September Theme: The Stories We Carry
Big Question: Why do certain stories stay with us?
Week 3: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
The Question Behind the Question
This month, we’re exploring The Stories We Carry, and this week we’ve been delving into The Stories We Tell Ourselves, which prompted Monday’s question: Can you write great work without challenging your own beliefs?
And the responses I’ve been receiving to that question over the last couple of days have been somewhat unanimous in the affirmative, where most respondents agreed that yes, a writer can write great work without challenging their own beliefs. But I’m still not convinced of this.
As I wrote in Monday’s post:
“I find myself leaning heavily toward the second response [No. If you don’t change, readers can’t.] because I believe great writing, as well as the act of writing in general, compels us to challenge ourselves and explore what we believe. I also think that struggle is where authenticity lies, as well as what’s worth writing about in the first place. Without that struggle (what I also like to refer to as a crucial part of the writing process) readers will probably just passively consume our writing rather than engage with it or reflect on it. Which isn’t bad per se, but not necessarily what ‘great writing’ that stands the test of time elicits and encourages. Great writing, to me anyway, creates an experience in which something is at stake for both the writer and reader, and ultimately prompts further reflection, dialogue, and exploration for all engaged parties as a result.”
However, as I’m rereading what I wrote in that post, I’m realizing where some clarity is needed if we want to expand this discussion.
I am realizing now that the ‘no’ response should have read “No. If you don’t challenge your beliefs, readers can’t.” not “No. If you don’t change, readers can’t.” Because I too agree with most respondents and that you can write something great without changing your beliefs. Of course you can, as it’s our beliefs and convictions that often lead us to write something we deem worthy of writing in the first place.
Yet I do also think that in order to write something ‘great’, you must challenge those beliefs imbued in what you’re writing and that the writing process itself entails this whether we realize it or not, as the acts of writing and revising compel us to continually examine what we think, what we feel, what we assume, and ultimately what we believe, even if those processes don’t end up changing our beliefs. Or at least, they should, as challenging, not necessarily changing, our beliefs via the writing process itself is essential to our evolution as writers and the stories we tell ourselves about what we’re capable of achieving. Especially if we want what we achieve to outlast us.
In other words: If we’re not challenging our notions about what it means to evolve as a writer as we write, will we be able to write the ‘great’ work we have the potential to write?
Which brings us directly to the question behind Monday’s question this week, encouraging us to shift our exploration about the stories we tell ourselves from a simple debate about beliefs we already hold to a deeper exploration of our capacity for growth as writers, prompting us to also ask:
How do we allow ourselves to evolve and expand our reach and potential to write great things while keeping our creative soul and core beliefs intact?
To bridge this gap between examining our internal assumptions and the stories we tell ourselves and the stories we tell others, however, we must first grant ourselves permission to do so in the first place. Indeed, we might even need to come to see this as a crucial and necessary step in our writing practice.
As you continue to read, feel free to join the Dialoguers Chat at any time.
Permission to Challenge Ourselves to Write Great Work and Remain Authentic
When we ask if a writer can produce great work without challenging their beliefs, we’re really asking a deeper question: Can we grow our craft and our careers as writers without losing the core truth of who we are and what we believe?
And to bridge this gap between challenging our internal beliefs and growing and evolving our outward craft, we must first grant ourselves permission to step into unfamiliar, maybe even uncomfortable, territory. Into a space where we can safely examine who we are as writers, as well as what we’re writing and why.
As Flannery O’Connor famously noted in her essays on craft, true internal self-examination requires an uncomfortable, unblinking stance: “To know oneself is, above all, to know what one lacks. It is to measure oneself against Truth, and not the other way around.”
Facing our own creative limitations and confronting our comfortable personal assumptions requires a deeper sense of bravery and confidence, in other words, precisely because, as O’Connor adds, “the truth does not change according to our ability to stomach it emotionally.”
And this is exactly where the vital distinction between challenging our beliefs and changing them becomes so clear.
Challenging what we believe as we write doesn’t necessarily mean we need to abandon our core convictions. Instead, it means we need to be willing to put them into the crucible of our writing process. We must test them, examine their edges and longevity and vitality and relevance, then see how they hold up under the weight of what we write and revise, as well as the evolutions of our life’s work.
