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
What I wrote below is based on the following reflective journaling prompt included in Saturday’s Writing Prompts for What Comes Next in Your Creative Life post.
Prompt: What Do You Hope Your Writing Teaches You?
We often talk about what we want our writing to teach readers, but shouldn’t we also consider what our work is teaching us? Perhaps writing teaches you how to further develop and hone your patience, courage, attention, curiosity, honesty, forgiveness, or regularly allows you to see something you couldn’t see before. Today, take a moment to consider what you hope to learn by continuing to write.
Why did I choose it?
I chose this prompt because I think as writers it’s often easier to consider how others are encountering, perceiving, and engaging with our writing much more than it is for us to consider what our writing is allowing us to learn about ourselves, other people, and the world around us. Or the scale tends to lean heavier toward the former at least. Especially while we’re in school or at work or writing something for a publication or social media consumption.
We writers also like to consider ourselves as objective vessels of information and ‘truth,’ especially when we’re telling our personal stories and articulating our own thoughts (ironically enough), often forgetting what and who has influenced what we decide to write, when, and how, as well as the unique trajectories of our individual writing lives. Especially while we’re in the middle of writing something.
But how often do we consider what our writing is doing for us, teaching us, as humans? How often do we actually reflect on how and if the practice of writing, and what we decide to write, is allowing us to evolve our understanding of the world and all the people in it?
Basically, I chose this prompt because I want to take a moment and reflect on why I write what I write, and what I hope my daily writing practice teaches me during current and future stages of my creative life, especially as we cover ‘Preparing for What Comes Next’ this week.
My Response: I Want My Writing to Teach Me How to Be More Human
Honestly, it’s weird asking yourself: Why do you write? Especially if you’ve been writing your whole life and have already lived through many decades and seasons of your writing life.
The first writing memory I have involves me sitting down at my grandmother’s typewriter when I was around five, typing away some nonsensical story about a princess who was annoyed with a prince who came to rescue her from her castle because she was interested in rescuing herself… or something to that effect. Because, of course, the story, which barely filled two pages, made a little less sense than that at the time, and was covered in White-Out by the time I was done with it. But it was a huge step for me and my writing life, the hugest step even. And luckily, my grandmother continued to cheer me on as I continued to sit down at her typewriter and conjure ridiculous stories out of thin air, or so I thought. After all, she was the one who taught me how to tell a good story, and who introduced me to the library.
Writing memories that follow that one are closely linked with what I was doing and learning in school. I remember spending a lot of time in the writing lab writing scary stories and stories about aliens up until the third grade.
I remember winning a writing contest when I wrote a story about a self-erasing chalkboard and recliner chair for teachers when I was in the first or second grade. I was on the school news and everything. They were clearly biased, and I apparently had already learned the adage “Know your audience” by then. But the experience still left an indelible mark on me.
I remember getting poor marks on the first book report I ever had to turn in when I was in the third grade because it was around twelve hand-written pages when it was only supposed to be one or two pages. At this point, I clearly knew how to explore stories, but not how to summarize them well.
I remember writing in composition notebooks and in the margins of novels and books outside of my assigned schoolwork in middle school. And writing terrible poetry when I read and analyzed my first Edgar Allan Poe poem, which was morbid and dramatic, in true pre-teen fashion. Though all that writing is lost now as a result of multiple cross-country moves.
I also vividly remember becoming more familiar with literary techniques and critical theories in high school before going on to study literature and English in college through grad school alongside philosophy, which was my dual major. I will never forget all the times I had to write about the green light at the end of The Great Gatsby, for instance (and no, I was not a fan). Or how writing philosophy papers influenced how I wrote my English papers, and vice versa (and yes, I was a fan of this).
I remember writing a paper about Joyce’s Dubliners and Dante’s Inferno. I think the title was something like ‘The Dubliners Go to Hell’ or something ridiculously dramatic like that. And of course, there were the papers I loved writing for my Feminist Lit class and Shakespeare class, as well as the American Lit class I had that was centered around various perspectives during the Civil War. And so on…
I remember taking only one creative writing seminar in college and hating it. And I don’t use that pungent word lightly because it hurts me to say it now, especially because I’m not sure I ever admitted it in writing before. But I did. I hated that seminar. I vaguely remember what the focus of the seminar was, but I starkly remember writing something about an abandoned apartment that went nowhere and being incredibly bored while writing it, though the workshopping of it went fairly well, which shocked me because I nearly fell asleep while writing it and rewriting it over and over again. I also remember being incredibly disappointed that we weren’t assigned an extended reading syllabus that encouraged the type of writing we were supposed to be immersed in and learning how to execute ourselves.
