Write your truth
Making a supportive space to befriend and write from your personal, felt truth
Dear Writing friends,
This month, we’re beginning a new ‘theme’ here at Dear Writing. I’m putting quotation marks around that word ‘theme’ because what I really mean here, I think, is – idea, inquiry, conversation. I’m hoping that these themes can be a way of asking ourselves some gentle questions about writing (and living).
This month, we’re thinking about Truth – how to connect with and write from our personal felt truth or truths, how to sneak up on our truth, develop confidence in it.
By truth, I mean our ‘big why’, the reason why we keep writing. I also mean the things, feelings, experiences, stories, voices that feel true for you, rather than The Truth (or Finding Your Voice, in that singular, holy grail kind of way that was once so beloved of teachings in creative writing).
Our personal truth is about feeling. It could also mean what feels right for you to write - and not what you think you should or ought to write.
My invitation to you this month is to:
Experiment with writing from a sense of your personal truth.
Let go of the big red Biro of self-criticism - or at least trade it in for a soft 2B pencil.
Explore ways to share your truth safely, including asking for the feedback that you really need – not the feedback that you think you ought to ask for as a writer, or how other writers do this thing called feedback.
Explore how to hold more than one truth at the same time in your writing.
Unpack what we really mean by confidentiality - in workshops, writers’ groups and online spaces - and how we can approach holding others’ truths with integrity.
Develop strategies for writing our truth even when it feels controversial, vulnerable and risky.
This last point is in response to a Dear Writing reader suggestion. Please do let me know in the comments if there are other questions you’d like us to explore around this topic of Truth.
And this month’s Writing Together live workshop – scroll down for the details – is called: Write Your Truth!
Let’s get started.
“Truth is a matter of the imagination. The soundest fact may fail or prevail in the style of its telling: like that singular organic jewel of our seas, which grows brighter as one woman wears it and, worn by another, dulls and goes to dust. Facts are no more solid, coherent, round, and real than pearls are.”
Ursula Le Guin - The Left Hand
Four ways to explore ‘truth’ in writing
In twenty-five years of teaching writing, I’ve noticed that one of the ideas that we writers most frequently struggle with is ‘truth’ and our relationship to it.
If you write memoir, even if you abandon the idea of The Truth and acknowledge that how we remember things in our own lives is always going to be, to a certain extent, a kind of fiction, then you have probably found yourself searching for a personal truth - a thread that feels most true to you.
If you write autofiction or fiction, you worry about voice and narrative point of view and about how to convey the emotional truth of a character or a situation. You also worry about what will be read as fact and if it will upset someone who is/ thinks they are in your book.
If you write poems, you worry that readers might interpret the ‘I’ of the poem and you as the same – and you may end up feeling inhibited about writing anything.
We get all tangled up in this idea of being true to ourselves and our writing.
Writing out our truth can be good for us. Many of us find that when we begin to try to get all that stuff that we’ve been carrying around inside us – slippery, difficult to get hold of – out onto the page, there is a sense of release and relief.
Maya Angelou wrote: ‘There can be no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.’
Bessel van der Kolk writes: ‘While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.’ He continues: ‘As long as you keep secrets and suppress information, you are fundamentally at war with yourself. Hiding your core feelings takes an enormous amount of energy.’
Yes, there can be catharsis in getting your truth out there. This is true.
But I think it is often a little more complicated than that because there can be agony in finally finding the courage to tell your story only to have it dismissed, misunderstood, overlooked, or worse, not believed. There can also be worry and guilt and shame bound up in writing truths that, once out there, might hurt others.
How do we navigate this complex terrain of truth in writing? How do we grant ourselves the space and freedom to write what we really need to write?
Here are four gentle suggestions:
Ask yourself: What is true for me today?
Acknowledge that truth might be transitory and impermanent. What feels true today may have shifted by tomorrow but there are things you can know to be true, right now, through your body – through touching, tasting, listening as well as seeing. Spend some time each day writing what you experience as true to you in this moment. The more you do this, the more you’ll connect with what this feels like for you inside your body. You’ll find it easier to write from this everyday truth in your writing.I love that
from Create Me Free has a weekly thread where she asks ‘What’s true for me this week?’ and invites her readers to share their own personal truths.What feels true for you right now? What do you know today through your body?
What words no longer resonate for you?
Sometimes, we come across certain words that are used so often that they become emptied of meaning. They are no longer true for us. (Awesome, ridiculous, fantastic, co-create are a few of mine.) We need to reinvent language for ourselves so that our words are filled with our personal truth.
What words no longer fit you? What words irritate you or make you angry? What words do you wish people would stop using? Write them down. Think of other words that you could use instead, words that feel like a better fit for you.
Deborah Levy titled the first book in her ‘living autobiography’ Things I Don’t Want To Know. Such a brilliant title. A brilliant book on writing too.
What do you not want to know right now? What do you not want to admit knowing, even to yourself. Write about it.Find symbols and metaphors that speak to you. Ursula Le Guin wrote: ’The only truth I can understand or express is, logically defined, a lie. Psychologically defined, a symbol. Aesthetically defined, a metaphor.’
By inventing vivid speculative worlds, Le Guin enabled herself to play with emotional truth through the lens of imagination. She didn’t need to stick to the facts in order to convey truths. She created a metaphorical language instead.
What images, symbols, metaphors do you feel drawn to?
As ever, Dear Writing friends, be playful and tender with yourself. Don’t push through difficult stuff.
And look out for the Sunday Writing Experiment later this week.
Next Writing Together live workshop session dates on Zoom:
Saturday 24 February - Write Your Truth!
4.30pm - 6pm (UK time)
Sunday 3 March
4.30pm - 6pm (UK time)
Wednesday 10 April
6.30pm - 8pm (UK time)
When you join us for a Writing Together paid subscriber session, you’ll find a gentle and restorative writing space where you’ll receive support and inspiration for your writing and reflection. Camera on or off, we’ll write together in response to writing rituals, suggestions and prompts and then have an opportunity to reflect on what we’ve written and the process. The first part of the workshop is recorded for everyone so that you can catch up later if you can’t join us in ‘real time’. The second reflective part of the workshop is never recorded, in order to honour confidentiality.
I send out a new Zoom link a few hours before each month’s workshop session.
Thank you, Dear Writing friends, for your hearts, comments and encouragement, all of which fuel Dear Writing and help us to build this space together. I’m so grateful to you, my members, for making all of this possible.
Let me know in the comments if there is something you’d like to see me cover in these letters. How can I support you and your writing?