Ask a novelist, a journalist, and a poet what writing is, and you will likely get starkly different answers. Ask more people—a professor, a linguist, an essayist, a child—then try to boil all the responses down into one definition. When you strip away the decorum and pretension, you’ll be left with something like this: all writing is communication, and the act of writing is engaging in a conversation.
It is easy to see how your writing becomes a conversation when someone reads it; it elicits a reaction which you can respond to in future writing, creating a cycle of input and output. But with all good communication, as in all forms of art, the conversation begins long before a single word is written.
The most imaginative science fiction and fantasy writers can only be described as inventive because their literature is read in juxtaposition to the known world. Likewise, realism can only be quantified by its similarities to the known world. All writers, and in fact all artists, are responding to their realities and being perceived against their reader’s realities. We may write to explain or transform or distort what we experience of the world, but that necessitates a pre-emptive input of the world itself. In terms of conversation, a writer should listen more than they speak.
This is not a new concept. In The Artist’s Way, Julia Cameron encourages creatives to take “artist dates,” where they engage with the world by themselves. She explains, “We must become alert enough to consciously replenish our creative resources as we draw on them.” Cameron is surmising that art of any kind, writing included, can only be created in conversation with the things the artist has experienced. Others agree, and go on to frame creative input as instructive. In Big Magic, Elizabeth Gilbert says, “[Y]ou can find [great teachers] anywhere. They live on the shelves of your library; they live on the walls of museums; they live in recordings made decades ago.” Gilbert is explaining ways to put your writing in conversation with other artists, but she expands to include all manner of experiences, in her case, everything from waitressing to international travel, that may not seem writing-related, but serve as foundational to writing. Our experiences expand the bounds of our creative output.
Not only do I agree with the necessity of creative input, I believe that creative input is more important than creative output, and not just because the latter depends on the former. For one thing, I believe the more nuanced your understanding of the world, the more nuanced your response to it is. Some of the most transformative events in my writing life include the birth of my first child, a moment when I underestimated a peer, and the fourth time I streamed Lin-Manuel Miranda’s Hamilton. These events changed how I was entering the conversation, the first two by altering how I understood the world and the third by altering how I approached thematic resonance in my writing (yes, it took me four views to figure out how Miranda was making me sob). More importantly, these events made me a better writer.
I have a personal philosophy about conversations: you should enter them meaningfully and purposefully. This translates to writing with reasoned intent. Whether the intent is to be funny, or informative, or controversial, or something else is immaterial. Whether the intention becomes clear in a first draft or the final draft is unimportant. What matters is that when you enter the conversation (i.e. when you give your work to readers), you know what you want it to mean in context of your greater reality. Of course, once your work is in a reader’s hands it is no longer your own and they will make of it what they will, but I believe that the greater your grounding in creative input, the more purposeful your expression will be, and the less likely your work will be misinterpreted.
You should bear in mind that communication is a series of symbols, but life is the real thing. Without experience, there would be nothing to create, and you deserve a reason to create. At the end of the day, writing is a game of telephone where things get warped and lost before they arrive at the destination, but the beautiful thing about being the writer is that you get to feel it first. The things you are trying to replicate in your words, the experiences you hope to give readers, will always be yours first. I encourage you to go out and experience the world not simply as a resource for your art, but in excess of your art. Because, just like your readers, you deserve to feel everything.
My kernel of advice: Input without reserve, output meaningfully.
Inspiration, Information, & Insight
Shelby enjoyed
’s interview with New Yorker cartoonist Emily Flake. She’s halfway through a handful of books but might start reading a new one instead. Could it be Veronica by Mary Gaitskill, which she purchased on Natalia’s recommendation? Or Rouge by Mona Awad, a writer Shelby loves? Only time will tell.Natalia started Jon Fosse’s The Other Name, which she is very excited about because it is the first book in his seven-volume masterpiece. He is a Catholic convert, which was Natalia’s initial interest after she heard he’d won the Nobel Prize in Literature. In other news, Natalia attended a generative workshop held at an art gallery by the NY Writers Coalition. She is still asking herself what growth sounds like after reflecting on an art installation that contained a mound of dirt with dry grass on top, and a set of headphones emitting a crackling sound coming out of the center of the dirt mound.
This week Sarah was overwhelmed by her responsibilities of care: to her children, her spouse, her friends and students, not to mention her own mental health. She has been digging herself out of a hole at work and trying not to panic about looming deadlines. These are terrible conditions for writing. Nonetheless, her deadlines have forced her to press on: revising an old story and working piecemeal on a new one. For grad school this week she read Eudora Welty’s The Ponder Heart, James Baldwin’s “Sonny’s Blues,” and way too much about postmodernism.
Some life events have pulled Neidy away from the literary world all month. Still, she found time to listen to a few episodes of The Shit No One Tells You About Writing and start Bianca Marais’s The Witches of Moonshyne Manor.
So true, Neidy! I am feeling the lack of input in my own life right now—quite acutely. And I have noticed it take a toll on my writing. I have “wrung the tag dry” and need to soak up more experience, more observation, before I can continue. Thanks for the reminder that this is common—and that there is a solution.
This reminds me of on of the seven habits : “Seek first to understand, then to be understood.” I’m not a writer but I’m sure there’s a specific finesse that’s required of you to postpone certain works and acquire an adequate pool of resource (experiences, vocabulary, etc) to feel like you can do Justice to the expression of your ideas. You continue to amaze and inspire me sister! Keep up the fantastic work!