O’Connor also beautifully captured the ultimate reward of this crucial step in the writing process when she noted, “Writing is a good example of self-abandonment. I never completely forget myself except when I am writing and I am never more completely myself than when I am writing.” Which is to say that the writing process itself should encourage you to abandon yourself and who you think you are and what you believe but only as it also makes you evolve into the most authentic writer you can be.
But by stepping into that space of creative self-abandonment, when we challenge ourselves via the writing process, we’re not completely erasing who we are or what we believe, but clearing away our internal defense mechanisms and outdated approaches and notions so that our truest voice can continue to evolve and emerge. Madeleine L’Engle captured this exact creative surrender when she wrote, “My writing knows more than I know.”
Essentially, when we give ourselves permission to get out of our own way and stop being rigid in our writing approaches and underlying convictions, on purpose, as an intentional part of our writing process, we’ll be able to continually uncover the hidden and consistent truths of what we think and feel and believe, making our writing impossible to ignore once we transfer those truths, our internal truths, to the page.
To evolve as creators, then, we must expand our internal capacity to challenge what we’re writing and how we’re writing so that we can handle the heavy, beautiful stories that want, even need, to be written through and by us, especially when they demand that we actively interrogate and explore our existing beliefs.
Dialogue Wrap-Up: Rewriting Our Inner Narratives to Improve Our Writing
Since this week’s dialogue had to be reframed, our dialogue wrap-up will reflect that change, further exploring the question behind this week’s original question instead, assuming that great writing requires us to challenge and not change our beliefs.
Instead of asking ourselves whether we can write great work without challenging our own beliefs, we’ll be asking ourselves: How do we challenge ourselves to evolve and expand our reach and potential to write great things while keeping our creative soul and core beliefs intact via the stories we tell ourselves?
So, let’s take a moment to unpack how we can challenge ourselves to be writers who continue to evolve and produce better and better work, even ‘great’ work, by first challenging some of the specific stories we tell ourselves about what it means to be a writer who writes great things in our modern world.
The Story of Becoming a Sell-Out
There is an exhilarating but terrifying moment during a creator’s life when people start paying attention to their work, whether it starts getting noticed in workshops and online spaces or when they start sharing or selling it in a larger marketplace.
But with this exciting attention often comes the paralyzing fear of ‘selling out’ or becoming a ‘sell-out’, which occurs when a creator starts questioning whether selling their work will force them to forfeit whatever inspiration or creative spark or beliefs enticed them to start creating or writing in the first place. And this makes them begin to view financial and commercial progress as a threat against their artistic motivations and abilities and beliefs. Basically, they view selling their art or writing as equivalent to selling away their creativity and core beliefs.
But the biggest danger to our creative authenticity isn’t actually a marketplace or an algorithm. The real threat is the rigid, unexamined story we tell ourselves about what it means to ‘succeed’ as a writer, creator, or artist.
When we assume that financial success as a creative requires us to abandon our original artistic impulses, we create a false choice between visibility and integrity, or making money and keeping our art and writing as more of a personal hobby or endeavor. And this friction often causes writers and creatives to retreat into their comfort zones, even stop creating things, mislabeling creative and financial stagnation (even if endured purposefully) for creative and ‘artistic purity’ or integrity.
However, expanding your commercial reach and earning more money doesn’t necessarily mean you’re compromising your values or integrity as a creative. So, this story is worth challenging whenever it comes up, and reframing visibility as a responsibility to your work rather than an act of conformity or marketplace complicity can change the internal narrative you form about your work from a threat into an opportunity for deeper connection to it as well as those who want to engage with it.
The Myth of the ‘Starving Artist’
Creatives often carry an exhausting internal narrative: “If I make money, optimize my process, or actively write for an audience, I am no longer a ‘true artist’.”
But we need to deconstruct the myth that unneeded or self-inflicted suffering, obscurity, or chaotic habits equal artistic authenticity, or are representative of innate creative gifts.
Earning a living, or healthy stipend, by creating art doesn’t necessarily mean you don’t care about being an artist or your craft or that you’ll forfeit everything you believe. (See above.) In fact, financial security will ensure you can take the time and space you need to continually improve your craft and fine-tune what you believe, as you won’t be distracted by needing to eat or survive every second you’re writing. Note how Harper Lee’s friends pulled enough money together for her to live off of so she could write To Kill a Mockingbird, for instance.
