deeper capacity to imagine and pay attention to what we already have inside us. The book becomes an instrument of recognition, a mirror, in this sense, but doesn’t put something inside us that isn’t already there. Instead, it helps us discover what was there all along.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

• The books we love often tell us as much about ourselves as they tell us about their subjects.

• “The only true voyage of discovery ... would be to possess other eyes.” — Marcel Proust

• A reader’s emotional response to a story can reveal beliefs or desires that were previously outside their conscious awareness.

• “A book is more than a verbal structure ... it is the dialogue it establishes with its reader.” — Jorge Luis Borges

• Two people can read the same book and experience completely different encounters or transformations because each reader brings a different self to its pages.

• “The mind, the brain, the top of the tingling spine, is, or should be, the only instrument used upon a book.” — Vladimir Nabokov

• A book may feel life-changing because it gives us words for something we already knew intuitively.

• Returning to a beloved book years later can reveal how much the reader has changed, even when the words on its pages literally remain the same.

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

• Have you ever believed a book changed you, only to realize later that it helped you understand something you already felt before you read it?

• When a story feels deeply personal, does that necessarily mean it has changed you?

• Can a book reveal something about us that we genuinely didn’t know was there?

• How much of what we take from a book comes from its author, and how much comes from us, the reader?

• If every reader creates a different experience of the same book, where does the book’s transformative power actually reside?

No, only real-world experiences can genuinely change who we are.

From this perspective, books can influence our thinking, but they can never be a substitute for lived experience. For example, we can read about grief without having lost someone we love, or read about how to be courageous without ever having faced real danger, or read about someone starting over without knowing what it takes first-hand to rebuild a life ourselves. And so on.

In this sense, then, a book can prepare us for an experience, help us imagine it, and give us the language we need to talk about it, but the real-world experiences we face outside of books will always be what ultimately tests and changes us at our core.

Books are powerful precisely because they can accompany real life, maybe even mirror it in a lot of instances, but they will never be able to replace what real-world experiences offer. In other words, a book may plant a seed in our minds or hearts, but lived experience is what offers the weather, soil, and seasons that determine whether anything grows.

Readers with this perspective might even argue that the books they describe as ‘life-changing’ mattered only because they read them while they were experiencing a real-life moment that gave their words consequence and direct meaning to them. The deepest changes in who we are and become usually only emerge through our real-world relationships, failures, responsibilities, losses, risks, work, love, etc. and the unexpected events we cannot control, not necessarily through the books we read.

If you agree with this answer, you will probably also agree with one or more of the following statements:

• A person can understand an idea they read in a book intellectually without understanding what it means emotionally until life gives that idea personal weight.

• Books can prepare us for experiences, but that preparation is different from real-world transformation.

• “How vain it is to sit down to write when you have not stood up to live.” — Henry David Thoreau

• The most enduring lessons in our lives often come from consequences we have personally experienced.

• “You think your pain and your heartbreak are unprecedented in the history of the world, but then you read.” — James Baldwin

• A book may inspire us to act, but it is the action and its consequences that ultimately reshape us.

• “We don’t see things as they are, we see them as we are.” — Anaïs Nin

• Real relationships can challenge our assumptions in ways that solitary reading cannot completely reproduce.

To engage in further dialogue, ask:

• Can empathy developed through reading ever be as powerful as empathy developed through lived experience?

• Have you ever experienced something in real life that completely changed the meaning of a book you had previously read?

• Can a person genuinely change without first having a real-world experience that challenges their existing worldview?

• If a book inspires someone to change their behavior, is the transformation caused by the book or by what happens after they read the book?

• What experiences have taught you something that no book could have ever taught you?

My Reflection and an Invitation

After sitting with all four responses, I still find myself drawn to the first one: Yes, completely. Not because I think a book can single-handedly remake a person overnight, but because I have experienced the feeling of being changed by something I’ve read on more occasions than I can count. Though I must confess that it is an intuitive conviction more than a conviction I can definitively prove with lines of empirical data… for now. Regardless, I am still convinced there are books that seem to enter our lives at the exact moment we need them, as if by magic— those books that leave us with a different understanding of ourselves, our work, or the world around us… Dare I say, change us?

