📜📚💭A Month Focused on The Stories We Carry
This was the third month we explored a monthly theme together on Daily Drafts & Dialogues, and I’m so grateful to all of you who have joined us! You have truly helped keep this thing going.
While read-through rates have been strong and continue to tick up gradually, and engagement rates have remained steady, we have reached a bit of a plateau with our new subscriber rates. So, I would love your help!
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As a thank you to current free subscribers, this month I am offering you a fully comped 30-day Free Trial if you leave a comment on this post explaining what Daily Drafts & Dialogues means to you.
I want Daily Drafts & Dialogues to be a story that you carry with you too! ✨✍️✨
Which brings us to this month’s digest post, which includes a comprehensive recap of what we covered while exploring this month’s theme, The Stories We Carry.
In September we were able to unpack a lot about the stories we carry through the drafts we wrote, the dialogues we engaged in, and the books we read together. But since we covered five weeks’ worth of topics in over thirty posts, I think it’s a good idea to slow down and recap and reflect on everything we covered before we move on to next month’s theme, The Unknown.
What follows is a high-level recap of our month exploring The Stories We Carry together on Daily Drafts & Dialogues.
I hope you find it useful and inspiring, and that you remember to bookmark it, for whenever you need a personal and practical resource for revisiting the stories you carry, as you never know when you might need such reminders and exercises in the future.
Again, thank you so much for being here and becoming part of this growing community. I look forward to your next comment and chat reply as we close out the month and begin a new one!
💬👥Our Dialogues About The Stories We Carry
In September, we first discussed: Can a book genuinely change who we are?, as we explored The Books That Changed Us.
This question generated a ton of engagement across social media. According to your responses, 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.
This dialogue 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. Which led to us unpacking The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us, in an attempt to better understand this gap and perhaps even fill it.
Next, we discussed The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional during the week we covered Memory and Storytelling, which allowed us to explore the line between factual accuracy and creative truth more in depth via an interactive mock dialogue between Writer A and Writer B alongside industry data and real-world trends and concerns.
Then we discussed: Can you write great work without challenging your own beliefs? as we navigated The Stories We Tell Ourselves in week three, which led us to an even more interesting discussion in Rewriting Our Narratives: How to Evolve as a Writer Without Losing Yourself that was centered around those inner narratives that we need to continually improve and fine-tune as writers, such as The Myth of the ‘Starving Artist’, The Imposter Narrative, and a few others.
And during our fourth week, we discussed: Is it possible for a writer’s public work to remain separate from their private life? which was a partial continuation of week two’s dialogue about autofiction but primarily focused on whether it’s truly possible, or even desirable, for a writer’s public creations to remain separate from their private existence. And this ultimately led to the expanded dialogue in The ‘Death of the Author’ in the Age of AI, which covered how we should revisit and redefine Roland Barthes ‘Death of the Author’ literary theory from 1967 in our current age.
If you missed those discussions or wanted to join any of those dialogues when they were first published but didn’t have the time, they’re still up and ready for your comments!
📚📖Books We Read About The Stories We Carry
September was our second month reading together with our new Daily Drafts & Dialogues Book Club. And we read five great books together! They were all very different and allowed us to understand The Stories We Carry from more interesting and diverse angles.
📕For our Popular Pick, we read Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel, a novel that asks what remains worth carrying forward when almost everything familiar is gone. It created space for us to consider what stories we would carry with us at the end of the world, and how essential memory and storytelling is to human survival. And also made room for our exploration of 20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us as we discussed The Books That Changed Us during week one.
📗For our Real World Application Pick, we read Educated by Tara Westover, an intensely personal memoir that explores the complicated relationship between memory, family, identity, education, and the stories we inherit about ourselves. It allowed us to reflect on how Memory and Storytelling appear and affect our personal narratives. And also made room for us to explore and discuss other Memoirs to Carry.
📘For our Diverse Perspectives Pick, we read Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu, a novel with an inventive screenplay-like structure that examines race, assimilation, family, ambition, and the stories society teaches us about who we are allowed to be. It encouraged us to unpack the invisible background roles society and others expect us to play and what it looks like when we finally decide to stop playing those roles and use our own authentic voice instead. And also allowed us to look at Historical Fiction that Challenges the Stories We Tell Ourselves and why understanding the ins and outs of The Stories We Tell Ourselves is so important.
📙For our Literary Dive Pick, we read The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood, a novel that layers memoir, family history, romance, political history, and a story-within-a-story to explore the distance between what happened, what is remembered, and what is told. It allowed us to take a deeper dive into The Stories We Tell Others and explore whether first-person or third-person perspectives are more trustworthy. It also helped us explore whether intertextual analysis can help us better understand a novel and what it reveals about the power of storytelling. And paved the way for 13 Books on AI, Identity, and the Stories We Tell Others that are worth reading right now.
📖For our BONUS Pick, we read The Book of Love by Kelly Link, a novel that encourages readers to ask questions about what we owe one another and what kinds of stories can survive across time, which helped us end the month with more in depth conversations about Stories That Last, and also serves as a great complement to the other books we read throughout the month.
If you missed any of our book discussions, no worries! You can still join them at any time in Storygraph. Just join the book club then find the Buddy Read link for the book you want to discuss.
✍️💭My Drafts and Reflections on The Stories We Carry
I learned a lot about The Stories We Carry this month, not only by engaging in our dialogues and book discussions, but through the drafts I wrote over the course of the month, which were responses to the creative and reflective writing prompts that went out each Saturday.
The week we covered The Books That Changed Us, I was able to incorporate a bit of magic into my flash fiction piece The Book of Answers, which ironically enough made me understand more about how a book can and does change someone’s life in the real world. Then I wrote What My Favorite Books Say About Me to further understand the books that have changed me personally, and why.
