Everything and anything beautiful and inventive and hopeful and exciting, and most of all, true.
… is my response to the reflective journaling prompt: What would you create if you knew someone needed your story? See how I arrived at my answer in today’s post, then join the conversation!
July Theme: Creative Courage
Big Question: What does it take to begin, risk, and share what you create?
Week 3: Sharing the Work
What I wrote below is based on the following reflective writing prompt included in Saturday’s Writing Prompts That Encourage You to Share Your Work post.
Prompt: What would you create if you knew someone needed your story?
Why did I choose it?
I chose this prompt because it touches on the dialogue we had last week: Should writers prioritize creative risks or readers’ expectations? Because if you’re considering someone who might need your story, you’re also considering a potential readership, and potentially making assumptions about them and what you should write or create for them as well. Though the connotation of the question for today’s reflective prompt is obviously different. Where the dialogue question from last week seems more technical and strategic, today’s reflective prompt seems more sentimental and subjective. And I find that interesting and worthy of reflection, as it poses another question: Are there times when prioritizing an intended audience is more appropriate than others, especially if that intended audience needs something? Though how will you ever know who needs a story that only you can write, or something that only you can create?
I also chose this prompt because, like many writers and creators, I think about who might be needing a story that only I can tell due to my unique viewpoint and experience from time to time. Not because I want to impress them or ‘help’ them, but because I want my work to resonate with them in a way that makes them feel understood and seen somehow.
If you’re an avid reader and writer like me, you know what I mean by that. You know what it feels like to read or experience something that reaches you at exactly the right mood and time in your life. That book that makes you want to write and take creative risks when you’re feeling unsure about yourself and your ideas. That story that brings you a moment of joy when you’re feeling overwhelmed, or brings excitement when you’re feeling off or bored. Those pieces of art and stories that make you see the world a little differently. And how they often stay with you for a lifetime, simply because you read or experienced them at the exact time you needed to in your life.
My Response
First, today’s prompt nudged me to ask myself: Who would need your story? And how can you determine this?
And the truth is, I’m not entirely sure how to answer that. Not really. At least, not when I am considering all the people across the planet who are living now and aren’t yet born. Because my stories will inevitably outlast me, even if no one reads them today, or only read them today and not decades from now. There are also too many variables to consider when weighing those questions that I have limited control over, as I have limited control over others’ life circumstances or opinions of my work, and whether they even encounter my work when I want them to.
So, prioritizing readers’ expectations in this context seems like a losing venture, or one that requires an incredible amount of guessing and machine-level yet subjective calculations that even AI won’t be able to compute because readers’ expectations are central and connected to the humanness innate to storytelling itself though we are often loathe to admit it in our current age of quantifying and commodifying everything. Because if we didn’t have readers expecting something on some level, even if those readers only include ourselves, would we ever feel the compulsion or responsibility to tell stories and understand them at all?
Seriously, how am I to know if a sixteen-year-old girl living 50 years from now, or an elderly man who currently lives on the other side of the globe, will or will not connect with my work, even need it, at the precise moment they encounter it, or whether they will encounter it at all? And even if I did, how would I know what to write for them and what they need at precise moments in time when I am not them and never will be?
At the same time, I can assume those who share similar demographics as me are more likely to connect with my story and what I write, but that isn’t usually the case most of the time. At least, not when my photo isn’t readily available to look at. And not when AI and newer technologies are complicating and upending those demographics at record levels as we speak. Meaning, I am assuming women my age, living close to where I’m living, with my education and background, etc. might need different stories than what I am telling in future decades, as well as today. And I am also assuming that they aren’t some homogenous group without individual needs and storylines themselves.
In other words, considering readers who might need my story got me nowhere definitive fast, and just seemed to confuse things more. But the connotation behind today’s reflective question itself still presents an ineffable pull toward something worth paying attention to and considering because at the end of the day we all want to both experience and create things that deeply matter… to someone. Don’t we? Even and especially when it’s getting harder and harder to determine who that ‘someone’ is. Because why else would we feel called to create and tell stories in the grand scheme of things?
So, I started considering who my work might matter to most, which still felt like a parallel fool’s errand, until doing so made me remember the following advice in last week’s post, Balancing Artistic Vision and Creative Risks with Readers’ Expectations:
“Your audience is one single reader. I have found that sometimes it helps to pick out one person — a real person you know or an imagined person.” — John Steinbeck
“The duty of the writer is to make the reader see.” — Joseph Conrad
Weighing those tidbits of advice together got me out of that pattern of circular questioning I was in because it inevitably prompted me to ask: Who is the one reader I would want to make ‘see’ something? For which I do have a definitive answer: My previous self at any age.
The only person I can practically and logically feel responsible for making ‘see’ anything via my writing is my previous self at any age. So, what if I wrote for her and what she needs? Because she is the only person I know for sure will ever really need to hear my story one hundred percent of the time. Whether that story, my story, her story, our story, is contained in the fiction, poetry, or essays I write, what I create should make her see or experience something resonant and meaningful, as there is always a bit of her inside of me as well. And I love remembering the beautiful symmetry of that.
So, what would I create if I knew my previous self (the only ‘someone’ I will ever know for sure needs anything I write or create) needed to experience my, our story? Everything and anything beautiful and inventive and hopeful and exciting, and most of all, true.
Join the Conversation
What’s your answer to this question, or any of the other prompts in Saturday’s Writing Prompts That Encourage You to Share Your Work post?
Leave a comment or join this week’s Drafters Workshop chat, where we’re still discussing creative courage and sharing our work for the rest of the week before we move on to The Creative Life next week.
Whether you join the chat to share your responses, ask questions, or connect with other writers and support their work, we look forward to your contributions!
Please don’t forget to like and share this post with your network so others can see it too. Thanks in advance. I hope to see you in the comments or chat threads sometime soon!
Continue Exploring July’s Creative Courage Theme
This Week: Sharing the Work
Writing Prompts That Encourage You to Share Your Work
Drafting Diaries: Creative Courage
Your Essential Nonfiction Library for Creative Courage
Popular Posts from Week 2: Taking Creative Risks
Taking Creative Risks: Writing Prompts to Build Creative Courage
Popular Posts from Week 1: Beginning Before You Feel Ready
Beginning Before You Feel Ready: Writing Prompts
Why Beginning Feels So Difficult, But Doesn’t Have to Be
Books That Made Me Want to Write and Take Creative Risks
Consider going more in depth with this month’s theme with July’s Creative Courage Writing Collection.
The writing collection is designed to help you explore creative courage from different angles: discovering your voice, strengthening your craft, experimenting with new approaches, and reflecting on the writer you are becoming.
The free posts that will be published every day this month will explore the outward side of creative courage—beginning, risking, and sharing— and should complement this collection quite well, which invites you to go much deeper into the internal work of creativity with 30 guided writing prompts and craft exercises, reflections, as well as three options for guided monthly writing challenges for those who want to go even further than that.