At the same time, I can see why the other responses complicate that intuitive conviction. It makes sense that we have to be receptive to what a book offers in order to fully receive what it’s offering. And it’s true that we bring our own beliefs and experiences to every book we read, and that our circumstances shape what we are capable of noticing and receiving from a book. I also think there is a level of truth behind the idea that some books function more like mirrors than fundamental agents of personal change, as they help us recognize something we were already sensing but had not yet found the language to express. And there are certainly things that only real-world experience can teach us. Reading about courage is not the same as being courageous when we need to be in real life when it matters, for instance.

Which is probably why the books that stay with us can be so difficult to explain not only to others but to ourselves. Their influence over us is rarely isolated from the rest of our lives or the rest of the world and all its people.

A book can give us an idea, but real-world experience tests it. A story can reveal something we didn’t know we were carrying within us all along. A single sentence can mean something different on different days in our lives because of the different experiences we have at different ages, and can even help us recognize or face something difficult a few years after reading it. Fiction and nonfiction can both be change-makers as well, as the form a book takes seems to matter less than the experience a person has when and after reading it. And on and on…

So while I intuitively believe in the fundamental power of books to change us, I still see all the other responses outlined above as valid and worthy of reflection and consideration and might end up including a bit of all the responses in my extended notes on this question when our dialogue comes to a close at the end of the week.

I want to hear from you.

What book changed something for you, or even changed you?

What was happening in your life when you read it, and do you think the book changed you, revealed something that was already there, or gave you the perspective you needed to make a change yourself?

Join the Dialoguers Chat to share your responses to today’s question.

I would especially love to hear about the books that had an impact on you and your life that are difficult to explain— those books that arrived at an oddly serendipitous moment or became meaningful only years after you first read them, for example.

You don’t have to defend one of the four answers above if you join the chat either, by the way. Just tell us your thoughts on the books that have changed you in some way or tell us what makes you uncertain about whether books can genuinely change us or not. There are no strict ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ answers here, just those authentic responses that will help us explore what books have changed us and maybe allow us to get a little closer to how and why.

That feels like the more interesting conversation to me anyway, since we probably all agree that books matter, but we may have different ideas about how they matter to us as individuals, which is where a meaningful dialogue can begin.

Join the Dialoguers Chat

Leave a comment

Share

Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry

This week’s Posts: The Books That Changed Us

Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us

The Book of Answers

Subscribe now

Buy me a coffee to say thanks

ICYM August’s Theme, The Creative Life

Go more in depth with The Creative Life Writing Collection

September’s The Stories We Carry Writing Collection is coming soon!

Popular Posts from Week 4: Preparing for What Comes Next

Writing Prompts for What Comes Next in Your Creative Life

“Did we ever…?”

Reading Notes: Possession

Popular Posts from Week 3: The Messy Middle

Writing Prompts for Navigating ‘The Messy Middle’

Continuing Without a Trace

Reading Notes: The Cemetery of Untold Stories

Popular Posts from Week 2: Creative Habits

Immersive Storytelling Mode and the ArXiv

Reading Notes: The Unabridged Journals of Sylvia Plath

The Habits That Help Me and My Creative Life Most

Popular Posts from Week 1: Making Space

A Day Alive in the Lakeside Library

How to Make Space and Time for Your Creative Life

The Creative Life as Play and Work

If you want to explore past themes, paid subscribers also have access to the full archive, including previous writing prompts, discussions, and reading lists, as well as full access to the community chat and Daily Drafters Exclusives writing collections.

Get 30-Day Free Trial

Share Daily Drafts & Dialogues

© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 4: Preparing for What Comes Next

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 3: The Messy Middle

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 3: The Messy Middle

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 2: Creative Habits

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 2: Creative Habits

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 1: Making Space

Read more

August Theme: The Creative Life

Big Question: How do we build a creative life that works for us?

Week 1: Making Space

Read more

Read more

July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 3: Sharing the Work

Read more

July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 2: Taking Creative Risks

Read more

July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 2: Taking Creative Risks

Read more

July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 1: Beginning Before You Feel Ready

Read more

July Theme: Creative Courage

Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?