Struggling, especially if it’s needlessly self-inflicted, won’t help you evolve and improve upon what you already know about developing better story structures and characters. It won’t help you market your book more efficiently, or make people want to read it more. It won’t help your diction or vocabulary or writing techniques. And it certainly won’t help you write more, or more efficiently. On the contrary, day-to-day struggles are more likely to stifle your best writing and authentic voice.
Protecting and mastering your writing workflow and how you’ll promote what you write actually protects your art and creativity in the long run, as well, because it prevents you from stressing out and burning out and spinning in circles. Instead of corrupting your voice and beliefs, getting organized and funded ensures your voice will be strong and clear and have a platform on which to be heard. Not to mention, it will also ensure you’re more productive and focused when you actually sit down to write.
Clinging to the romanticized ideal of the struggling artist often acts as a shield or defense mechanism against the vulnerability of putting your work into the world, as it’s much easier to protect a hidden, unpolished draft than it is to sharpen your technical skills and invite public critique. True professionalism and intentionality will never sanitize your creative spark but will provide it with the sustainable framework it needs to evolve over a lifetime. Essentially, when you treat your writing time with credence and respect, and assume it’s worth promoting, you secure the mental freedom required to explore your deepest convictions on the page.
You might also want to read: A tortured artist is a myth. No?
The Imposter Narrative
When a larger audience begins to follow you and your work, it’s tempting to tamp down your quirks or smooth out your rougher, more authentic voice, especially once you start making an income from your work, which seems counter-intuitive at first.
Yet as our creative platforms grow, an updated imposter narrative often takes root. Instead of thinking what we write isn’t ‘good enough’ we might start telling ourselves things like, “To be taken more seriously as I scale up, I need to sound more like a famous author who readers identify with, or fit myself into a specific, more sanitized yet successful literary or creative mold.”
So, writers adopting this inner narrative will start absorbing as much of that ‘sanitized yet successful’ literary or creative mold as they can, trying to see how they can fit their work inside it. But the technical growth this requires, and learning more about the mechanisms of your craft and those works you want to emulate, should always enhance your unique perspective and voice, not erase it or dilute it.
Readers don’t connect with flawless, robotic, copy-and-pasted prose. Instead, they tend to connect more deeply with the cracks, the vulnerabilities, and the imperfections that make your voice distinctly human and distinctly yours. Refining our craft and challenging our beliefs through our writing is not about achieving uniformity with the trends and molds we want to emulate, but more about finding the inner clarity we already possess and enhancing our skills to share who we truly are through what we write.
You can and should actively protect your creative ‘weirdness’ while simultaneously sharpening your technical skills. When you master advanced pacing tricks or study complex sentence patterns, for example, you’re not altering your authenticity or what you believe, but adding whatever writing tools you might need to enhance and strengthen it. Understanding when and how to challenge and improve the writing mechanics you own ensures that your core beliefs can resonate more powerfully via your writing.
Diluting your personality or writing to please a crowd usually results in sterile writing that satisfies no one. Your goal, then, should be to scale your reach and improve your craft without minimizing your beliefs. By viewing craft improvement as a vehicle for your unique perspective rather than a replacement for it, you can confidently challenge and elevate your work. True craft evolution and improvement allow you to grow as an artist while keeping your distinct personality and authentic voice fully intact.
The ‘More is Better’ Trap
In a fast-paced, always-on digital world, it’s incredibly easy to fall into the dangerous trap of believing that to scale and improve your writing career you must say yes to every project, chase every trend, and show up on every platform. But this mindset equates relentless hustle with creative progress and improvement and stems from the undeniable truth that writing more words and producing more work is often seen as better for visibility and growth and a writer’s overall evolution in today’s world.
However, constantly chasing hyper-productivity divides your attention and forces you to keep your ideas at a superficial level, where you hardly ever challenge them or add to them in any significant way. When you rush to meet a relentless publishing schedule just to keep your word count high, you rarely have the time to interrogate your thoughts or challenge anything about your work, inevitably recycling old or outdated ideas and or approaches. You also risk becoming a content machine rather than a thoughtful creator or writer, trading your unique perspective, which requires regular introspection and interrogation, for temporary metrics that will only spin you in circles.
