Discovering Yourself In and Through Your Writing

Just one question for this next writer roundtable.

Flannery O'Connor wrote, “I write to discover what I know" and “I write because I don’t know what I think until I read what I say.”

How has being a writer and telling stories helped you discover who you are and what you know?

Nikki Nelson-Hicks: Very interesting question. For me, some of my stories have helped me to touch on emotions that I didn't realize I had inside. Very much poking a blister and letting some stuff ooze out. I have also enjoyed creating characters who have the bravery I wish I had. That's also very insightful.

Jessica Nettles: Being a writer as a kid helped me embrace my differences from the other kids at school. It gave me a space where it didn’t matter that I was the youngest or the smallest or weird. It was the first thing I felt confident was mine.

As an adult, it helped me rediscover myself after a really shitty marriage in my twenties. I found this spooky girl in the middle of the debris who needed to explore the darkness, my darkness. I learned my dark parts were okay and just as important as being good. I love that spooky, magic-loving girl. I learned that I have a voice that people actually enjoy (still shocked by this) and that I’m funny. Mostly, I learned that writing is who I am. I do many things, but at my core, I am my words. That’s my magic.

Lainey Kennedy: Writing has helped me explore the human conditions by creating characters that are both over the top but rooted in little bits of everyone I know. The adventures are the escapism, but the characters are what I know.

Fay Shlanda: My writing has helped me a lot as a person. I write poetry about my relationship with the world around me, which is mostly about mental illness and being broken.

I have discovered that I have much to say on the subject and that overcoming my hardships is something I would not trade in for an easier life. They have shaped me into someone I like and I use my knowledge to help others.

October Santerelli: I wanted to be a writer as soon as I heard it was a job you could have. I was in 7th grade, and I went home that night and told my parents that was what I wanted to do. And after that, writing became a lifeline, a way to express what I couldn't say, feelings I didn't even know I had. Writing helped me understand myself, like holding up a mirror and seeing with fresh eyes.

I've noticed a lot of it leaks out in the themes of my works. I don't plan the themes. But the book I'm working on now is all about being outside the mold of your family's expectations, a feeling I am KEENLY aware of. And it's about realizing no one lives up to expectations, especially not their own, and how unhealthy that can be, and how realizing you're human is important, and I sat back and stared at it and I went: well, crap. Maybe I should take a day off. It's come out in subjects of depression and mental health, trust and self-growth, friendship, communication, belonging, otherness, activism burnout, and more. When I start a first draft, I might start with a plot, but the meaning of it all doesn't come clear until the end. Then I go back and rewrite it like I meant that to be the theme the first time. Much better story on the other side of the second draft, haha! What it's told me about who I am and what I know is that I am a complicated being full of feelings and thoughts and a tangle of emotions, and I know that if I keep it all inside, I'll burst. So I share it, and I try to share it in a way that others can relate to, so they know they aren't alone. They, too, can be a hot mess with a bright smile. I've also discovered that I really like public speaking and teaching through writing, but that's a separate subject. Being an author has allowed me to give keynote speeches, be on panels, present workshops, teach writing craft, run critique groups, and more - and I really like lifting other authors up with me. I didn't know that until I wrote, because I wasn't able to bring others up with me when I hadn't done it. I like sharing what I know. And when I write on serious subjects, in micro-essays on social media for the most part, I learn how much I value that support in return. I learn how important it is to me to keep telling my story, to keep talking about being transgender and queer and disabled. How important it is to tell my stories so the people who aren't in these groups know what it's like, what it means to me, what they can do.

Bobby Nash: I learn things about myself through the lens of my characters all the time. At times, writing has been therapeutic, a way to rail against authority, a way to vent frustrations, a way to say things or express feelings I could never say aloud, a way to connect to things, a way to deal with loss, and even educational. I've learned things about the world, about people, and about myself.

Bishop O'Connell: It helped me see the blind spots in my worldview, and allowed me to grow and become an overall better person. An ongoing and eternal process, but so many things I didn't see till I wrote them down and others were good enough to point them out to me.

