What Has Writing Taught You About Yourself?
Ten authors share how writing their books transformed them.
Whenever I read a book that moves me in any way, I can’t help but think about how writing it must have altered the author—maybe because I’m an author myself. I was not the same person I had been when I had begun writing my book, which came out about five years after I had started writing it. I had set out to write about duality, trying to write from the overlap between Mania, the New York City nightlife persona with a moniker to match, and Greg, the undergraduate student trying to relearn himself behind the carefully crafted character he was portraying to the world. But, throughout the process, I learned that I didn’t have to be just one thing or another—I can be many things, the facets of my identity shifting and shedding and changing over time—and by the time I was finished with my book, duality became totality.
I realized that if my book had taught me so much about myself, then my fellow authors must, too, find themselves changed in some ways after writing theirs. “What has writing your book taught you about yourself?” has become my favorite question to ask authors when I interview them, and every answer is different and awe-inspiring in its own way—they even reveal to me things about myself I hadn’t previously considered, both as a writer and a person.
In this week’s newsletter, ten authors share how writing their books shaped them. Five are from interviews previously published in different publications, both online and print, and the other five are from authors who have graciously agreed to answer my question as an exclusive for you, dear subscriber.
I hope their answers burrow their ways into your hearts, too.
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Elizabeth Acevedo: I learned that writing ambitiously is a kind of joy, it’s thrill-seeking the way some people only feel alive when jumping off of a cliff. I’ve always found writing [as] a kind of magic, but this novel, in the middle of the pandemic, was pure, unadulterated joy-finding. And I hadn’t realized just how having a writing practice could help keep loneliness at bay.
I think what I learned about family is the level to which we need to forgive our elders; the more you learn their stories, the more you realize how much they, too, have been hurt and perhaps had less language and resources to make sense of it. That doesn’t mean you excuse the hurt or ignore it, but forgiveness doesn’t require either. Simply showing grace to the vulnerable human in another.
Full interview originally published in The Rumpus.
Click here to purchase Family Lore.
Isle McElroy: I am not a very consistent person by nature—I’m spontaneous and flaky—but writing has given me the space to think more deeply about ritual and consistency. It has given me a life to commit to and to love. I was fairly aimless before I started seriously writing. My dream, before writing, was to manage a professional basketball team—weird—then my dream was to be a dietician—not bad. When I settled into writing, however, I found a practice that gave my life both meaning and clarity. It gave me a sense of ritual, a routine I loved returning to every day. I don’t know how my life would have turned out if I wasn’t writing—perhaps I’d be running the Knicks—but every morning, I’m immensely grateful to turn to the page.
Click here to purchase People Collide.
Ingrid Rojas Contreras: In writing this book, I really gave myself the time to examine how those eight weeks of memory loss I had in 2007 changed my life. Without writing the story down, I don’t know that I would come to know all that I know about the experience now. I really feel that I came back as a different person, and this book was getting to know on a deeper level who that was. I think we are always becoming new, especially through the writing of a book, and this was no exception. Probably the biggest thing I got from writing this book was reaching an understanding of how I fit within my family’s story, which, at the core level, I would describe as belonging to a lineage of storytellers.
Full interview originally published in The Rumpus.
Click here to purchase The Man Who Could Move Clouds.
Maggie Smith: Although I finished writing You Could Make This Place Beautiful almost two years ago, I think this book will be teaching me things about myself for a long time. Maybe always. Writing the memoir was probably the most deeply contextualizing experience of my life, sort of like visiting a place, then coming home and looking at a map and realizing where you were in relation to other places. The writing of the memoir was a kind of cartography for me; it allowed me to examine the ways different times in my life and aspects of my life touched (and are still touching). But some of the most important things I’ve learned about myself came not from the actual writing but from the publishing of this book, the act of sharing it with others and traveling with it. For one: I’m braver than I thought I was.
Click here to purchase You Could Make This Place Beautiful.
Ruth Madievsky: I never thought myself capable of writing a whole-ass novel. I had never deeply considered the downstream effects of the Holocaust and Soviet Jewish trauma on people of my generation. I learned that I prefer drafting long-form fiction to revising it. That, as excited as I was to share the book with editors, I would have moved commas around forever if my agent hadn’t torn the novel from my death grip. And I was pleasantly surprised by how much of an influence my poetry background had on the novel. I polished every sentence until it gleamed. That’s both my strength and my weakness. It's easy for me to think I’ve really done something here when I write a beautiful sentence. I think it was Matthew Zapruder who said that, in poetry, everything can be abandoned in the pursuit of beauty. That principle doesn’t quite translate to the novel—many of the lines that served beauty more than the book itself had to go.