True artistic growth requires a deliberate shift away from pure volume toward depth, and this requires introspection and reflection and challenging oneself and what they think and feel. Which doesn’t necessarily mean that a writer must produce less work overall but that their output is intentional and serves a real purpose guided and or influenced by their own evolution and the stories they tell themselves.
It takes courage and confidence to say no to the wrong projects, or to too many projects, so that you can say yes to the deep work that truly matters. And to balance the demand for creative volume with artistic integrity, you need an inner narrative that is not built around the ‘more is better’ trap. So, introducing a firm set of non-negotiable rules and guidelines for what you will and will not write protects you and your artistic evolution from burnout, also ensuring that your authentic, creative soul remains intact, allowing you to scale your word count and your creative output over time without losing your authentic voice.
Balancing intentional depth alongside the quantity of what you write or create ensures that every piece of writing you publish still carries the authentic weight of your genuine curiosity and the stories you tell yourself. In the long run, readers won’t connect with algorithms or empty word counts, they’ll connect with your challenging, and challenged, human truth. And cultivating a sustainable, intentional creative practice that includes reflection and interrogation is how you’ll be better able to build a massive body of work that actually lasts.
Books to Add to Your TBR to Evolve as a Writer AND Remain True to Yourself
To help navigate this dialogue and the stories we tell ourselves, here are a few books that offer notable guidance on protecting your creative spirit and time and what you believe while expanding your craft and what you’re capable of writing.
NONFICTION
Writing Life Stories by Bill Roorbach
This is a foundational guide for unlocking deep memories. It explicitly teaches you how to sign a mental waiver that grants you permission to take massive creative risks on the page and is ideal for dismantling your internal filters and learning to look at your life experiences without shielding yourself from raw honesty.
The Way of the Fearless Writer by Beth Kempton
This book completely replaces competitive, high-pressure industry metrics with a mindful focus on ritual, beauty, and deep internal listening. It connects seamlessly with the journey of shifting away from the ‘more is better’ trap and learning to redefine success on your own terms.
Writings on Writing by May Sarton
A collection of short, highly focused essays exploring the ‘tension in equilibrium’, which is the delicate way an artist balances the past, the present, and the unconscious mind. It offers wise advice and warnings about analyzing the creative process too closely, helping you maintain an intuitive, authentic voice even as you study your craft and the craft of writing.
Writing Creativity and Soul by Sue Monk Kidd
This luminous, four-part guide frames writing as a sacred, deeply spiritual pilgrimage rather than a purely mechanical craft. Drawing on her own mid-life transition from nursing to bestselling author, Kidd provides a comforting map for anyone who feels creatively lost or constrained by traditional career paths. Instead of prioritizing technical rigidity, it teaches readers and writers to cultivate ‘the empty space’ required to quiet digital noise, listen to the unconscious mind, and find the courage to voice what is uniquely theirs to say.
FICTION
The Savage Detectives by Roberto Bolaño
A sprawling, chaotic journey charting the lives of two avant-garde poets who obsessively search for a mythical, vanished writer across decades and continents, this novel directly confronts the ‘more is better’ trap and pure aesthetic obsession. It brilliantly demonstrates how chasing an elusive, romanticized ideal of the ‘literary lifestyle’ can end up scattering an artist’s energy across the globe, leaving their original creative promises unfulfilled.
The Muse by Jessie Burton
Moving between 1960s London and 1930s Spain, the plot in this novel unravels a deep mystery surrounding a painting, and spaces attributed to a young, tragic male genius, only to reveal the masterpiece was actually painted by a woman who hid her authorship out of fear and intense social pressure. It provides an intimate look at imposter anxiety and hiding as a creative. It also beautifully unpacks how creators often tell themselves they aren’t safe enough or worthy enough to step into the spotlight, choosing to let alternative, more palatable mainstream narratives take credit for their soul’s genuine output.