James Tuck: Writing helped me discover that I could be a writer. I think most people have heard the story about how I wrote my first book which was that I was reading a book that was supposed to be everything I ever wanted in an urban fantasy and when I was done I put it down and said to myself out loud "I can write better shit than that" and then I googled how to write a book read Lilith Saintcrows blog about it that had real life writing advice and then proceeded to write my first novel.

Stuart Hopen: When I was an undergraduate, I had a sweet tooth for the kind of art that was largely referential only to itself. Art that obeyed no rules. Art for its own sake, as the cliché goes. Art that was not unlike an ecstatic religious experience, a vision of the mysteries that lay beyond the senses, but which could be approached through the senses. I became that species of artist who had a clear vision from the very start, determined to make any sacrifice necessary to bring that vision to fruition, vowing to starve if necessary.

I learned a great deal about writing in college and came away with an inflated view of the discipline, and I pursued a master’s degree under a teaching fellowship at the University of Miami. When I was teaching Freshman Grammar and Composition, I would tell my students that thoughts lacked meaning unless they could be reduced to writing. I was dead wrong. It took decades for me to understand just how wrong I had been.

I ended up dropping out of the master’s program and going to law school, and freelanced for D.C. Comics the whole time, which surely impaired my academic performance.

When I was 22, I wrote and attempted to sell a comic book script that involved a character who had deduced the secret formula—part equation and part spell—for reconciling magic and science. I envisioned a cross between Doc Savage and Dr. Strange, a series that would be both science fiction and fantasy. Understanding the formula made this character immensely powerful.

The editor who rejected this story asked me point-blank, "What are you trying to accomplish?"

And I responded, glibly, “I’m exploring the nature of reality, and the interaction between reality and self. And I want to shock my readers into changing the way they see the world and themselves.”

He laughed. “That approach isn’t going to sell many comic books—especially since you have an oddball, uncommon, hard-to-follow view of the world. Most people think their own view of the world is correct, whether that view makes them happy or not. People don’t want their worldview changed. I mean, you don’t want your worldview changed, do you?”

“I don’t know. Some of my favorite books have done exactly that.”

“Yeah? Best sellers?”

“Not exactly.”

“Most people want to be reassured about their worldview. They’ll be quick to drop books that challenge it. They want adventures where their worldview defeats all the other worldviews. They want a writer who can find words to superbly say what they want to but can’t. They’ll settle for getting their emotions aroused, but they will stop listening if you go against their basic beliefs. And you know, we don’t even make most of our money selling comic books. Most of the money comes from merchandising, stuff like action figures, lunch boxes, and toys. My guess is that you’re the kind of person with strong convictions, your own set of artistic values, and you probably don’t care much about whether what you say will affect the merchandising.”

“Well…”

“You aren’t going to change your mind about your own beliefs on that score, no matter what I say. Right? You want fans, but not if it means selling out. Right?”

“Well…”

“If you want to make it in this business, you should stop trying to be F. Scott Fitzgerald.”

It wasn’t that I wanted to be Fitzgerald. But I identified with him when I was in college because I wanted to drop out of Princeton, and someone had once told me that I was the first person since Fitzgerald to serve as an editor of both Tiger Humor Magazine and Nassau Literary Review. I have no idea if this is true. It didn’t matter. And although I actually held the title of Editor for Tiger Humor Magazine and put together a great issue that included a piece by future Hugo Award-winning author, Lawrence Watt-Evans, that issue never actually made it to the presses, so the post was kind of an empty one, and that didn’t matter either. I was willing to latch onto a myth if it would enable me to latch onto Fitzgerald’s mythic status, at least in my own mind, if nowhere else, including the part about how Fitzgerald attained mythic status while all the evidence around him by the end of his life suggested he was a failure.

I had thought I was destined for a successful literary career, after getting praise and encouragement from the award-winning writers who had been my professors (though one of them had privately said that he thought Princeton would never produce any great writers— not taking F. Scott Fitzgerald into account, presumably because Fitzgerald had dropped out). Another professor had lavishly praised my work and then told me he was planning a horror novel about a creative writing professor who lavishly praised a student’s work when he privately despised it, and years later, the student appeared at his doorstep with a ten-thousand-page manuscript, which he forced the Professor to read at gunpoint. “You’re not trying to give me a hidden message, are you?” I asked. “Nah,” he assured me.)