Full interview published in Gulf Coast Journal.
Click here to purchase All-Night Pharmacy.
R. Eric Thomas: My book has taught me so much about the power of embracing and owning the messy, the jagged edge, the bittersweet, and the hard parts. As I write, I’m a really Pollyanna-ass person—or, at least that’s who I want to be—so my editor’s advice to sometimes let an essay or a section end in uncertainty, unresolvedness, or painful memory was hard for me. But the writing process of the book and, even more so the reception of the book, taught me that acknowledging not being okay or not being at happily ever after isn’t a failure. So many people have responded strongly to a feeling of lostness and the vulnerability that that requires. As a result, I’ve had so many beautiful, heart-opening conversations in-person, online, and—in my favorite way of communicating—on podcasts. You don’t get to the truth of a human relationship without showing yourself. And you don’t have to be perfect to do so. In fact, perfection—unless you’re running a lifestyle brand sold at Target—tends to put people at a distance from you. It continues to be hard to go to the place of vulnerability in my writing because I’m really just here to have a good time. But I know it’s where I want to be because it gives me what writing has always given me: a community, a home.
Click here to purchase Congratulations, The Best Is Over!
Alexandra Chang: That I’m obsessed with loneliness, ha. No, I guess if anything, it’s taught me that even if I go through phases of not writing, I’ll find my way back to it. There was a period of time where I didn’t think I’d finish this collection or ever want to write again. It’s like that saying about athletes dying twice, the first being when they can’t physically perform their sport anymore. That’s how it felt for a while—like this thing I’d dedicated a huge part of my life to was gone forever—and I was pretty depressed. I reoriented my life around other stuff. I got a day job. Not writing slowly felt less devastating, and as time passed, that desire to write crept back in. I think if it goes away again, I’ll be more okay and less anxious about it.
Full interview originally published in The Rumpus.
Click here to purchase Tomb Sweeping.
Rasheed Newson: While writing my debut novel, My Government Means to Kill Me, I discovered how much I'd been holding back. A decade and a half of writing television dramas (The 100, Narcos, Bel-Air) had conditioned me to work within the sensibilities of a broad audience. I could only be so Black and so gay in my storytelling.
Mind you, I pushed the boundaries as much as possible, and I am proud of the vast majority of my work in television. But I lost a lot of battles to present Black and LGBTQ+ storylines in an accurate and frank manner. I accepted the idea that there was such a thing as "too far." With time, no one even had to tell me where that line was. I approached the line but didn't cross it. I held myself back.
Writing my novel freed me from all constraints. My book is unapologetically Black and gay, and my work really soars when unbridled. I learned there's an exciting scale of notes that I can hit; notes I never attempted before. The Writers Guild strike has just ended, and I look forward to returning to television. I've got some new tricks to show them.
Click here to purchase a copy of My Government Means to Kill Me.
Laura Warrell: Once, when someone asked me this question about my debut novel, I had drawn a blank. I then realized that, often, I’ve already made some sort of discovery before I have written, and it’s these discoveries that bring me to the page. Writing the book helps me record, so to speak, what I’ve learned. Writing helps me flesh it out.
What totally surprised me, though, was finding myself in the character I least expected to connect with in that way. Koko is the fourteen-year-old daughter of the playboy jazz musician at the center of my novel. Her parents are neglectful so she gets into trouble as she tries to figure out who she is. I’d felt a parental bond to her until at one point, I put her into a particularly tricky situation and became super emotional about it. I actually teared up. It must have triggered a memory because I asked myself, “Holy shit, am I Koko?” Her story’s not mine but I guess on a soul level, we’re cut from similar cloths. So, while I didn’t necessarily learn anything new about myself, I definitely think I healed some old deep hurts writing my book.
Click here to purchase a copy of Sweet, Soft, Plenty Rhythm.
Melissa Febos: That I have the power to change my own thinking. There are so many ways to get free.
Full interview published in The Millions.
Click here to purchase a copy of Girlhood.
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Yours,
Greg
Credits
Art by: James Jeffers
Editorial assistant: Jesse Adele
You can follow my other unhinged missives by following me on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. My debut memoir, Born to Be Public, is out now.