“I write entirely to find out what I'm thinking: what I'm looking at, what I see, what it means, what I want, and what I fear.” -Joan Didion
Writing, specifically creative writing, is a path to better understanding yourself and your lens on the world.
I’m sure this has been on my mind lately because of the weekly therapy sessions and the Philosophy classes I’m taking (we’re going full tilt on self-improvement this year, baby!), but in all seriousness, it’s a concept that keeps springing up for me: this idea of lifting the lid on my own brain and seeing what’s really going on in there.
It’s easy to move through the day without thinking too hard about anything. “Ignorance is bliss” is thrown around in jest for good reason. But…think about its context: from the pages of George Orwell’s dystopian book 1984, the depiction of a repressive, totalitarian regime. (Yikes.)
The reality is that you don’t incur much friction when you just let everything slide off the surface of your consciousness, never letting anything really permeate your Awareness.
Some days, I would *love* to be a person whose interior world was far less permeable. But ever since I was a little kid, I’ve been a feeler. Call it being sensitive or over-thinking…whatever label you slap on it, I’m a person whose heightened emotional antennae are up and active. And I think most writers (and artists, in general) have this affliction.
I paint the same way now as I did when I was five. The goal is expression, not mastery!
We evaluate our thoughts in the same way I’d examine an interesting mineral: Holding it in my hand, checking out how the light glints off it at different angles, rotating it, zooming in, zooming out, etc.
We similarly look at situations and ask questions like, “Why? What’s the context? What’s informing my perception here? What does it mean?”
Many days, the inner machinations that come with being *like this* are exhausting. Our minds are meaning-makers, and for a sensitive person who wants to get into the dichotomy of why about…well, everything…that eats up a lot of hard drive space in the ol’ brain.
But you know what works well to offload some of this thought processing? Writing.
Specifically, writing fiction.
It wasn’t until I started working on a piece of fiction a few years ago that I was able to see my own inner thinking play out through the characters I was building in my story. Once they were on the page and depersonalized, becoming decidedly “not me,” I was able to spot patterns and distortions and sometimes surprisingly wonderful facets of my lens on the world through this work.
By making fictional characters think, say, and do things on the page, we can come to understand ourselves better.
It’s easy to say, “I’m not like that” or “I don’t think like that.” But fictional characters don’t lie. We summon them out of our interior worlds, and they can be a shocking window into the reality of who we really are.
I didn’t fully realize this until I had an editor review one of my early drafts and give feedback. One of her notes was: “This female character makes some choices in her relationships that really surprised me...and to be honest, they made her hard to root for and a little unlikeable. She tolerates too much, and those choices aren't very inspiring for a main character.”
Woof. (Who knew writing fiction could provide the honest perspective I needed about myself, but no friend would give without fear of hurting my feelings?)
It’s hard to get perspective on yourself and your way of being in the world because, well… we’re behind the camera. We’re writing the script of our lives in real-time: making snap judgments, ad-libbing dialogue, wardrobing, etc.
But by writing fiction, we get a rare opportunity to hop inside our own minds. It helps us escape the non-stop action of being in the director’s seat, where we’re making real-time choices every second, and drops us into the quiet of the writer’s room, where we can be more deliberate about things like character development.
I share all this to say that it would be silly of me to write all of this, to encourage you to do this work, and to not roll up my own sleeves and get back into my novel.
Because even if it never sees the light of day and no one reads it but my editor, it’s going to pay dividends in better understanding myself and channeling that sensitivity into something productive: an act of humanity. Making art.
Go make art, my friends.
Interested in monetizing your writing? This resource from Nathan Barry is worth reading.