Writing my poem, A Childhood Memorial, allowed me to step back in time in a way that proved to be deeply emotional the week we covered Memory and Storytelling, and I can’t recommend completing the prompt that inspired it enough. As I wrote this poem, I truly felt as if I was revisiting and moving through a real space from my childhood.
Writing The Vital Glitch allowed me to unpack some unspoken fears I have about the future of AI, memory, and the stories we tell ourselves, and was fun but eerie to write. But my reflection on the soundtrack of my flaws, The Story of My Flaws Sounds Like Death Metal, was a little more straightforward and simple to write. Still, both helped me navigate The Stories We Tell Ourselves in important ways, and I will continue to recommend writing about these topics.
My flash fiction piece, No Good Deed, made me think about the stories we tell others from a different and unexpected angle and ended up being completely different from what I had originally planned to write. Yet it did help pave the way for me to explore intense honesty in my reflective piece, The Happiness Trap, in which I discuss the one compliment that makes me feel trapped or forced to perform for others. And in retrospect, I see how these two pieces complement each other much more than I thought the week I wrote them, when we explored The Stories We Tell Others.
For our final week, I wrote Uncanceled, a flash fiction piece that left me feeling conflicted and thinking about the intentions behind art in all its forms, and how such intentions matter when investigating and understanding the Stories That Last. Which led me to write the reflective piece, The stories that wedge themselves into my psyche must…
All in all, I would say what I’m feeling after engaging in our discussions about The Stories We Carry and writing drafts that prompted me to investigate those stories and what makes them not only tick but stick is: cautiously hopeful.
I also want to sincerely encourage you to complete some of the writing prompts in September’s Drafts posts, which explored The Stories We Carry, if you haven’t already, because you might just end up surprising yourself in some unexpected and reaffirming ways you’ll never forget. Truly, completing some of the prompts in the following posts, as exhibited above, allowed me to understand the stories I carry in ways I never saw coming.
🌱👥Growing Our Community and Looking Ahead
🫶THANK YOU FOR BEING HERE! 🫶
I can’t tell you how much your engagement and support for what we are building here means to me, and how it continues to inspire me to keep building and growing an online reading and writing space that you and I both deserve— a space where writing and reading meet through daily practice, thoughtful discussion, and shared curiosity. And I hope if you haven’t had the chance to subscribe already, that you will consider joining us in October. We can’t wait to connect with you!
As a thank you to current free subscribers, this month I am offering you a fully comped 30-day Free Trial if you leave a comment on this post explaining what Daily Drafts & Dialogues means to you.
We’re now three months into following curated monthly themes with weekly focuses on Daily Drafts & Dialogues, and the responses to what we are building here continue to be positive and encouraging.
However, as mentioned at the beginning of this post, engagement rates and subscriber rates are currently plateauing, which isn’t alarming by any means, but is something worth noticing and getting ahead of if we can.
So, please take a moment to share this post and publication with your friends and social networks so others can join us too. This will ensure our future discussions are more robust and meaningful, and that Daily Drafts & Dialogues continues to evolve into the publication you want, need, and deserve.
🗣️👥💬SHINE AND THRIVE IN THE CHATS💬👥🗣️
In the month ahead, I want to keep focusing on increasing our engagement in the Drafters Workshop Chat and Dialoguers Chat threads, so we can discuss our writing and engage in interesting dialogues and genuinely support one another there.
I know joining a new chat can feel weird or even seem intimidating, but I can assure you that these chats only have one goal in mind: to keep you more curious and motivated about what you want to write and read than overly cynical and overwhelmed about what you want to write and read.
I can’t wait to see your first or next chat reply, even if all you do is pop in to say hello.
📚October Book Club Picks📚
ℹ️ Tomorrow’s post will include more details about how you can join October’s book discussions and what to expect. But for now, know that some Books posts in October will be centered around our book club picks to enhance our discussions centered around October’s monthly theme and weekly focuses.
Having designated books to read together each month will enrich our monthly and weekly dialogues, as well as really allow us to dig deep and experience and examine practical applications of what we are reading and discussing in a way that is insightful to our own writing practice and creative lifestyles.
🔔You’ll see more details in October’s ‘Book Club Picks: The Unknown’ post, which goes live tomorrow. But for now, be sure to reserve your copies of the following titles through Libby and your local library or order them through your favorite bookstore so you can read with us.
📕If We Were Villains by M.L. Rio
📗I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
📘The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa
📙The Haunting of Hill House by Shirley Jackson
✨OCTOBER THEME: The Unknown ✨
Next month, we will be discussing The Unknown and asking ourselves the big question: Why are we drawn to mystery and uncertainty?
🚀This Saturday we’ll kick off October’s posts with five creative writing prompts and five reflective journaling prompts, which will focus on: Mystery.
📝The Unknown Writing Collection will also be available by the 10th for paid subscribers, if not sooner, so stay tuned for that!
Inside October’s collection:
✍️ 30 Guided Writing Prompts
💡 Craft Explorations and Tips
💭 Reflection Exercises
📚 Curated Reading Recommendations
📅 3 Month-Long Creative Writing Challenges
I can’t wait to see what our drafts and dialogues uncover next month when we unpack The Unknown and how it influences our lives and our writing.
And I’m truly looking forward to your next comment or chat reply!
Until then, happy writing and reading.
It’s not too late to go more in depth with The Stories We Carry Writing Collection.
This writing collection is designed to help you explore The Stories We Carry a little deeper than weekly prompts and posts typically allow, with 30 guided mini writing workshops and craft exercises, reflections, as well as three options for guided monthly writing challenges for those who want to go even further than that.