The Best Writing Advice

From Emily Dickinson to Taylor Swift—The Essential Work of Writing When No One Is Listening

The most profound piece of writing advice I’ve ever heard came packaged in a rumination, perhaps to be expected since it came from a poet.

Mark Nepo, poet, best-selling author, a man I’m lucky to call my friend, once mused to me, “I’m so glad I kept writing when no one was listening.” This was in reference to the years he’d toiled away at his craft in relative (comparatively) obscurity, in the years before his Book of Awakening was chosen as one of Oprah’s Ultimate Favorite Things, making him a best-seller and that rarest of all things—a nationally recognized poet.

I think about his words often when I write because sometimes I feel the heavy weight of expectation. Sometimes I’m conscious of the way it feels to write for others, how much I write for outcome, how much I write for likes or comments. As writers, we exist in two worlds—the world of insta-publishing, where our social feeds and Substack and blog posts go live the moment we click “publish.” Then there’s the world in which we write alone for a future outcome that’s uncertain and elusive and often seems very far away.

To exist in both these worlds is to cultivate an appreciation for both. Most of us love insta-publishing because its equally instantly gratifying. We’re in conversation. We’re getting validation. It doesn’t require endless hours of toiling to get it just right. Click, and onto the next. The writing alone part, even if you’re doing so with a publishing plan in mind, is . . . different. Not better or worse, but certainly it asks so much more of us. With my memoir-in-progress, which I naively thought I could finish in one year, I’ve spent hours and hours carefully considering each scene, trying to reconstruct a timeline, beckoning memories I buried, some of which I feel I’m coaxing back from a place I should have let them lie.

For a productive writer like me, being in a longer-term project is an act of graciousness to myself. I’m granting myself the gift of time spent with an earlier version of me, to think and process and better understand the path that led me to here. When I started my memoir, I didn’t realize I’d been holding a key to an entire garden of memories that I’d not bothered to appreciate or spend time with until now. And now that I hold the key, the garden keeps beckoning me back. It’s a place where I want to spend time, where I want to linger, so much so that getting pulled away from it or out of it when a writing session is over feels like regret.

On my podcast that lands tomorrow, Grant Faulkner and I interview Baron Wormser, a poet in his late seventies who wrote a memoir called The Road Washes Out in Spring about living off the grid in the woods of Maine for more than two decades. In his book, he evokes other poets, and this passage about Emily Dickinson recalled Mark Nepo’s words to me. I stopped and read it twice, then three times:

Emily Dickinson wrote for herself and for a world beyond her that also was within her. In her proud, gnomic fashion she was a female shaman as she wrote taut, vital spells that queried and cast out the bleak, loveless religion in which she was brought up. She was doing work that needed to be done to the American psyche, although no one at the time knew it; most men and women who spoke for poetry were lost in the polite wastelands of gentility. Dickinson’s narrator confronts puzzlement and indifference; the poems are both ordeals and initiations.

The work that needed to be done. If you’ve ever felt this way about your writing, you’re on the right path.

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Taylor Swift is everywhere, so I’m pulling her into this post, too. I’m a regular listener to The Daily podcast, and Friday’s episode was all about Taylor. Any of you who are Swifties know this story well, but I needed to be reminded that Taylor had been publicly humiliated by Kayne West (excuse me, Ye) when he insulted her in a song he wrote called “Famous,” claiming he had permission from Taylor to name her. Taylor insisted he did not. Kim Kardashian came to her then-husband’s defense, saying Taylor did approve the lyrics. Cue a very public and harrowing social media pile-on, after which Taylor took a seventeen-month-long hiatus that lasted into 2017.  One article said, “ . . . she didn’t do a lot in 2017, until she did.”

What Taylor was doing in the aftermath of that crushing blow-up was writing the songs that would become her next album, Reputation, which many people think is her most important to date. She was already a huge star, so yes, she was writing for an audience, for eventual release of the songs, for a future outcome. But holding goals for outcome and writing while no one is listening are not mutually exclusive. And when you listen to that album, you can feel the blood-letting. The songs are honest, empowering, and they don’t hold back the shame and heartbreak of what was clearly one of the most difficult episodes of her life. Taylor, I think, is a model of how to attune to what is essential—and shows us how writing what matters is doing the work that needs to be done.

Ironically enough, memoirists and writers of personal story are led to believe that their work doesn’t matter. The culture tells writers of personal truth that they’re self-indulgent, that to write about oneself is me-focused/self-centered. Memoirists internalize this to such a degree that they thrash around and self-sabotage and light themselves on fire reliving past shames. So, it’s our practice to constantly come back to center, and to remind ourselves that it’s our birthright to do the work that needs to be done. You are part of a lineage—from Dickinson to Swift. There are many who’ve paved the way, including Audre Lorde, whose poem “A Litany for Survival” can be a mantra and a rallying cry for all of us:

and when we speak we are afraid
our words will not be heard
nor welcomed
but when we are silent
we are still afraid
So it is better to speak

We get to stand on the shoulders of these and other courageous writers—poets, song-writers, memoirists, creators—who’ve come before us. I’d love to know who you’d give shout-outs to. Who’s inspired you in your writing? Who helps you to feel you’re less alone? Share in the comments and thanks for reading!

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A sampling of writers and creators who’ve inspired me this fall:

In my ears:
Aimee Mann (every album, every song)
Naomi Klein (Doppelganger audiobook), for following the thread of her obsession
The Daily Podcast (confession: the Taylor Swift episode made me cry)

In my memoir writing:
Carmen Maria Machado
Maggie Smith
Linda Joy Myers

In my feeds:
Jeannine Ouellette
Dan Blank
Jennifer Lauck
Courtney Maum