Celebrating courage and depth instead of numbers

write, ressurect, reinvent your practice

“To find relief in what has been, we must make ourselves eternal.” — Violette Leduc

If you are doing the kind of work that people will remember, you will not be universally liked.

Writing that has a heartbeat sparks reactions varying from adoration to disgust. We see the hyperspeed version of this on social media, but unlike clickbait, thoughtful and intentional art can cause a person to question their perspective.

When I was a kid, the first book that did this for me was Flowers for Algernon. I remember reading it and thinking it was sad, it was strange, it was impossible to put down, and it was confusing because it scrambled everything I knew about being successful or important in the world. It caused me to better understand that there was and is a myopic version of intelligence and that looking/sounding/being status quo can sterilize the heart (though I wouldn’t have used those words at 9).

Not everyone is a fan of every perspective, nor is everyone willing to step outside their bubble. Not everyone is tolerant. Not everyone is kind.

As such, if you are doing the real work, some people will want your words to disappear. I wrote about this here and here. And here I am writing about it again.

Violette Leduc was born in the early 1900s and became a friend of Simone de Beauvoir with whom she shared her creatively courageous work. Already with a platform, Beauvoir championed Leduc’s personal writing and connected her to the right people to get published.

But Leduc was a woman who explored body issues, such as her self-proclaimed ugliness and her unabashed passions as a gay woman, without shying away or hiding behind layers of metaphor. She was compelled to share her truths and didn’t have tolerance for the illogic that told her she was crazy for wanting to do so.

“I want to be remembered,” Violette Leduc wrote. She believed she could do that through writing.

Her first book, La Bâtarde, was edited for “offensive” content. Leduc was called hysterical (as one is when doing anything real in the world) and ridiculed for being honest about her desires. But she was adored by the few who were conscious enough to see her story for what it was. Human.

I never assume to know why a writer writes. But if I were to guess, Leduc didn’t write for acceptance from the mainstream gatekeepers. She wrote to be remembered by those who understood and didn’t speak as freely as she could. And she wrote for those who would read with enough openness to try to understand.

Leduc is not the focus of my next book, but she’s one of many who inspire me to keep going. She’s influencing my reason for continuing to write by hand under a willow tree while the world seems to care less about the musings of a strange middle-aged woman who is relishing in something as simple as sitting on the ground beneath a shady tree.

Those of us who are not mainstream, not wealthy, not hiring ghostwriters or having AI write for us, need to keep going until we have nothing left to say. The more diverse and nuanced the human tapestry is, the less language can be used against us. The more muddled and diluted we allow it to be, the more our reality will look less like a tapestry and more like my mother’s yarn after her cat gets into it.

So here’s a prompt for you.

Anything that you’ve outsourced or rewritten or censored deserves to be resuscitated. Breathe life into its lungs again and let it reform. The sentences and paragraphs you’ve rewritten into something polite and unrecognizable might get likes, but likes are cheap.

Instead of adding a filter to our work, let’s allow the rawness. Let’s invite people to try to remove passages because we know our true audience will find them.

Prompt: Write one paragraph that scares you this week. Write the emotional, uncomfortable work. Write what AI cannot. Write about passions or what is taboo or what you disagree with that you know you’d take shit for.

And don’t do it to fit in with yet another group or to sound cool or counterculture, just write your truth. See what comes. You can always burn it later if need be.