The Door by Magda Szabó
In this novel, a rising, upper-class female novelist hires a fiercely private, illiterate housekeeper named Emerence. As the writer achieves growing public recognition and state honors, her obsession with uncovering and narrating the housekeeper’s tragic past creates an agonizing moral rift. The book presents the ultimate warning about losing your soul to your career, as the protagonist realizes too late that she traded genuine, raw human connection for material to feed her growing literary profile, ultimately betraying the trust of the person she loved in order to build her own narrative success.
The Idiot by Elif Batuman
In this novel, Selin, a linguistics student at Harvard in the 1990s, becomes infatuated with a classmate and begins a complex, deeply stylized email correspondence with him. As she tries to live her life as if it were a high-concept literary text, the gap between her hyper-intellectualized internal stories and raw human reality becomes painfully wide. This novel acts as a brilliant portrait of a young writer trying to build an artistic identity and explores the exact moment a creator realizes that over-intellectualizing experiences or hiding behind sophisticated word games can actually alienate them from real, authentic feelings and stifle their genuine voice.
📙The Blind Assassin by Margaret Atwood (OUR BOOK CLUB PICK NEXT WEEK)
An elderly woman, Iris, narrates her family’s dark history alongside the text of a scandalous, posthumously published sci-fi novel attributed to her late sister, Laura. As the layered narrative unfolds, the truth of who actually wrote the book, and who sacrificed their identity to let it be published, is revealed. This novel offers a devastating look at the cost of public narrative and hits right at the heart of growing and evolving without losing your soul, exposing the grief, betrayal, and erasure that happen when a writer allows family expectations, public scandal, or survival to dictate how and when their true story is told.
Join this Dialogue
Growing as a writer is never a betrayal of your past self and what they knew or believed. Instead, it’s a necessary, beautiful evolution, or a living draft of a writing life.
I encourage you to look at your current writing practice and see where you can best challenge yourself and the writer you’re becoming without being afraid of losing those things that make you uniquely you, and your writing uniquely yours.
Please remember, you are allowed to expand and fine-tune your ideas, to be fairly compensated, and to sharpen your craft tools. And that it’s fine to hold fast to your core truth, trust your authentic voice, and boldly turn the page to the next chapter in your creative career.
Now, I want to turn the conversation back over to you.
We often focus so much on the mechanics of writing but rarely talk about the emotional scaffolding required to sustain it over a lifetime, and the inner stories that scaffolding requires.
So, tell us:
When you look at your own creative habits and writing practice, what is a major story you are currently carrying about them? And are they serving you?
Are you holding onto old scripts that tell you that obscurity equals authenticity, or are you fighting the urge to sanitize your voice to please a growing audience?
Or is the story you’re carrying about something else?
Please like and share this post to keep this conversation going. ✨🫶✨
Continue Exploring September’s Theme, The Stories We Carry
This Week: The Stories We Tell Ourselves
Writing Prompts that Navigate the Stories We Tell Ourselves
Can you write great work without challenging your own beliefs?
Reading Notes: Interior Chinatown
The Story of My Flaws Sounds Like Death Metal
Week 2: Memory and Storytelling
Writing Prompts About Memory and Storytelling
The Art of Autofiction: Memory, Markets, and the Modern Confessional
Week 1: The Books That Changed Us
Writing Prompts About Books That Changed Us
Can a book genuinely change who we are?
What My Favorite Books Say About Me
The Anatomy of Books That Have Changed Us
20 Banned Books That Have Changed Us
Go Deeper with Daily Drafters Exclusives
This month: The Stories We Carry Writing Collection
This collection offers a month of guided writing exercises, mini workshops, and creative writing experiments designed to take you beyond a single prompt and into a deeper creative practice. It gives you the creative spark and space you need to explore memory, identity, inheritance, perspective, voice, and the stories we tell ourselves and others. It will also encourage you to consider how those stories shape the work we create and the creative lives we lead.
Inside this collection, you’ll find 30 original writing prompts (designed as mini writing workshops) across five sections with focused themes, craft-focused exercises, curated reading suggestions, reflective questions, and three optional month-long writing challenges designed to help you develop your ideas, explore your personal material and stories, and build a consistent writing practice.
You can follow the prompts in order, choose the exercises that speak to you, or return to a section whenever you need a new way to explore your writing craft. As a paid subscriber, you will also be able to come back to the collection throughout the month or any other time you feel like exploring The Stories We Carry in the future.