A different creative writing professor once stated his goal for the class was not to produce commercially successful writers, but rather to teach Creative Writing as a tool for promoting personal growth. My initial reaction was that he was misguided. It pissed me off, especially when I later found I hadn’t actually learned the proper skills to achieve commercial success.

I ended up producing a fair-sized body of artistic work, but not many people have read my fiction, although I’ve had comics published by D.C., Marvel, Eclipse, Fantagraphics, and others, and a novel published by Tor Books. I’ve at least garnered enough critical and commercial success to qualify my writing as utterly obscure. Still, my books meet the only irrefutable test for identifying literary masterpieces, in the sense that they absolutely and perfectly achieved their intended objective. That one irrefutable test is the test of one person’s opinion, for all other tests can be refuted, and the criteria for being a masterpiece is hardly what you’d call the product of an exact science.

Part of the writing process involves targeting an ideal reader, and the ideal reader of my fiction is fully satisfied. For the longest time, without my realizing it, my ideal reader was patterned after myself. That sounds awful, I know, something you’d expect from someone caught up in self-referential, self-reverential art, drowning in the pool of Narcissus. The standards I set were quite high, ambitious far beyond my talents, I knew, but I kept striving for them anyway. My work continually tormented me with its lack of perfection. It was a compulsion. I was cocky and arrogant as hell when I was younger, confident that a great breakthrough was just around the next bend. But the road kept bending and bending, until it was nothing but bends.... continued...

I tried the starving artist bit for a while. I found I wasn't really suited to it after all. Could it be that the experience contributed to my cynical view that America has an excessive bias for measuring value, morality, and wisdom in ways that translate into money? But I did achieve the goal I had so ambitiously set for myself—that of reshaping my ideal reader’s worldview.

There’s a trick to actually reshaping the reader’s worldview, and that involves the same trickery that magicians use, sleight of hand, and misdirection. Make it seem like you’re talking about something else, talk about Science and Magic. Make it funny. Make it seem like you are only kidding. And I was only kidding myself. This, in the sense that I was the person most shaken in his worldview by what I discovered while I was writing, simply through the process of challenging my perceptions, raising countless questions and honing the final product that gave material form to my ephemeral dreams as they interacted with the material world. I understood my fictions well enough, but I’m not sure how many others came away with the message I intended. As I found myself a writer with fewer and fewer readers, I began to think, perhaps that’s all there is here. Writing as a tool for discovery and personal growth. It was kind of a joke.

In the years that followed, my literary and artistic efforts crashed into failure after failure. The lack of commercial success and critical recognition humbled me. That was fortunate, I think. Without a doubt, even a moderate level of success, either commercial or critical, would have derailed my day job as an attorney.

I fell in love, and what is love if not the greatest form of magic of all?

Instead of financially struggling while trying to sell my eccentric visions, I earned a comfortable living by going to work in a hospital two blocks away from my childhood home. It provided a measure of stability, so that I could continue to write in what passed for my spare time.

I had not spent long hours studying the rules of grammar and composition and rhetoric because I had aspired to greatness when writing consent forms, hospital policies and procedures, privacy notices, and contracts, though the writing skills I picked up aided these tasks. In truth, the material I wrote for what I had thought would be a temporary job ended up being my most widely read creations. Consent forms, policies and procedures, notices, medical staff by-laws, contracts, interoffice memos. Thousands of people have read my writing when the product fell into these categories.

