The Permission Workbook: Why do you want to write The Story?
On Creative Reasoning
Why do we feel the need — often it’s a compulsion — to write certain stories?
In the last installment of The Permission Workbook, I talked a little bit about the whys: why do we feel the need to write the stories we must write? Wouldn’t it just be simpler to leave the stones alone, rather than turning them over? Isn’t it safer not to bother with the profound need to get to the truth? Isn’t it less disruptive to just look the other way? Probably. After all, this is how myths are made and adhered to at both the personal and cultural levels, until someone, inadvertently or not, cracks open the truth and announces to everyone that the emperor has no clothes and is strolling down Main Street stark naked.
As I said in the introduction, Humans hew naturally to codification, and we write memoir — we make art — for this reason: To make sense of the chaotic. To corral the wild horses. To order the disordered. In my case, shame coursed through my family’s century-old story of abandonment like lava, and my father metabolized the shame not by hiding it from his immediate family the way his sister had done, but through the telling of it because he knew, intuitively, that light and truth dilute and ultimately render shame and destruction powerless.
But.
Does this mean that all stories can and should be told? Is everything fair game? Does it mean that we bear no responsibility for what we write about? It does not. How do we even begin to know where to start? Janna Malamud Smith refers to the creative process as agreeing to enter into a complicated psychological space filled with ricocheting emotions: we want to write X but we’re worried about writing X but we need to but we’re terrified about the ramifications but the idea of not doing it feels vaguely nauseating. So we must, from the outset, ask ourselves what is my motivation for writing this, and what is my intention? Even if those questions are rhetorical (and they mostly are), we have to consider them.
Some stories will just not leave us alone — at least that’s what happens to me. I will do everything I can to ignore them, without success. I could be walking the dog, or at the gym, or awake at three in the morning, or in the shower, or making an omelette, and there it is, screaming in my ear. I have a small notebook with me all the time (not in the shower) because I cannot trust myself to remember these creative brain bursts, all of which seem to occur when I’m engaged in another activity. When this kind of thing happens, I’ve learned to pay attention to it. I might begin to make preliminary notes, which might then turn into the very early draft of a manuscript. But at some point on the front end, I have to consider — privately, and honestly — why I want to write The Thing. Why must I tell this particular story? What is driving me?
These are questions that we rarely ask ourselves, in part because the creative process is so amorphous. When I was an editor, I was always suspicious when an author told me EXACTLY what they were going to write, EXACTLY how they were going to do it, and EXACTLY why. It’s fine to have a vague sense of these things for the sake of selling a book proposal, but stories need to be what they’re going to be — they take on lives and forms of their own if we can manage to keep our grubby little controlling hands off them — and we have to understand that they are alive. They morph and change organically, and so does our relationship to them. We might begin the process of writing something motivated by a desire for clarity, and midway through, find ourselves staring down the barrel of revenge writing. (Never a good idea, no matter how angry you are. More on that soon.)
Can writers be held accountable for writing things that someone else deems forbidden?
When we talk about motivation and intention, we have to ask ourselves these questions (or some version of them):
1- What are we wanting to gain from telling this story? (This is not a monetary question.) Wisdom? Clarity on something that has long been murky? The unraveling of a generational secret that touches us directly and profoundly? (Think of Dani Shapiro’s Inheritance.)
2- Are you trying to get revenge or exact retribution? (Think of Christina Crawford’s Mommy Dearest.)
3- Do you want to become a so-called famous author (see monetary, above), or is it purely ego that is motivating you?
4- Are you making what Mark Doty calls, in his brilliant essay Return to Sender “an inquiry into memory?
When I was excised from my family for inadvertently telling a long-held secret in Poor Man’s Feast that was not a secret in my childhood home and that impacted me directly, I knew two things:
That the story itself — my grandmother had walked out on my father and aunt when they were young children; she returned a few years later — made my father who he was, and me, who I am. It is as much a part of my DNA as the color of my eyes. Right or wrong, inappropriate or not, he told this story to me constantly when I was a child, as though he was metabolizing it. Was it my fault that my aunt chose to hide this story from her children? Absolutely not. Was it my fault that I told a secret that I had no idea was a secret? Absolutely not. Can writers be held accountable for writing things that someone else deems forbidden? No. More on this here, in my conversation with Dani Shapiro, on her podcast Family Secrets.
I believe that every writer is a subversive carrying a story that must be told. Writers are often the family truth-tellers whether we want to be or not; this burden of storytelling is a heavy weight, and I know of no writer who carries it blithely. In my case, this was the story I was meant to write, and the reason I believe I was placed on this blue marble: to break the chain and free myself and anyone who comes after me from the strictures of societal shame encapsulating the myth of a mother who abandoned her husband and children almost a century ago, and was demonized for it, even though no one ever bothered to find out why she left.
In telling the story of my own profound fear of abandonment and need for sustenance and security which was passed down to me by my father, my grandmother morphed from a one-dimensional, tiny pariah to a perfectly imperfect human—a woman stuck in the Bardo between the old world and the new, grasping for some semblance of power and self-knowledge. I had to know her, and to understand, and that was why I had to write this story — not because I was out to hurt anyone, as some believed I was. The work of writing can be exhausting and treacherous; no writer I know will spend two years slogging through the mess of the past to hurt someone. It just doesn’t work that way.
This story chose me in the way that an important, life-changing story will choose you. And you will have to decide whether to write it, or not.
Rejection is a key part of our core family history, and as James Baldwin promised, one that I would write about over and over, until it became clearer and clearer, narrower and larger, more and more precise. As in Abraham Verghese’s The Covenant of Water, in which a single family loses a member to drowning in every generation, in my family, themes of primal rejection and abandonment play out repeatedly in the narrative of our lives across the years of a century.
When I asked myself about my motivation and intention for writing this story, the answer was not retribution, or to blow the lid off some dangerous secret, or to control the narrative. This story chose me in the way that an important, life-changing story will choose you. And you will have to decide whether to write it, or not. I hope you will.
In writing my story, this is what I learned, and what every writer learns when they honor the need to follow the breadcrumbs: when we move from the silent to the spoken, we shed light on and create life where there was darkness and shame.
Still, the most difficult decision that any memoirist faces is whether or not our own kernel of truth is important enough to the story to honor and share: Without that kernel, a memoir has no soul.
And with it, we risk everything.