Week 1: Beginning Before You Feel Ready

Read more

Read more

SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM TO SEE TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT

Have you been feeling lost or desperate lately?

Write anyway.

Do you feel like there’s still too much to learn, see, and do until you find your true inner voice?

Write anyway.

Are you feeling uninspired today?

Write anyway.

Do you feel exhausted, or irritable because of how exhausted you are?

Write anyway.

Are you feeling lonely and like nothing you do matters?

Write anyway.

Have you been feeling overwhelmed by the weight of the world lately?

Write anyway.

Do you have a busy schedule and feel like you never have time to yourself?

Write anyway.

Are you anxious and unable to focus on anything for longer than a minute at a time?

Write anyway.

Does it feel like no one will ever listen to what you have to say?

Write anyway.

Are you unsure of what you’re feeling and where you’re going in life right now?

Write anyway.

I could keep adding different feelings, states of being, and life scenarios to this list, but I think you get the gist.

Regardless of what you’re going through today, write anyway, because the times you are less inclined to write are probably the times you need to sit down and write the most— to reflect, to breathe, to escape, to remain inspired and creative, to remain human.

When you write, you will become more inspired with each word you write, each sentence you write. Or, at the very least, you will start to feel more relaxed and focused as you write. The only caveat is that you allow yourself to write freely and even badly sometimes. The act of writing itself will allow you to slow down and breathe as long as you aren’t expecting a perfect literary masterpiece to surface every single time you sit down to write.

Also, using cloud-based apps and setting doable daily writing routines and quotas will keep you writing every day, especially when it’s difficult to do so. Even if you only write 500 words per day for an hour each day at lunchtime or right when you wake up, it all adds up. And you’ll always feel better about having written something.

You can also change what you write whenever you want. Write a journal entry one day, then the next day complete a free writing exercise or a creative writing prompt like the ones you’ll find at the bottom of every Daily Drafts and Dialogues post. Or write the next scene in your novel or your next Substack post. It doesn’t always matter as long as you keep writing, no matter what. Trust me. You will feel better in the long run when you do.

Today’s Dialogue

When’s the last time you decided to write anyway? And how did it make you feel?

Leave a comment

Share

Buy Me a Coffee

Explore the Archive

© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

Community Notes

ICYMI

EGALITARIAN BOOK CLUB

Join the public chat for June’s pick, Yesteryear by Caro Claire Burke.

Join the Egalitarian Book Club

CURRENTLY READING

Poverty, By America by Matthew Desmond

Week 1 (July 1-5 )— Prologue- Chapter 1

Week 2 (July 6-12)— Chapters 2-4

Week 3 (July 13- 19)— Chapters 5-7

Week 4 (July 20-31) — Finish Book

July 31st: Discuss entire book in Substack chat thread

Join Buddy Read

See What Paid Subscribers Get

Get 30 day free trial

TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT:

Read more

SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM TO SEE TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT

It’s part of the human condition to compare ourselves to others sometimes, to see where we fall on the ever-elusive spectrum of ‘normal.’ And to emulate those we understand as setting the bar for the ‘normal’ standards we want to reach or feel we need to reach within our chosen professions and roles in life.

However, there are times when we wind up, even if unintentionally and subconsciously, comparing ourselves more to the stereotypical visions and versions of the roles we’ve chosen than what those roles actually entail on the ‘normal’ spectrum, or what feels most authentic and normal to us individually, especially as writers. Which is problematic for a number of reasons; chief among them: self-doubt and creative abstinence.

When writers compare themselves against stereotypical visions and versions of who they think they should be and what they think they should be doing in order to be considered a ‘normal’ or ‘serious’ writer, they often wind up flattening, or even eradicating, the most creative and authentic impulses and aspects of who they are as both writers and humans, and end up suffering from crippling self-doubt as a result. Which then ends up not being all that great for their writing, which in turn makes them continue to question their identity and abilities as a writer, which in turn makes them continue to search for other writers and practices to emulate that may not encourage them to be the writer they truly are and want to be. And on and on it goes— inert creativity trapped inside a never-ending spiral of self-doubt.