Most of the creative writing and writing workshops I engaged in and enjoyed while in college were oddly outside of the classroom and consisted of small groups of friends without any real structure.
Between undergrad and grad school, I ended up getting an editing job in the media research industry, which was fun in a way because the writing I edited was based around television shows. But it was also hard because I had to work the midnight shift, and the writing itself was incredibly formulaic in a lot of ways, though there were some creative aspects to it.
Then during my first year in grad school, I got a marketing gig at the university I attended, where I wrote materials and correspondence promoting some of their programs, while volunteering in the writing lab as a tutor for college students.
In grad school, I of course considered staying on to get my PhD, but why I ultimately decided not to do so will require more space to unpack than this post will allow, sooooo… we’ll just let that rest here for now.
Anyway, I ended up working for a well-known travel publication after they turned my internship position into a full-time position… and the rest of my writing life, well…
There have been some major ups and downs and stops and starts over the past decade or so since I finished grad school that inevitably led me to starting my own LLC, which offers writing and editing services, or did, as I have pivoted my focus to building out Daily Drafts & Dialogues and my debut novel in the last year or so.
There are other writing memories and positions I don’t have the bandwidth to mention here but have also influenced my writing life and its trajectory, as well as who I am today and what I write today.
In other words, the loose and informal writing resume I’ve offered above, is a long-winded way of demonstrating how reflecting on why I write is as bizarre to me as asking me why I breathe or live, as it is so deeply ingrained in my DNA, my psyche, my history, the trajectory of my life, my expertise and experience, my interests, and how I operate on a daily basis as a human. Truly, I don’t think I could ever live without writing or understand who I am or want to be without writing.
Which is essentially why I found today’s reflective prompt so compelling.
I’ve always written things because that’s just what I did. Since I could hold a pen or type on a keyboard, I have been writing.
However, until recently, the writing I took seriously and gave most of my energy and effort to, or even bothered to keep copies of, was always completed for a grade or a specific payday.
So, what did all that writing teach me then?
Well, it taught me how to write, what techniques and rules to use and when, as well as how and when you can bend and break those rules. Otherwise, I would not get a good grade or get paid.
More than anything else, however, my writing life up to this point has taught me how to adapt my writing for different audiences, especially as those audiences fluctuate and evolve over time. Which was probably truer for my audience of professors than the target audiences I was writing marketing materials for, believe it or not.
But what about now? What do I want my writing to teach me now? Now that I’m not writing for professors or companies or clients or following strict style guides or publication requirements that I have no direct control over? Now that I allegedly have more creative freedom and control over what I write?
Well, I want my writing to continue teaching me about my humanity, and how the vulnerabilities I express when being profoundly human will connect me to others’ humanity. I want it to teach me how to connect with others and what truly matters in this world before I’m gone. I want it to continue teaching me new things about myself, the world and all the people in it, as often as possible. I want it to inspire as much creativity in my daily life as it does thoughtfulness and reflection.
Essentially, I want my writing to teach me how to be more human on purpose.
Sure, knowing your audience and how to write for them has value. But writing something that allows you to see yourself more clearly and profoundly, is where and how a writer’s life can take on an entirely different life of its own and (ironically?) allow it to connect to others on a much deeper and more human level, whether they are a target audience or not. And that, I think, is what I’m striving for now as I reflect on what I want to prepare for next in my creative life this week, as my writing life continues to evolve— paying attention to all the ways my writing is encouraging me to be more profoundly and authentically human.
Join the Conversation
What’s your response to the question I answered in today’s post, or any of the other prompts in this week’s Writing Prompts for What Comes Next in Your Creative Life post?
Leave a comment or join the Drafters Workshop chat or Dialoguers chat, where we’ll be discussing how to build and sustain the creative lives we truly want for the rest of the week.
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Continue Exploring August’s Theme, The Creative Life
This Week: Preparing for What Comes Next
Writing Prompts for What Comes Next in Your Creative Life
Drafting Diaries: The Creative Life
Popular Posts from Week 3: The Messy Middle
Writing Prompts for Navigating ‘The Messy Middle’
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
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