The best writing is naked writing—vulnerable writing, writing that draws from your own experience, directly or indirectly.
Any other kind of writing is phony, and readers can smell it a mile away.
Would you trust a yoga instructor who told you what to do without doing it herself?
Would you trust a carpenter who never picked up a hammer?
Then why do writers sit up there in an ivory tower tossing pages out of the window, expecting us to run after them?
Readers won’t care what you have to say until you come down here and be yourself.
Manufactured writing is boring. Hackneyed.
How do you get naked?
1. Write what you know. You know plenty, but it takes discipline to be introspective enough, self-aware enough to know what you know. Seek for this, then tell us all about it.
2. Go after more experiences. Let’s say you want to write something, but if you’re honest you don’t know much about it. Interview the experts. Get some related experiences on the calendar.
3. Commit to the process of revealing yourself. W. H. Auden, wrote, “How do I know what I think until I see what I say?” Henri Nouwen spurned writing that merely recorded preexisting thought. “Writing is a process in which we discover what lives in us. The writing itself reveals what is alive.”
4. Go deeper. The deeper stuff is the universal stuff. “If I can tell my story artfully enough,” Robert Benson wrote, “then perhaps those who read them will, at the end of the telling, be able to hear more of their own stories within.”
5. Go from the abstract to the concrete. The best communicators speak on the level of the concrete as much as possible. Don’t write “about” things. Get into them and make them come alive.
6. Be honest. Everywhere and always, even if it’s more expedient to cover up.
7. Have a partner or a friend who knows you read what you’ve written. Then ask, “Does this ring true?”
The last way to get naked is the most important, and I promise whatever effort you invest here will be worth it. The last way to get naked is to commit to becoming a person you’re pleased with. If you don’t like yourself, the temptation to avoid yourself will be too great. The writer you is an extension of the real you; the two are not separate. If you don’t like yourself right now, what would it take to begin moving in that direction? The time is now.
What are you doing to get naked in your writing?
The first thing…I’m sorry, I cannot write “get naked”. I’m Canadian, we dress in layers.
🙂
The VERY first thing for me is to admit, in the mirror, out loud, “I AM a writer”.
#1 speaks to me, simply,(though not on Mary’s scale, I couldn’t finish her memoir, sorry) that I can take what pain I’ve gone through and put it on the page.
#6-My MS deals with racism, rejection, abuse, renewal and the healing power of being honest with one’s self and with God.
NOTHING will heal unless we tell the truth. Not one thing.
Thanks for this post. It affirms what I’ve been trying to do all these years. My memoir, Thin Places, was Naked x 10. Can’t get much more authentic! 🙂
Thanks, Mary, for chiming in! Memoir is by definition vulnerable. Takes GUTS! See you at Re:Write!
Chad, I’ve been enjoying reading your posts of late and this one has me thinking. What would you say to a would-be novelist who has been told she needs to make her protagonist more likeable, but who, during multiple revisions, feels that her protagonist shouldn’t be completely likeable? Does one bow to the temptation to change a story in order to secure an agent, or is one faithful to the story itself? Hypothetical, of course. 😉
Erin, thanks. Wow, tough one. As you know I don’t work in fiction, so others’ opinions would be more informed than my own here, but I’ll give it a whirl. The whole issue of likeability in a protagonist strikes me as delicate matter because there is an infinite number of degrees of likeability, right? The pragmatist in me wants to ask, If it’s between getting your novel out there or not, how many degrees can you go and still be faithful to the story? Or: what if you tried it? See how it writes. If you like it, great. If you don’t, don’t send it.
Well, there you go. Hope that’s helpful.
This is similar to acting. Writing that reveals the internal person is the best. I hope your next post talks about ways in which we can do this. For an actor it is not always about verbal communication. How can a writer get more into the internal life of characters?
Elba, thanks for the connection to acting, i think you’re exactly right. We have all watched a scene where an actor was obviously “putting on a performance” over and against the actor who accesses within himself dramatic features of the character. It goes for just about any art form, I expect. Yo Yo Ma sways when he plays his cello because he’s living inside the same emotion he’s trying to express. In terms of getting into the internal life of characters, I think empathy goes a long way. It takes time and intention, but the investment is worthwhile. Thanks for this insight!