Of course, finding writers and writing practices you want to learn and emulate is essential to evolving into the writer you want to be, and is a never-ending process. Reading others’ work and seeing how they do it, however, should always be inspiring and inspire your own authentic work, not make you feel less worthy of calling yourself a ‘serious writer’ because you aren’t doing exactly what they’re doing, exactly how they’re doing it. Especially when stereotypical visions and versions of who you think they are and what inspires their writing begin to blur with who they actually are and what they actually do when they write, and those blurred visions and versions begin to influence you and your writing for the worse and make you start doubting yourself and your capabilities as a writer.

In other words, as you continue to fine-tune your writing identity and writing practices, be careful of falling victim to those stereotypical visions and versions of who you think other writers are and who you think you should be as a writer— those generic stereotypes that are often applied to writers— without allowing yourself to discover on a case-by-case basis which writers’ writing you genuinely admire and which writing practices of theirs you want to emulate, to become the most authentic writer you can be. Especially if you want to avoid being trapped inside a never-ending spiral of crippling self-doubt that prevents you from writing at all.

Subscribe now

So, what stereotypical visions and versions of ‘normal’ or ‘serious’ writers am I talking about?

What writer stereotypes need to die?

Buckle up because there are a few, though they all have a common thread. See if you can pinpoint what that thread is.

1. You need to own a million vintage typewriters and leather journals or even care about vintage typewriters and leather journals.

There is nothing wrong with owning vintage typewriters or caring about vintage typewriters, of course. But you do not need to be obsessed with them in order to consider yourself a ‘serious’ or ‘normal’ writer. Personally, I don’t like how they take up a lot of space, collect dust, and can be difficult to maintain. I also don’t like the smell of white out and don’t like how noisy typewriters can be when I use them. If you don’t feel the same way I do, cool. But if you do, please know that’s okay, too.

Likewise for leather journals. Personally, I am a fan of collecting journals I never actually write in because my Notes app is always closer and easier to get to, and because, well, they’re just so pretty and I don’t like ruining them. But if you enjoy marking up all the pages in the leather journals you collect, please, be my guest, go nuts!

2. You need to be depressed, a heavy drinker, or partake in illicit or hallucinogenic substances on a regular basis to be a creative writer.

In fact, the opposite is true. Studies show that you can’t think clearly or creatively when you are on drugs or use them frequently, and that drugs damage creativity by dulling our awareness, making us self-absorbed, and impairing critical faculties. [1]

Not to mention that the tired stereotype that ‘serious writers’ need to be depressed or dark often leads to heavy drug use and addiction, which is a toxic and deadly stereotype to uphold. If you are an optimistic, generous, hopeful person who doesn’t need medication or want to use illicit drugs, you can still be a writer with something worthy and important to share and are in fact more likely to write anything creative at all long-term. I also wrote about this in A tortured artist is a myth. No?

3. You need to be a man or adopt stereotypical masculine habits and tropes (see above), and or only write about war and misery and death, in order to be considered a ‘serious writer’ worthy of attention or acclaim.

There’s a lot to be said about this stereotype because it seems to be the hardest stereotype for writers of all backgrounds to accept and confront let alone eradicate due to their deeply indoctrinated beliefs of what ‘real literature’ is— which is a direct result of stereotypical cultural, patriarchal, educational standards, which are solely based on a literary canon full of tomes by men, for men, promoted by men, for centuries and centuries, offering the illusion that women have not always been ‘serious writers’ since the invention of written language, despite their work continually being outright stolen by their male guardians or intellectual peers who seem to have no shame or embarrassment about passing women’s writing off as their own in the annals of history, albeit discreetly and dishonestly, all while deliberately and publicly sidelining those same women authors in every way imaginable (literally, legally, and professionally), belittling them as being ‘too feminine’ so therefore ‘not serious enough’ (whatever that is even supposed to mean), even as they steal from them and require institutional indoctrination to subordinate those women’s ideas and writing to their own entitled wills.

