What Do You Love Most about Your Writing? Learn How to Talk about It!

Sep 6

How do you talk about your writing project, whatever is currently occupying you creatively? A friend asks, What are you working on? or What’s your story/book about? If you’ve worked on the answer, you may tell the plot, the place, the message. But does your answer communicate your passion? The actual reason you are so wrapped up in it?

In May and June, and now again for a few shows in September, I’ve been learning a lot about this on a podcast tour. Each podcast tour I’ve done, with the help of

Michelle Glogovac

my podcast guru, the goal has been to share more about my latest novel. Ostensibly, these past months have been about the most recent book,Last Bets,but most often—and this ties back into my question of passion and how to communicate it—hosts want to go wider than that. Some want to discuss all the stuff I’ve sent out into the world over the past few decades!

Someone once told me, books never die. And I’m learning that’s true.

Yes, my earlier novels, as well as my writing craft book published over twelve years ago, are still in print, still selling well. I still hear from readers who have read one or another and want to tell me about it.

So, suddenly, I have a “body of work” and I need to be ready to talk about it, even when promoting just one part of that body.

So this week, I’d like to talk about how we talk about our writing. How do we look beyond our current creation and its specific topics to a larger message we are communicating through all our creative work.

Why are you writing?

My writing starts as a story I want to tell, an idea I want to share. I don’t get too ethereal about it when it’s just new. I usually hook into a character or place, my fascination with a moral dilemma, some plotline I want to explore. It’s a time of exploration and questions. I don’t get into big stuff, not at the start.

It’s a bit of a trick, though. Because I don’t really write, in the larger sense, to just tell a story. I write to explore, for myself, a certain belief about life. Or the hope for something different in someone’s life (a character’s if not my own). Or some wisdom I’ve touched into and want to know more about.

We travel paths that repeatedly show up in our work, right? We don’t usually create in a vacuum outside of our deepest interests. Our writing elucidates those fascinations for us, first, and eventually our readers. But it’s not my particular way to know this when I am starting out. I walk blind. I try things and fail. I try other things and open a new door. It’s all experimental. I don’t set out with a theme or message, really. That evolves as I go deeper into the story.

It’s as if the story is the teacher.

Themes emerge if I pay attention. Certain repeating ideas or questions that I explore over and over again. But I am fairly unaware of this when I am drafting or revising a book or a story or an essay. It’s only later, when I reread it to find what the core of the piece is, that I locate the thread of theme.

If this is true for all of us, how do we learn to talk about our work with clarity and depth?

Often, it takes others telling you what they see in your work.

Using feedback to learn what you’re really writing about

A wise art teacher once pointed out something recurring in almost every painting I did during that time. I painted pathways. Through land, water, sky. Always a thread of a path or road. I was totally unconscious of this. “What do pathways mean to you?” she asked.

I’ve written about this before, but when I took her question home to contemplate, I realized I was painting hope. The continuation of life. A very real desire for me as a survivor of two serious cancers.

What do you write about, or paint or sing or dance about, over and over again? Are you aware of your life themes as they emerge in your stories or other art? I think most of us aren’t that conscious of this, but readers see it and podcast hosts, if they gift you with their attention, certainly do, as I’m discovering on my podcast tour. (I feel like I should send them thank-you notes for educating me to my own work!)

What themes do you love writing about?

Once I clicked in to the trend of podcast hosts asking these larger thematic questions, I gave myself some homework. I did an exercise where I wrote down one-liner answers to the question: What’s this story about?

I wrote at least ten for each of my books that hosts had asked about (for me, I was relieved this was just four, even though I’ve published more). Here are the best results of my ten scribbles for the two recent novels.

A Woman’s Guide to Search & Rescue, Two estranged sisters, both pilots, reunite when one of them is forced to run from the law but how will they shelter each other until they become real family?

Last Bets, An artist with second sight sees the future of the people she paints; she must decide if she will use it to save her own life.

There are clear thematic threads, even in these unedited responses to the exercise. I started with what repeats: Both stories are about women facing their demons, women who are badass and somehow become heroes. Then I looked at the possible themes in each. Both are about redemption, found family, women who transcend their ugly pasts to save another.

Wow, I thought. I actually didn’t realize these were my personal fascinations. My themes. But they are.

Body of work is not just what’s released into the world

We use the term “body of work” to showcase what’s been published or exhibited or released into the world in some way. But I find it’s fascinating to look at the body of work you’ve created—and begin to see the themes you’re repeating and exploring—as something beyond.

For instance, in childhood, what were you obsessed with? What did you love to read or watch or listen to? What meaning did it have for you? It’s a cool exercise to study what you’ve played with, explored, created in the past. It can be very revealing—and helpful to you now, if you want to learn how to talk more clearly about your book or story or creative work.

Not everyone likes to do this. Me included. If not for the podcast hosts pressuring me to dig deeper, I would stay with just what I’m working on now. Generally, I prefer letting go of what I’ve created after it’s done to my satisfaction. I don’t hang on to my early paintings, I don’t reread my novels or nonfiction books. After a time, I give them away. I paint over the canvasses that haven’t sold. I’m generally unsentimental about moving on. But I’m prolific and fast, just my nature. Maybe you create only a few precious expressions, so every one is as present now as it was years ago when you started it.

Whatever your approach, consider researching your fascinations to find the threads of love running through them. Love, meaning what gives you life. What makes you feel purposeful as an artist or writer. And not just as a writer but in other areas where you create with joy and energy. These are your larger body of work. And once you know more about that, you can speak to it.

Your Weekly Writing Exercise

This week I’m offering a free writing exercise that helps me get closer to what I most love about what I create. Practically, it also lets you find new and better ways to describe your work, should anyone want to know!

Set a timer or alarm on your phone for ten minutes. Write down everything you love about your book or your current writing project. Small stuff, big stuff. Doesn’t matter.