Why You Should Be Bold in Your Writing
Photo by Alvin Balemesa on Unsplash
I signed up for Pema Chödrön’s most recent teachings at the Omega Institute. She gives teachings there annually, and they are recorded so you can register and see them even if you can’t get there live. I’m listening to a little bit each morning to start my day with some mindfulness and compassion.
This morning I learned about the practice of “compassionate abiding.” This is where you sit with those powerful, judgmental emotions that come up around your thoughts, your feelings, your behaviors. You breathe those in, and then breathe out spacious acceptance. All those things you try to push away? Those are part of who you are, like it or not. Jungians call this the Shadow. And the adage holds true, that “what you resist, persists.” Before we can extend true compassion to anyone else, we need to learn to have compassion for ourselves.
What does this have to do with writing?
In writing, it can be tempting to shy away from the big emotions. We remain on the surface, narrating our lives (if it’s a memoir or personal essay) or our characters’ lives as though we’re a movie camera. But we’re left with a two-dimensional picture that doesn’t fully resonate with readers, because we’re afraid to really speak our truth.
We feel uncomfortable. We worry what readers might think of us. We worry that it reveals something about ourselves even we don’t want to know.
Or we write to the market – what we think agents, editors, or readers might like. We fail to dig up the good stuff because it might turn people off.
Raises hand. I’m as guilty of this as anyone!
You don’t need to write “serious” pieces to have emotional resonance. David Sedaris’ work is hilarious, but it resonates with readers not just because it’s funny, but because also speaks to deeper truths about the human condition. He doesn’t shy away from the awkward or the ugly or the painful. He’s bold on the page, which gives the reader permission to laugh at their own inadequacies, humiliations, failures.
There are two ways to be bold as a writer:
Be bold in your topic: Choose the topic that really spurs your emotions. If you’re not sure about being bold, use these prompts to do a little excavation. Set a timer for at least 15 minutes, and don’t take your hand from the page (and yes, I mean write longhand).
What do I really want to write about?
If I weren’t afraid of what other people would think, I’d write...
The most important thing to me right now is...
What I really want the world to know is...
(These last two can be Big Ideas, or small ones. If you pick a Big Idea, you’ll need to plunge in and make it small, through talking about your own experience, or getting specific.)
Be bold in your writing: Don’t just skate along the surface. Ask yourself where you can go deeper, and tell the real truth.
Use specific language – not “I entered the hospital room” but, “The smell of antiseptic hit my nose as soon as we stepped into the cramped hospital room. I sneezed. The curtain was pulled across the window, leaving my mother’s body a dim hump in the bed. The steady beeping of the heart monitor reassured me she was still alive. A skeletal hand reached out to me as her eyes opened, registering my presence. My feet seemed to move forward of their own accord, even though I didn’t want to touch her cold hand.”
Go deeper into character interiority (whether you are the character, or it’s fiction): Not “Looking at her, I felt angry,” but “I held her gaze, trying not to let any of the emotional storm I felt show on my face. How dare she treat me like my feelings, my preferences, didn’t matter! It always went back to the same old thing. The minute I felt someone dismissing me, I was six years old again, trying not to cry on the playground because, once again, no one wanted me on their team. Now, I had to turn away, before she saw the tears pricking my eyes. Please God, let me have some dignity left.”
Not every moment needs so much detail, but in revision, it’s a good idea to go back over your prose and see where you can go deeper, be bolder. Tell your truth. It will make your writing exponentially better. Beginning writers especially often err on the side of lacking depth and boldness, specificity and interiority.
Sometimes that is difficult. It involves holding our fears, our discomfort – not pushing them away. We have to sit with it, breathe it in, sort through a tangle of emotions to get at what we really want to say about a particular experience.
But if we’re going to create that emotional resonance for a reader, we can’t shy away from it ourselves.
You still need to practice self-compassion, or in Pema’s terms, “compassionate abiding.” If you’re describing something that is upsetting or traumatic, you need to allow yourself some space to step back afterward. What will you do to recalibrate? Go for a walk or run? Drink some tea? Read some poetry, or some humor? Meditate?
Take a look at something you’ve written in the past week. Where can you be more bold, in one of the ways described above?