Whew. I know. There’s a lot to unpack there. I am already thinking of writing a post (or entire book!) dedicated to this topic, as we speak…

4. You need to be a pretentious, pompous pr*ck in order to be a ‘serious writer.’

This stereotype follows from the last but is more insidious as it tends to sneak up on those who are so indoctrinated by what they have been led to believe ‘real literature’ is that their creative sense of wonder and exploration via writing and reading becomes practically non-existent over time. So, they (likely as a coping mechanism based on their unresolved insecurities they refuse to tend to) end up shutting down and ignoring and sidelining everything that isn’t ‘real literature’ to them or the patriarchal literary canon and dictates they refuse to expand or edit— essentially working to shut down the natural evolution of human literature and its potential, as well as their own creative potential.

Again, I realize there’s a ton to unpack here, worthy of its own post or book… But for now suffice it to say that being a judgmental jerk about what is and is not ‘serious writing’ or ‘real literature’ just makes you a jerk, not a ‘serious writer’ who knows how to genuinely explore the possibilities of what’s written and what can be written, especially if you aren’t critical of your own work or limitations.

5. You should read and laud every Classic in the existing literary canon, and only enjoy those works, if you’re a ‘serious writer.’

There are thousands of Classics, so reading every single one of them would be challenging if not impossible, especially if you’re interested in dabbling in Eastern Classics as well as Western Classics. And the likelihood that you’ll enjoy every single one of them or want to emulate every single one of them is definitely impossible and straight-up disingenuous to claim, if you’re actually paying attention to what you’re reading and fine-tuning what you want to write. Statistically, there will be far more literary works outside the Classics canon that will resonate with you as a writer than not. Of course, some Classics will resonate with you and the writer you want to be. But all of them? To the point that you feel the need to laud works that don’t actually resonate with you or the writer you want to be? And belittle everything else in the process? I don’t think that’s reasonable or healthy or indicative of wanting to be a ‘serious writer.’

Please, it’s time to put the tired stereotype to rest that anything outside the Classics canon isn’t ‘real literature’ or worthy of reading or emulating, and that popular writing is essentially meaningless simply because it’s popular—especially when it’s propagated by those who don’t even bother to read what they’re judging at face value before making their stereotypical judgments without direct textual evidence. I believe whole-heartedly that readers of all stars and stripes and backgrounds should experience a book in its entirety before they can judge its merits— and even then, they’re only qualified to judge its merits for their own writing, not every person in human existence. (Note: this is coming from someone who has a master’s in English.) Besides, most of the Classics today were actually popular when they were first published… so there’s that to chew on, as well…

“Don’t judge everyone else by your own limited experience.” — Carl Sagan

6. You aren’t a ‘serious writer’ until you earn a prestigious award or acclaim, are traditionally published, or hold a degree.

You can still be a serious writer creating important work if you don’t earn a prestigious award or acclaim or hold a degree. And yes, even if you aren’t traditionally published. There are so many writers out there worthy of attention and acclaim, whose work is worthy of emulation, who don’t have awards or degrees, and aren’t traditionally published. In fact, most prestigious awards are based on, you guessed it— “deeply indoctrinated beliefs of what ‘real literature’ is and should be … as promoted by stereotypical cultural and patriarchal education [and institutional] standards,” so… I at least think it’s worth questioning what stereotypes aren’t even being questioned when it comes to prestigious awards and acclaim and traditional publishing norms, no? Which is not the same thing as saying that awards and acclaim and traditional publishing norms don’t have their own value, only that questioning what they represent and offer, especially in relation to one’s own writing, is essential.

I have a master’s in English and only perceive its value in relation to my own writing, not others’ writing. And I am still struggling to see how traditional publishers and their affiliated awards offer more benefits to most writers and authors (not just those who make it big) than self-publishing or indie publishing in the second quarter of the twenty-first century— especially those writers who want to make money, which the whole traditional book business is supposed to care about and spearhead, no?

