Writer's Secret Weapon Volume 8: Creative Honesty
The one where I talk about truth and lies and truth in lies
Welcome back to The Writers Secret Weapon, where I layout a set of tools, ideas, and motivation to help you write better.
And if you don’t know who I am, I’m John, I’m a writing coach and developmental editor with over 20 years of experience in traditional and self-publishing.
Today I’ve got one thing to talk about, and it’s sort of a central pillar of everything I do across all the places I do things. Come take this ride with me.
I’m a liar. I lie for a living. You’re a liar too. You lie for a living. We make up things and hope that we’ve done such a good job at lying that someone gives us money for our lies. We are professionally dishonest for profit.
I have a messy relationship with honesty. I spent nearly two decades avoiding honesty through the magic of various pills and other drugs, and when you spend that much time out of your head, you come to realize that you’re very good at avoiding honesty in order to get what you want.
And that’s because what you’re avoiding are feelings. Feelings that you’re scared of because they’re maybe enormous and messy and jagged and you’ve got fuck-all tools to manage them. You’re scared. You’re lonely. You’re hurting. You’re angry. You’re horny. You don’t feel good enough. You feel like there are changes that need to happen but you’re absolutely certain you don’t have any ability to make those changes. You lie because all of those feelings are hard and don’t always feel good the way the pills or the needles or the powders do.
Here comes the best worst hardest writing advice you’re going to get: those feelings need to end up in your work.
They don’t need to directly come out of the mouths of your characters, there’s no reason to stick a scene in your fantasy novel where all of a sudden the priest gets shitfaced because their third-level spell didn’t work right and now they feel like a failure who no one’s ever going to talk to again. You don’t need to interrupt the development of your romance novel so that your protagonist can take a few pages to wonder where they can score some coke before the end of the chapter.
But those big and scary, messy and unclear, unpleasant and impolite feelings need to be in your work. How you feel at your worst, at your best, on a Thursday, when you’re happy, when you think about that person you have a huge crush on, when you’re binge eating because you’re unhappy, put that in your work.
This means you to step outside having that feeling and think about what that feeling is. How would you describe to someone else? Even if you have to invent a person you feel safe enough to admit how the feelings feel (I did, because talking to actual people seems hella unsafe on a lot of days without significant tools in place), you need some way of knowing some amount of vocabulary to describe the real feelings you’re about to impart into your created world.
The feeling of getting picked last for kickball might not seem to matter in your fantasy quest story until you take a step back and consider that the feeling of being not good enough, not like other people, of not being popular or strong can absolutely drive a protagonist to be maybe too proud and stubborn and a little angry at the world, making this quest more personal than it maybe is for everyone else.
That time your grandmother said that hurtful comment to you when you were at the Thanksgiving table that you probably had enough because you were getting “chunky” might not end up in your queer romance novel, but that feeling of being judged and not accepting who someone is or could be absolutely works in your story where one character has to love themselves first before they can really love someone else.
That’s the honesty we need to get to, that’s the honesty people connect with. Too often we get hung up on the particulars on the memory’s specific pieces that personalize it for us: I can remember the t-shirt someone wore when they broke up with me, and I can remember the color of the roast chicken when dinner was getting cold as my father told me I was a failure and a disappointment every day of my life. But those details aren’t the things that make it relatable - no one cares how brown a chicken was or how many zebras were on a t-shirt - it’s the feelings we can associate with the chicken and zebra description that will put the reader in the space with the characters.
Our truth can empower magnificent lies that affect people as they decode our lies into their own truth. You might never know what it feels like to find just the right number of pills to swallow after a long day of watching other people do better than you, but you probably can understand what it feels like to feel like you’re never making progress and never getting any closer to your goals while everyone else seems to be blasting past theirs and the relief you feel with that glass of wine or one more episode of whatever show you’re binging.
Even when the specifics are unrelatable, there’s always something underneath that we have to poke with a stick so we can use it to connect with someone else. This is hard. A lot of writers aren’t willing or aren’t able to do this easily, if ever. There is no shortcut to this. You can’t farm this out to AI or a template. You can’t hire someone to find your own truth.
This is the hardest work you’ll put into your art. It requires enormous vulnerability because there are a number of risks to ego and mood. You can’t control the response you’ll get, you don’t know what people out there will think and because that audience reception is critical fuel for all the later steps in publishing, it can make the earlier steps in publishing (the writing) feel like they’re at times futile or dangerous or terrifying or any of another thousand words to describe the feelings, fears, paralysis, and excitement.
But it’s worth it. It’s worth it because people are coming to your prophesied child urban fantasy novel not for the dragon who owns the coffee shop but because you’ve written something relatable about the pressures of feeling like people are counting on you. The way you right your big courtoom legal thriller climax is nice but people aren’t going to remember your book because you found the best adjective to describe the chairs - they’ll remember the way you swept them up in the emotions around the what-if of the protagonist’s failure.
Always look for your truth so you can give the characters their truth. Be brave. Try.
Love you. Talk soon.