Welcome back to the Writers Secret Weapon, the newsletter for writers who are looking for help writing and being creative but who are tired of the same old advice that everyone else gives them. I’m John and I want to help you write better.
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I thought today we could talk about being vulnerable, so I recorded a few thoughts for you. The transcript is below as well.
JOHN: I thought I would make a music bed, a little bit of audio to kind of open and set the mood for everything. And I realized as I was poking around and chopping up audio and finding some sound effects that were making me really happy. Um, I don't think anybody would notice because I'm not honestly sure if people listen to this or if they just, you know, keep scrolling down and skimming or reading the, transcript and , then call it a day.
If, by the way, you are hearing this. In addition to or instead of reading it, let me know, leave, leave a comment down below. And if you are somebody who could not care less about me talking and are instead just reading down below, let me know that too .
But, um... I've, I've been noodling on this topic for a while, really sort of struggling with this for a while because it takes so many twists and turns and you know me, I tend to, to not have the most scripted, polished sound in the world. I like not having a scripted, polished sound, but because of all the twists and turns, it really went places and I started ranting about other things and I lost my place and it just, It became a mess and it's become a mess and I've ended up being judgy and critical and I wanted to do neither of those things.
I wanted to sound like me and hopefully I'm more than just somebody who's judgy and critical. So I thought I would sit down and try it one more time, but this time in audio. And we could talk about something that's pretty important that is, I think, a fundamental tool in the writer's toolbox. And it's the strategy I'm calling guts on the page.
I've been calling it that for years. It's the idea of vulnerability. but not vulnerability that's manufactured and not vulnerability that's targeted. It's just the fact that you are vulnerable in your writing. Now I want to approach this from two ways first, from a fictive fiction kind of way and from a nonfiction kind of way.
Let's deal with the fiction first. I think that's what a lot of people are here to check out. In fiction, our vulnerability as a person is sort of diffused and steeped into and through our characters, and our plots, and our stories, and our themes, and our constructions. How we see the world. So, let's use me as an example for this.
How I see, how John sees the world, turns out... It informs how John writes his characters, and how John makes his plots, and how John, you know, picks the themes he chooses, because that's what's on his mind, and that's part of his life experience. And one of the reasons, publishing wise, why we want that vulnerability is so that we end up seeing a diversity Not only of creativity, but a diversity of personal experience this way.
Not everybody's writing the same five themes and just sort of coloring in different colors or, you know, scribbling different lines. But it's almost always the same thing. We're actually getting person in the personality as it comes across to each other and as it matters to one another, that's. For me, I think the core of fictional creativity, we're making something up and it's not just about how fanciful or imaginative or the number of adjectives, you know, it's about you showing up into something creative, whether you intended it or not that, whether you sat down and made a conscious effort that the, you know, hurt, lost, scared main character child in chapter one really echoes some part of you feeling hurt, lost and scared when you were a child and you know, you wandered away from everybody and you felt lost in the appliance section or something like that.
That idea that parallelism is what you want to see more of, not forced, you know, not You know, shoehorned in there like, well, X, Y, Z situation happened in my life, so X, Y, Z situation happens in the story. That's a little too on the nose. But we want that kind of sincerity of expression. That's the, the principle, I don't even know the word, the principle foundation for, , getting your guts on the page.
It takes real courage to find that sincerity, because there's a temptation to take this into either very manufactured kind of sincerity, you say what you think you want other people want to hear, or you say it in a way that elicits some kind of response, or you hyperbolize and you take a thing that maybe isn't an 11, And you crank it all the way up to 11 because, you know, at some point you'll get a response.
However, if you keep cranking everything to 11 and saying everything, you know, is help, help, giant red sirens, everything's on fire, eventually, what are you going to do? You get diminishing returns. In fiction, when we are looking at our. Our sense of ourselves. We want to balance the kind of I've imagined this alongside.
I've lived this in nonfiction. We reverse that in fiction. We take what we live. And we express it in ways that are creative, not created. We don't want to bullshit people. But we take the creative way of building a bridge because our experience is our own. And we might be trying to connect with somebody who's never been where we've been or done what we've done or said what we've said or felt what we've felt, but we want to find a way to connect somehow, some way to them again, not in a way that is manufactured so that I am forcing or eliciting a response that is insincere, just that I'm trying to.
Get across to you what's going on in a way that I think you can connect with on more than just that Intellectual I understand the words and they're all in a sentence way you want to connect with someone Deeper in a meaningful satisfying way. This is not Easy. It's scary. It takes real courage. It takes real nerve to do it because now we're going to talk about the other side of this.
People freak out when you get vulnerable. They do. They don't mean to. They want to be compassionate. I firmly think the majority of people could be. Given enough support, given enough encouragement, given enough of an atmosphere could be very compassionate to each other. And once we strip away a lot of nonsense, we strip away things like performance and social and social media and.