7. You should be allergic to emotions if you’re a ‘serious writer.’

I enjoy literature that makes me think, but I also enjoy literature that makes me feel something and reminds me that I’m human. And I believe that ‘real literature’ or ‘important literature’ should do both. Personally, there is no in between for me. I didn’t include the following statement on my About page for no reason: “Always start writing with a vital question in mind or to better understand an emotional state. The best writing usually necessitates combining these two elements with great discretion and diplomacy, regardless of what’s written.” But again, I realize this is my opinion, and don’t think you necessarily have to agree with it.

At the same time, however, writers should be concerned about forfeiting real human emotions in what they’re writing for a stereotypical literary idea, or perceived intellectual standard (especially those mired in patriarchal dogma) they’re trying to achieve or believe they should be achieving in what they’re writing, as this does often lead to boring and inauthentic, superficial writing, sadly, instead of noteworthy writing.

8. You shouldn’t care about money if you’re a ‘serious writer.’

This stereotype stems from the fact that most writers who were able to pursue writing as a ‘serious’ vocation in the past had an elite education and came from wealth or had wealthy benefactors, as well as direct connections to the elite literati and traditional publishers. Bluntly: the writers that first promoted this stereotype didn’t have to care about money at all and whether their writing made money, so were therefore able to think of writing as a hobby or noble pastime, probably because everything they did was a hobby, including their intellectual pursuits.

But the truth is, many writers who come from humble beginnings must work hard writing a bit of anything and everything to make money before they are able to have the money, or the time that money affords them, to write their one opus that puts them on the map, unless they’re lauded for their work long after they’re already dead and therefore never compensated. Indeed, many writers who are not wealthy need money to pay their bills first in order to write. So, this stereotype also seems backwards when you think about it. Those who want to make money from their writing likely care about it a great deal more, and are more serious about their writing, as they are willing to put it as their main pursuit to live, not as a hobby they have the luxury to do on a whim while all their bills are being paid from a trust fund.

9. You can’t write different things across different genres and be a successful writer.

While it might be difficult for established writers to change their genres or styles of writing, I firmly believe that if you aren’t constantly evolving as a writer, you’re missing out on all the things that writing has to offer. If you write fantasy today, there’s no reason you can’t write a memoir tomorrow. If you write literary fiction today, there’s no reason you can’t write romance tomorrow. Etc. Why limit yourself or your writing?

Traditional publishing will have us believe that most authors are only one-trick ponies. But I bet if we were to look at those authors’ personal files, we would see a very different view of what they enjoy writing and what they feel they need to write or are compelled to write. There is a reason why many authors use pen names, for example, or why they sometimes switch publishers when tackling a new genre or niche. Don’t let niche-oriented algorithms and traditional book marketing practices make you believe that you can’t write what you want, when you want, even if you have to get a little creative or think outside the box to get it out to the right audience.

10. You need to write every day to be a writer.

I know, I know. This might seem weird coming from me, the person who started Daily Drafts & Dialogues. But it’s true. I don’t think you need to write every day to consider yourself a writer. However, I do believe whole-heartedly that writing every day makes the writing process more enjoyable and easier, and that when the writing process is more enjoyable and easier, writers are more likely to keep writing on a long-term basis. And I am not exempt from that. So, no matter what, I write every day.

Today’s Dialogue

What writer stereotypes do you want to say goodbye to for good?

Leave a comment

Share

Buy Me a Coffee

Explore the Archive

Sources:

[1] How Do Drugs Affect Creativity? by Steve Taylor, Ph.D. Psychology Today. 8.15.2025

© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

Community Notes

THIS WEEK’S WRITING SHARE IS LIVE

What are you currently writing—or stuck on?

Share something you’re working on right now. It can be incomplete, messy, or uncertain.

What part of your writing feels unresolved at the moment?

Or share some of your writing based on a writing prompt shared in a previous Daily Drafts & Dialogues post.

Join the Chat

Here are the results from last week’s poll: Is creativity innate or learned?

See What Paid Subscribers Get

Get 30 day free trial

TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT:

Read more

SCROLL TO THE BOTTOM TO SEE TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT

Earlier this month, I posted a simple Substack note that asked: “When do you feel most like a writer? While drafting, editing, reading, or in the quiet moments when you’re thinking about what to write next?”

And here’s what I learned from the responses I saw:

• Most people overall agreed that they felt most like a writer when they were drafting, revising, and or editing. No surprise there.

