Writing the Truth

Here we are in mid-January, 2020—holiday celebrations are behind us and another year, another decade is open before us! If you are feeling any after-holiday blues, my message is, “Cheer up.” We are writers. We know a secret to ridding ourselves of the blues. What is it? Start writing.

Write what you really feel, smell, see, hear, and touch. No one is watching. You’re free to lose yourself in some messy sentences, brainstorm new characters, or experiment with adjectives you rarely use, like “cumulative” to describe sentences that build to a crescendo.

In your journal, which no one ever reads or should read, get up early and write the truth about what bothers you, what helps you. Scribble whatever comes into your little holiday-washed-out mind and do not stop for fifteen minutes. Or look out the window and day dream awhile … writing and daydreaming are part of our truth-telling work.

Inspiration begets inspiration

During the holidays, my husband and I visited some of his cousins, their adult children, and their laughing, running-around grandchildren. One adult-child-of-a-cousin and I talked about writing. She wore not only a shining smile, but bright red writing anxiety right there on her long pretty sleeve. As we continued rambling about writing—its slow starts, false starts, and shitty first drafts—I tried to help her brush off some of her blank-page fear. As we commiserated about sitting down to make words real on paper, rather than letting them float like fog in our minds, something surprising happened. Well, maybe not all that surprising. As often happens, in offering her some good cheer, cheer came back to me.

My favorite book about writing

I told her about a book on the writing life/writing craft that I fell in love with years ago. It gave me comfort. It cheered me up deep inside. It was not preachy or intimidating, just a little book—only 179 pages—containing significant wisdom. It was written by the funny, dedicated, and inspiring writing teacher, Brenda Ueland (1891-1985). Here’s a bit from Goodreads about Ueland and the liberating book she wrote.

“Brenda Ueland was a journalist, editor, freelance writer, and teacher of writing. She is best known for her book If You Want to Write: A Book about Art, Independence and Spirit [1938] … She attended Wells and Barnard colleges and received her baccalaureate from Barnard in 1913. She lived in and around New York City for much of her adult life before returning to Minnesota in 1930. ] … Ueland would spend her life as a staunch feminist and is said to have lived by two rules: To tell the truth, and to not do anything you don’t want to.”

Telling the truth

Tell the truth. My relative and I reflected on telling the truth, especially regarding memoir. When telling the truth in that non-fiction genre, someone may get hurt. For sound advice on that topic, I recommend Judith Barrington’s, Writing the Memoir: A practical guide to the craft, the personal challenges, and ethical dilemmas of writing your true stories. Memoir writing often feels like pulling back curtains to reveal a complicated mess, so I suggest we learn how to write memoir with grace and honesty as best as we can. You may find other helpful books, too, but that one helped me the most.

But wait, there’s more! Writing truth is not limited to memoir or other types of non-fiction. In any fiction or poetry, or any other writing, Ueland urges us to tell the truth about what we see and feel; about what our characters see and feel. Take courage! Whatever we write, readers can sense whether it’s truth from our hearts or not. Describe everything with care. Cut clichés. Convey each line with all the love and concentration you can.

Ueland fills the pages of her wonderful book with stories about her students shedding fear and trepidation (and sometimes laziness and pretentiousness) to write with energy and truth. Here’s an example:

“A girl in my class once described a young man, her hero, by saying: ‘His muscles rippled through his shoulders.’

I turned to her and said: ‘Are you sure they really rippled? They so often ripple in fiction, but have you seen that? Can you see this young man clearly in your imagination? Can you tell me what he looked like?’

She said very earnestly: ‘Yes, I can. And they did ripple. His shoulders were very big and looked as if they would burst through the seams in his coat.’

‘Well,’ I said, ‘put that down. That is just wonderful, a fine graphic description.’”

To get that sort of original work on the page, Ueland reminded her students that they only needed to do one thing: tell the truth.

“Everybody is original, if he [or she] tells the truth, if he speaks from himself. But it must be from his true self and not from the self he thinks he should be. Jennings at Johns Hopkins, who knows more about heredity and the genes and chromosomes than any man in the world, says that no individual is exactly like any other individual, that no two identical persons have ever existed. Consequently, if you speak or write from yourself you cannot help being original.”

We are each original. No one else can do our writing for us; no one else can tell our truth. Let me offer one of my favorite quotes on this subject. I even memorized it years ago, and it’s been there for me in many moments of doubt. It’s from Hamlet, by our old friend William Shakespeare, who put the following wisdom in the mouth of Polonius: “To thine own self be true, and it must follow, as the night the day, thou canst not then be false to any man.”

Be brave. Write the truth. Write on and on.