All these different kinds of things that dictate we should act or function a certain way and we just get back to people are people. I think you'll see a lot of compassion and I believe the reason why we see so much compassion in situations outside of the dependence of Oh my God, this makes content or something like that is because people are fundamentally compassionate and it's the outliers of people who aren't that, you know, we need to deal with on a more fundamental level.
However, that doesn't necessarily get around the fact that when you are vulnerable, when you say vulnerable things, people don't necessarily know how to react. Not because they are devoid of reaction, but because they are immediately weighing their reaction in and around the climate of potential reaction.
So if I say something vulnerable to you, like I'm. Deeply lonely and I feel miserable and I feel incredibly unloved in a, in my marrow DNA level way. Somebody somewhere is going to hear that and Have a number of possible reactions. Maybe let's say it's not true. Maybe they'll say it's not so bad. Maybe let's say, well, there's gotta be somebody who loves you and short.
Yes, there, you know, there's family and their level of love that they're willing to engage with. But I'm, I'm. Deeper than that. I'm I'm thinking like I feel alone on this whole rock as it spins through space level alone And and you know knowing how much my mom thinks i'm i'm really nice and caring does not ameliorate the fact That you know I, I feel like I'm some kind of Byronic hero up on a tower looking out over the moors wondering if I will die alone tomorrow like that's, that's where I'm at and when I say something like that, the reaction is varied and the reaction ranges from everything from somebody laughs because I'm talking about Lord Byron in the moors all the way to disbelief or frustration or just, uh, sort of polite nod because they don't know what to say and they're welcome to their reaction You're welcome to your reaction hearing that I'm being truthful. You are entitled to feel however you feel I would encourage you to feel something, but it takes as much courage for me to admit a thing as it takes courage for you to feel a thing.
And you're probably at this point wondering ten minutes into this conversation, what does this have to do with writing? How did we get off on this tangent? And let me tell you what it has to do with writing your ability to access your emotional palette and your ability to interface with someone else's emotional palette is the basis for better writing because you're about to make up some characters and make up a silly little plot and have them do some things for a few, you know, tens of thousands of words.
And if you want that to be believable, if you want somebody in the middle of nowhere who's got your book to vibe with it. You need to communicate their actions, not just in a creative I wrote good sentences way, but express how characters think and feel in a way that someone else can use those thinkings and feelings and descriptions to imagine the movie in their brain.
And the primary tools of that imagination are emotional and creative relationships through feelings and expression. So getting in touch with your Feelings and interfacing with other people's feelings are critical to your writing. Now we can practice this, but of course, practicing it on some level turns intellectual.
We just look for more in different words to say a thing. Well, what's a different way I can say lonely. What's a different way I can say interested. What's a different way I can, that's just, you know, thesaurus. That's just a research method. We need to find ways where we can express it. Honestly, openly, and sometimes that means not dressing up, you know, an idea with a 10 word, but instead looking at something more simple, looking at more of an honest statement of, Hey guys, I'm lonely and depressed and I hate the winter.
And I hate that it makes me question existence. And I just hate that I feel bad for about five to six months out of the year. I think it's a miserable way to live. And I blame myself for all my problems. That's simply stated. I didn't dress it up in flowery language of my therapist. I didn't give it a DSM diagnosis.
I just stated a thing. Vulnerability takes courage. Vulnerability is hard and showing up for somebody else's vulnerability, especially when it's expressed through a character and you connect with it enough that you're seeing past the fancy adjectives or the magic spell of the wizard or the shiny cool toy of the superhero and you really show up to the feelings.
Is commendable, and it's hard, and we practice this not through an intellectual exercise, but by trying to understand the scene and the events and the actions of our characters in a way that can get past just being descriptive. We don't just want a procedural character moves his hand, then his foot, then his face, then he says a thing, then he feels a certain thing, then the other character says a thing.
We're not. We're not trying to recap and recount things. We are looking to find the feeling underneath. Why is the character saying this thing? Not what is it accomplished? And therefore that's the reason they're saying it. But what is the character feeling that allows them to say whatever they're feeling this way?
Cause they could have said it a million different ways. But again, to do that, we have to show up and talk about ourselves and we have to show up and own ourselves, which means sitting down in the drafting phase, sitting down in the marketing phase, sitting down at some point in the whole journey and thinking about how we feel and not running away from it.
And if you're somebody who's sitting there thinking, well, I'm somebody who's been writing, but not finishing. Uh, so this must not apply to me. Buddy, it super applies to you. You have to learn how to do this because the reason why you're not finishing is somewhere in this emotional stew. Whether it's you're just afraid of failing, you're afraid of getting started, you're afraid of not knowing what to do next, you're afraid of rejection, you're afraid of it taking too long, you're afraid of it feeling like you're wasting your time, you're just indecisive.