• However, more people shared that they felt most like a writer during quiet moments of brainstorming and reflection than when they were editing.

• And most people in the Other category claimed to feel most like a writer during spontaneous moments, when ideas come flooding in and they have to stop whatever they’re doing, regardless of where they are, to write them down.

• A few people in the Other category stated ‘All of the above’ or stated they felt most like a writer during two or more of the options provided.

• A handful of people also claimed to be struggling with feeling like a writer at all and shared feelings of self-doubt.

• A few people in the Other category stated they felt most like a writer when others regularly read and supported their work and offered encouragement.

• And a few people stated they felt most like a writer while drinking.

• Less than a handful of people said they felt most like a writer when they enjoyed rereading something they had already written or published, outside of the revising and editing stages.

• However, only one or two people claimed to feel most like a writer while reading others’ work (presumably for writing insights and inspiration).

Subscribe now

Overall, I was heartened by how many people embraced the various stages of the entire writing process, especially when they expressed their vulnerabilities with finding supportive readers and the unpredictable nature of the writing process itself. Never being able to shut off the ‘writer brain’ once it’s fully activated can make errands and everyday life a bit challenging, even with a portable notebook handy, as can the silent moments when nothing is happening or surfacing to write at all.

Yet nothing seems more challenging and vulnerable for writers than finding readers who engage with and support their work. Which is why I was somewhat dismayed that close to zero responders found the reading process to be essential to the writing process— but only somewhat, as I do realize the implications of the question itself (‘When do you feel most like a writer?’), which is centered around one’s identity as a ‘writer.’

So, why did that make me feel dismayed?

Because we all not only need readers to be writers, we also need to be readers to be writers. For both mutual support and inspiration.

“If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot. There’s no way around these two things that I’m aware of, no shortcut.” — Stephen King

“There is creative reading as well as creative writing.” — Ralph Waldo Emerson

“You should write because you love the shape of stories and sentences and the creation of different words on a page. Writing comes from reading, and reading is the finest teacher of how to write.” — Annie Proulx

“Basically, if you want to become a good writer, you need to do three things. Read a lot, listen well and deeply, and write a lot. And don’t think too much. Just enter the heat of words and sounds and colored sensations and keep your pen moving across the page. If you read good books, when you write, good books will come out of you.” — Natalie Goldberg

“I read widely—for news, the arts, science, for entertainment, and the value of being informed—and, as a fiction writer, I can’t help transposing what I learn into the scenario for a novel or story.” — T.C. Boyle

“Reading is like breathing in and writing is like breathing out, and storytelling is what links both: it is the soul of literacy.” — Pam Allyn

“Most important for a writer to read widely, enthusiastically. Writing is a consequence of reading and writing well is a consequence of reading well.” — Joyce Carol Oates

“Read and write. Read a lot. Read new authors and established ones, read people whose work is in the same vein as yours and those whose genre is totally different. You’ve heard of chain-smokers. Writers, especially beginners, need to be chain-readers. And lastly, write every day. Write about things that get under your skin and keep you up at night.” — Khaled Hosseini

“Read, read, read. Read everything—trash, classics, good and bad, and see how they do it. Just like a carpenter who works as an apprentice and studies the master. Read! You’ll absorb it. Then write. If it’s good, you’ll find out. If it’s not, throw it out of the window.” — William Faulkner

“I kept always two books in my pocket, one to read, one to write in.” — Robert Louis Stevenson

“The way to rock oneself back into writing is this. First gentle exercise in the air. Second the reading of good literature.” — Virginia Woolf

Today’s Dialogue

When do you feel most like a writer?

Leave a comment

Share

Buy Me a Coffee

Explore the Archive

© This work is not available for artificial intelligence (AI) training. All Rights Reserved by K.E. Creighton; Creighton’s Compositions LLC.

Community Notes

Additonal Reading:

Have a post related to today’s topic?

Share it in the comments so we can read it and chat about it next!

Let’s be readers first today.

See What Paid Subscribers Get

Get 30 day free trial

TODAY’S WRITING PROMPT:

Read more