Write Something That Will Change Your Life
By Jim Dempsey | March 23, 2018 |
It seems like a tall order, to write something that will change your life. And it is. But I think it’s still worth striving for.
By changing your life, I don’t necessarily mean that you have to write something that will earn you lots of money so you can buy an island or even enough money that you can quit your day job. Although, if becoming rich (or rich enough) is important to you, then that’s fine too.
And that’s the point, to write something that is important to you, something that comes from your heart, something that means a lot to you. As I said, money might be important to you, but it might be worth digging deeper to ask why money would be important.
If you want to use the money to buy a house for each of your kids, then it’s not the money that’s so important but your family’s long-term security. If it is an island you want, then maybe that’s because of your love for nature, quiet and rest.
It’s not always so easy to know what’s truly important to you, but there are—of course—some useful exercises to help determine your deeply held values.
1. Ambitions
We develop many of our most important values at an early age, and one way to find out what matters to you most is to go back and try to remember what your ambitions were as a child.
Think back to when you were young. What did you imagine your future would be like? Did you want a happy life with a family? Did you have a hero, someone you wanted to be like when you grew up? If so, what qualities did that person have that you admired?
Use these questions to write a few lines about your ambitions as a child. From your answers, you should already get a sense of what is most important to you. It could be that family, career, justice, or friendship is what matters most. Other values could be anything from adventure and assertiveness to sexuality and spirituality.
2. The interview
Even if you only write in those few spare moments you have in the week, it’s still useful to think of your work as an author as a career. What, for example, do you want to achieve with your writing? And what special skills do you have to make that happen?
Imagine you’re preparing for a job interview to be an author, your kind of author. Think about some of the following questions and even make short notes if you want.
- What are your most important personal qualities for this job? As with a real interview, find specific examples of when you displayed these qualities in the past.
- Why is writing important to you?
- What would you like your readers to say about you?
- What would you like other writers to say about you?
- If you had to have a personal motto, what would it be?
3. The speech
It’s your 90th birthday, and you’re a successful author. The people close to you have organized a party. Imagine then that one of them, the person most important to you—either in your personal life or your writing career—gives a speech. What would they say about your life? What did you stand for? How did you make a difference?
You could write the whole speech or just answer those few questions.
These exercises will give you an indication of what’s most important in your life. Look for recurring themes from all these answers and identify the most important values to you. Examples of typical values not already mentioned are: fairness, responsibility, kindness, safety, romance, conformity, gratitude, and humor.
You can use these values to give your writing direction, to write about the things that matter to you, to make the kind of change—in your life and others—that you would like to see. These are the principles that guide you through your life and which can inspire your writing.
The recent increase in popularity of feelgood books in the so-called up-lit genre—Gail Honeyman’s Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine and Jamie Thurston’s Kindness, the Little Things that Matter—make use of qualities like kindness and gratitude.
So, if, for example, family is an important value for you, you could explore that in your writing, perhaps by having a main character who ignores her family only to finally have to turn to the unconditional support of her family. If fairness is an important value, you could test your hero’s commitment to always being fair, and show that it was the right way to go despite being confronted with many difficulties and dilemmas along the way.
How would you like your writing to change your life? Or, how has it changed your life already?
[coffee]
Jim Dempsey (he/him) is a book editor who specializes in detailed analysis and editing of novel manuscripts through his company, Novel Gazing. He has worked as an editor for more than 20 years. He has a master’s degree in creative writing and is a professional member of the Chartered Institute of Editing and Proofreading and is a trustee of the Arkbound Foundation. Jim is fascinated by the similarities between fiction and psychotherapy, since both investigate the human condition, the things that make us uniquely human. He explores this at The Fiction Therapist website. If you have a specific concern with your novel, send an email to jim [at] thefictiontherapist.com, or visit the website to ask for a free sample edit. You can follow Jim on Instagram @the_fiction_therapist.
It did change me, not so much the writing but the publishing. And in that changing I had to come back around again to the writing and not the publishing.
Nice post!
Hmm…I think in my writing thus far a theme that comes up again and again is integrity — not just that we practice integrity when dealing with others but that we aren’t fooling ourselves. That we’re honest with ourselves about our own behavior. That we don’t hold views that are mutually exclusive, that our belief systems don’t reject the law of noncontradiction, that they are internally sensible and outwardly defensible. That we practice what we preach and that we preach it because we are convinced it is true, not because it is popular or advantageous to us.
And so my writing changes me each time I tackle a new story because each story in some way is dealing with something that feels irreconcilable inside.
Providence/fate vs. free will.
Who is “at fault” for something that happened, me or him? Or both? Or neither?
Confronting beliefs that feel innate and yet came from somewhere outside of myself and therefore may be dead wrong.
Stuff like that.
The writing helps me confront my own failings and fears. With each story, I can either reconcile opposing ideas or else decide that I must live with the tension when it cannot be reconciled.
Integrity is a good value to explore as a writer. There are many possible nuances. For example, even if you are “at fault,” can you still maintain your integrity? Would it be enough to own up and admit that “fault?” Or could your struggle to maintain your integrity even lead to that “fault,” in which case an apology isn’t going to smooth it over?
Lots of ways to go with integrity, many potential dilemmas along the way, and, yes, that tension works great for stories, even if it isn’t always so great in actual life.
Thanks for sharing your thouhtgts, Erin.
Good luck with your writing.
Jim
Great post, Jim.
My current WIP is quite personal. Although it is about a twenty year-old girl in search of her identity, who she is and how she fits into the world, I’ve come to realize we never, even as adults, stop searching for the person we want to be.
This story has made me dig deep inside, to dark crevices I’m not always comfortable considering, to thoughts on race, gender equality, sexual identity, and how my birthright alters these views.
Once finished, even if no other person (short of my agent) ever reads No Apology For Being, I will have undoubtedly changed the person in the mirror. For that, I am grateful.
Thanks for the wonderful post.
Dee Willson
Author of A Keeper’s Truth and GOT (Gift of Travel)
Excellent, Dee. Thanks for this.
As Kurt Vonnegut said: “Write to please just one person. If you open a window and make love to the world, so to speak, your story will get pneumonia.”
There is often no better muse than yourself.
Good luck with it.
Jim
Jim, good essay. Writing has been a terrific adventure, a great discovery–it brought me to my faith, so I’m eternally grateful for it. And I wouldn’t be writing if it weren’t for marriage and motherhood. And writing continues to transform me, clarify my thinking, and bring me ever closer to God.
A friend and I were just discussing why we write, and I remembered this wonderful lecture on why we *should* write: https://www.therealpresence.org/archives/Christian_Spirituality/Christian_Spirituality_037.htm It’s long but well worth it.
Thanks for a good essay, Jim. It’s always good to dig.