L. Andrew Cooper: Answering this question thoroughly would take too much space and probably bore readers not specifically interested in me and my work. I know each of my books, but probably shorter stuff, too, tells me something about myself--and says something about me to others--that I didn't plan. And I plan my books like an architect, constructing themes, recurring images, linguistic patterns, etc. to create deep structures that readers can explore, or not, while traveling through the stories. A brief example. The two splatterpunk volumes I have published so far this year, novel _Alex's Escape_ and novella _Father Is Pleased_, both inadvertently reveal(ed) that I have a fixation on nurturing, mentoring relationships, which appear centrally, in perverse forms, in both works and which I experienced in no significant form until adulthood. In a way, then, I lied in my foreword to _Father Is Pleased_ when I wrote that, since I wrote the book before my father died but published it after, the book has nothing to do with my actual father or his death. I see the book now, and it tells me that I was already grieving that I never had a mentoring relationship with my father, so indeed, that book deals with my daddy issues as well as daddy issues writ large. People read these books and think mostly about the overwhelming gore... which is appropriate... but psychologically, the books house houses.

Nancy Hansen: I've always had a creative soul. I've always had a big bump of curiosity, too. At various times, I wanted to be an artist, a singer-songwriter, I tried running a craft business, wanted to be a farmer, and thought about teaching. I planted gardens, put up food we ate, and did various creative projects. I am sort of an amateur naturalist. I can tell you what bird is singing in that tree and what species of oak it is. I have a huge bump of curiosity about the world around me. Just never had great people skills; I was always pretty much a loner.

I came kind of late to writing; it was while I was raising my sons, and the oldest was struggling in elementary school. I had to be there to see him and his brother through. Part of my being such an introvert isl I had always loved reading, and I needed something I could do from home, so that I could be there to run things and guide those two boys in life while their Dad supported us. I took a couple of correspondence courses and began fleshing out some of the tales I've sold in these later years. Fantasy of any kind was always my first love though I've done my share of Pulp and Action Adventure genre stuff. Along the way, some part of me decided I had to boost women into those tales, many of which at the time were the province of male characters. I went for unusual women, not the supermodel warriors you see on the covers. Tall and thin, short and round, other races, aliens, quiet spoken or outrageously outspoken. They became avatars of me if I was heroic, skilled, wise, or stoic. They had adventures I would never have lived through, blundering around like I would have, but coming out of it with better skills and important ideals. Sometimes they got physically, mentally, or emotionally injured, had their heart broken, wanted to give up, or even died. In real life, not everyone gets through unscathed. Not everyone is successful, heroic, or fit and able. Sometimes you just muddle through somehow. That part I understood all too well.

Writing has helped me through a lot of tough times in life, with some huge changes. I now have somewhere to go with those things that come out of nowhere to alter your life. I've lost a lot of independence in decreasing mobility due to advanced arthritis. At 68, I can't bend anymore so no major gardening, can't stand long enough to cook or do housework, and I use a walker in the home and a rollator when I go out. Someone drives me when I need to be somewhere. But I can write, so I get up every day, get dressed, and get to that chair to boot up the computer so I can get some work done.

Writing has given me something to focus on that is positive and an outlet for my frustrations. To me, it feels like what I was meant to do. So much of what I have learned over the years (I'm 68) goes into those stories as does my angst for the world we're leaving for my kids and grandkids. No longer an introvert, I first learned to speak up for my son, and then myself, and now I can talk to anyone about what I do and why I do it. I found a way to not just fit into the world, but to reach out and touch some folks, in hopes that what I put on a page might inspire them or at least give them a chance to get away from the everyday issues and disappear into a story for a while and unwind. If I had a superpower, that would be it.

Martha Williams: My novel showed me I needed to forgive my brother. A personal narrative, Fear of Frying, talked me through letting go of my fear of lightning strikes. I had been concussed by lightning pressure twice. Flannery had it right.

Kitty Moran: In a sentence, writing has granted me a reconnection with my culture that I have otherwise felt entirely removed from.

Lisa Barker: I know myself better than I thought I did...and yet I don't know what I know about myself until I'm writing. Then, it makes perfect sense. Lol

Jasmine Nicole Glancy: I'm pretty dark, it turns out. I have a very positive mask that hides a lot of internal and external pain. If you know, you know.

I like playing with complex themes and characters. I love writing things that tell the reader different things depending on how they read my work (skipping prologues, if they read one story before the other, etc). My writing research has taught me more about how to empathize with beliefs I don't share.

Plus, I have learned how to mean what I say! It's an ongoing process.