You're Gonna Hear Me Roar

Writing as an act of bravery

I attended a little talk over the lunch hour last Wednesday. Poet and novelist Jill Alexander Essbaum joined a small group of writers via remote video conference to talk about poetry and the poems in her collection Would-Land. At some point, the conversation turned to phrasing—someone asked Essbaum how she decides to word things the way she does.

Essbaum’s experience as a poet serves her well as a novelist, too. Her phrasing is always creative and exquisitely crafted. It often takes my breath away. Take the first line of her novel Hausfrau: “Anna was a good wife, mostly.” The line is so engaging and intriguing that publishers chose to include it on the book’s front cover. I imagine Essbaum spent a lot of time crafting that line, a line that seems simple but is powerful—it says so much. There is subtext in those six words. That sentence does a lot of heavy lifting and makes a promise to the reader about what they’re in for when they accept Essbaum’s invitation to read her story.

So, in answer to the question about how she decides on phrasing, I expected Essbaum to say something about lyricism or rhythm or syntax or wordplay or the sounds of words, all of which she utilizes to great advantage in her work.

To my surprise, though, she said it all comes down to bravery and authenticity. When she’s deciding how to phrase something, she works hard to push fear aside, she said—to say the things she’s most afraid to say, to say them in her own unique voice, and to be as true to herself as possible. “Let’s be braver about who we are and where we came from,” Essbaum said.

Essbaum is right, of course. I don’t think a writer can reach their full potential until they overcome the fear of writing the things they’re afraid to write. Until they become willing to say the things they’re most afraid to say. As writers, we never completely get over that fear, of course. But at some point, in order to break free as a writer, we must break free of the fear of writing what we truly believe, think, and feel. We must be authentic in our writing, and that authenticity is what will allow our unique voices to shine through. Sometimes we won’t say it perfectly, and some things, we may decide, are better left unsaid. But being honest and fearless is a courageous start.

Author Darin Strauss opens his memoir Half a Life with this brave sentence: “Half my life ago, I killed a girl.” In an interview with Meredith Maran for the Los Angeles Times, Strauss said, “If nonfiction is any good, it has to be harder on the protagonist than on anybody else.” Memoirist Gina Frangello (Blow Your House Down) agrees: “Without self-implication, the memoirist holds readers at a distance.” In other words, a memoirist has to be generous, own their mistakes, and let readers in.

I once wrote something for memoirist Emily Rapp Black (The Still Point of the Turning World): “I survived, but I didn’t shine. They will never make an inspirational movie about my life, about how I rose to the occasion ….” In her feedback, Rapp Black wrote, “THIS LINE. YES.” She wrote this because, she told me, admitting this made my story far more interesting. That wasn’t the reason I wrote it that way. I wrote it that way because it was the hard truth. But the impact of telling that truth, of acknowledging I’m not a perfect person, of the “self-implication” Frangello mentions, is that I am letting my readers in. I am sharing a private and vulnerable part of myself that, up until the day I wrote those lines, I had never before given voice to. It’s relatable because we all have those things we don’t talk about.

This same need to be honest and brave applies to fiction and to poetry as well.

When I think about being brave and putting it all out there, I often think about Stephen King as an example. He is a prolific writer who lets his imagination run wild. He gives himself permission to put his weirdest ideas on the page for all the world to read, and it’s served him well. He lets readers into his strange and terrifying fantasies. He allows readers to experience his offbeat thought process. I wonder if, sometimes, he is scared about what readers will think of a bizarre thing he’s imagined. I wonder if there’s ever been a time he held back—“No, that’s too much. I can’t tell people I thought that.” The truth is, we all imagine frightening or horrible things sometimes. My bet is this—King’s imagination isn’t all that unusual. What’s unusual is that he is brave enough to own it and to share it.

Which brings me to another fear—the fear of putting our work out there. Once we’ve faced down the fear of putting the words down on paper, we have to set aside the fear of what people are going to think about what we’ve written. We have to send those words out into the world, and once we do, they no longer belong to us. We’ve done our part. Readers will interpret our words as they will and say about them what they wish. As Mel Robbins says in a book I’m currently reading, let them.

“Let’s be braver about who are and where we came from.”

—Jill Alexander Essbaum

NEWS & ANNOUNCEMENTS

This is my 200th blog post! I started my blog The Write Stuff on September 1, 2021.

I’ve written this blog about the craft of writing and the writing life in addition to The Newsletter, My California, and writing my own novels, short stories, and essays—so many words! I’m surprised I’ve kept it going for 3-1/2 years, surprised I’ve had 200 things to say, and proud to have provided this free resource for writers like me.

Thank you to all my subscribers for reading and for your likes, comments, and emails, which always uplift me, each and every time.

“Bravery is acknowledging your fear and doing it anyway.”

—Cheryl Strayed

SOME THINGS FOR READERS

9 Books That Will Make You Want To Go Outside And Touch Grass: Let your screen-weary eyes rest on something real
(Erin Dorney for Electric Literature)

My Giraffe
(short fiction by Lexi Franciszkowicz for Weird Lit Magazine)

Journey Into Darkness
(nonfiction about Pluto’s demotion from a planet to a dwarf planet, by Nikos Kazantzakis for NewMyths.com)

Psychological Thrillers Are Finally Giving Middle-Aged Women Their Due
(Cate Ray for CrimeReads)

“There is only one way to tell the truth, but there are myriad ways to live a lie.”

—Gina Frangello, Blow Your House Down

SOME THINGS FOR WRITERS

The Unexpected Detail: Beloved by Toni Morrison
(Nina Schuyler for Stunning Sentences)
Thank you to my dear friend Anna for turning me on to this blog.

Q: Are you going to AWP in L.A.? What’s AWP all about? “As for the conference itself, what should you expect? What should your goals be?”
(Becky Tuch for Lit Mag News)

Horrific Surrealism: Writing on Migration
(Viet Thanh Nguyen for The Paris Review)

The Top 10 Things All Authors Should Know about Amazon
(Brooke Warner for Brooke Warner)

“Doing what makes you happy, being brave, taking risks, and following your own path will always be more important than other people’s opinions about it. This is YOUR life. Stop allowing what other people think keep you from living it.”

—Mel Robbins, The Let Them Theory

SOME THINGS TO MAKE YOU SMILE

This Job Interview Would Go a Lot Better if You Asked Me More Questions About Cheers
(Steve Gillies for McSweeney’s Internet Tendency)

‘The essential ingredient is openness’: Curtis Sittenfeld on the deep joy of midlife friendship
(Curtis Sittenfeld for The Guardian)

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Leanne Phillips
Writer | Book Coach | Editor
​leannephillips.com

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