You're just indecisive. Or a billion trillion other things. The reason you're struggling is in here somewhere too. And I'm not saying that if you just got gutsy and talked about it, it would suddenly go away. But if you got gutsy and started talking about it and learned that you're not alone in that feeling.
So the level of embarrassment you may feel about feeling it in the first place can be reduced. And, and that'll just, that'll just help because that way you'll be able to connect with how you feel and then be able to express how you feel without feeling bad for feeling it in the first place. And then you'll be able to connect to somebody who also feels that same way and is also very likely afraid that they are bad or wrong for feeling what they're feeling in the first place.
And the next thing you know, two people have connected and that's how you grow a more effective bridge between you and someone else. They're for an audience. That sticks around because they feel heard and accepted, which means you, from a production standpoint, need to write this vulnerability, your guts on the page, not so much forcing that connection, Hey, love me, motherfuckers is is not the best way to do this.
It's about being you. Honest without fear of judgment and without that sort of tightened jaw fist ready to throw a punch Response to judgment. Yeah, judge me. Well, fuck you, buddy You don't want to do that either you want to show up and just say here's how it is It sucks. I think it sucks and I think it sucks for reasons or I think it's great for other reasons and The audience whomever they might be they're gonna have their response.
They're gonna say and do whatever and You have to ride with it Now, let's be very practical about the environment in which we're doing this in. Some people are going to look at this and run the other way. They are. They just are. That's just what's going to happen. Not everybody. I don't know how many people.
Maybe it's one, maybe it's two, maybe it's ten. Fine. What that tells you... Is that those people, however many who just left, they're not here for any kind of substantial connection. They were here for the transaction of your creativity. I just want to know about a book and, and not really dig too deep. And if, if you are the kind of person who does not want to dig deep and just produce some art and get it out, that's fine.
That's great. Do that. But if you're somebody who wants to dig deeper because you want more meaning not only to come out through your art, but more meaning in the orbit of your art, you want to have better connections with people. You want to have more of an impact on people, not just sales wise, but personally, you want to raise the level of discourse.
You want to do something more substantial and move and affect people the way you've been moved and affected yourself without just forcing extra creativity. Then yeah, you're going to have to lose some people along the way and you're going to have to be willing to do the extra hard work because it's uncomfortable sometimes to get that depth and make it sort of normalized and accepted currency and normal part of the, the interaction.
It might be a better way to say it, a normalized interaction between you and others, and it takes real courage because you have to admit things that maybe people don't like talking about. And a lot of people will deflect through this. A lot of people will do this in a, in a fun way. That's not necessarily bad.
You know, you can laugh at your own expense, you can joke, but if you take it too far, you start self deprecating and it becomes a different kind of response because then either nothing is serious or everything is sort of like extra tragic. And there's a time and place for that. There's a time to laugh at yourself.
There's a time to be forthright. And you gotta, you gotta balance that out. You gotta... You've got to feel that out at the time, and if you're new at it, may I recommend that you start by making a joke or two, and then if you feel comfortable, press in a little deeper and make fewer jokes. And learn when it's, you know, to undercut a very heavy thing with some levity, not because you want to water down the statement, but because instead you want the audience to freak out slightly less.
It's really a feel thing. And part of this is going to come down to how you construct your ideas, the voice you use, the words you get across. And part of that's going to come down to what is it you're trying to say and how it is you're trying to do it. Like, if you're trying to do this in the shortest amount of space possible because you want to just write a couple paragraphs that really grab somebody, that's harder.
You can get there, uh, you're going to get there probably by writing a lot of paragraphs and then winnowing it down, finding it in the edit, as opposed to just forcibly saying, I have two sentences and I gotta have an emotion because that's, that's an unrealistic expectation to produce. Guts on the page is a remarkable strategy for Opening up pathways of communication that you didn't think you could get.
It's a really useful tool for not only exploring yourself, but opening the door for other people to not only do their own exploration, but share the results of their exploration, share the results of their observations. It's a great way to grow something beyond just sort of that one way informational, I say a thing and you nod your head kind of feeling. It takes courage. It takes practice. I would strongly recommend it. I believe every single reader who is reading this right now has the potential to do it. I think about 99 percent of you should be doing it more than you're doing it. And I hope if you've not started doing it, you give this a try.
I would love to know not only how well it goes, but what I can do to help. Thank you so much for listening. I will talk to you very, very soon. See ya.
John I listened. My brain receives info best by reading, however, I've learned that listening and reading at the same time helps me.
There are many other people who are opposite of me. They learn best by listening! It's cool you were able to add both.