Honesty in writing

How much is too much?

This was my very first published book. I learned the importance of collaborating with editors, formatting and marketing professionals, and cover designers with this self-published meditation journal (which is no longer in print). Spring, 2015

Most of us know there are some things that are best left unsaid. Ben and I watch the reality show COPS often, and when we do, I bury my face in my hands when the detainees end up saying too much, or something irrelevant to the situation, or something potentially incriminating or embarrassing.

Case in point: On one episode, a woman had called the police, because she was certain she’d found her missing pug. The dog had vanished a year before, and the woman spent most of her free time patrolling the neighborhoods, posting flyers, and speaking with anyone who would listen or pass by about her beloved pet. Once the officer arrived on scene, the woman was clutching a pug to her chest.

“What’s going on, ma’am?”

“Well, I found my dog! I know it’s her. This family across the street had her, and I recognized my dog. So I went in their house and took her. I’ll prove it to you that she’s mine. She’s chipped, and then you’ll know it’s true.” The woman was clearly (and understandably) distraught, but at this point, she’d given appropriate information that was relevant to the situation (albeit sketchy information that she’d walked in someone’s house and grabbed an unidentified dog).

Next, the officer interviewed the family across the street, who said they’d had their dog for over three years —and the woman who basically stole the dog from them said hers had been missing for only one year.

The distraught woman’s husband arrived on scene, and that’s when things got weird. Distraught Woman began to quiver and cry to the officer, pleading, “Please. Please. This dog is my life. My husband and I have separated over this dog, because she’s everything to me. After I had my ovaries removed, my husband gave me this dog as a gift. She is all I have!”

This is when I smacked my forehead. Does the audience need to know that she had her ovaries removed, and that’s how she acquired the dog? Or that she and her husband had separated over the dog? No. At least not in this way, or at this point in time, because it doesn’t directly move the current situation closer to resolution.

The same problem happens frequently in writing. I’m sure you’ve read articles and books that seem to go on some tangent unrelated to the overarching point of the story. (Pretty much every writer does this, but that’s what editing is for.) Stories are told to make a point. That’s why, in grade school when we first learned the rubrics of structure with essays and reports, we were asked to highlight the thesis statement —the premise that the writer uses as a foundation for the rest of the message’s intent or purpose.

If we write without clear intention, we end up like Distraught Woman on COPS: We end up saying too much, or maybe the wrong thing for this particular reflection or argument. That’s not to say Distraught Woman didn’t have a point to make about how she had her ovaries removed and that she and her husband had separated, but this information was enough of a digression that it got everyone off track in understanding what was going on and how it needed to be handled. Her extraneous details didn’t fit in that place and time.

We don’t want to do that with our writing. I don’t have a formal education in professional writing or editing, but here’s what I’ve learned in the last ten years: that it’s fine to digress when you are making your point in an essay, as long as you circle back to your original point and/or connect it to your premise somehow. Make things easy for your reader. Make sure what you write makes sense and isn’t jumbled, discombobulated randomness that sloppily became a paragraph.

You don’t want to irritate your reader. Even as I write this, I am sure I have fallen prey to all of these no-nos: digressions and tangents, T.M.I., and disjointed writing. That’s why I sit on the Vomit Draft, usually 24 hours at the bare minimum. And when I return to what I wrote uncensored, I can sort through the entire essay and ask myself as I go along, Yes, but what’s the point here?

Sometimes I erase entire paragraphs. And there are many times it pains me to do so, because they are lovely lines, almost like poetic verse, with punchy or pithy ends. They sound pretty to read, even in my head. But they just don’t fit. And I can’t force them to work when they don’t.

Maybe Distraught Woman on COPS could have privately journaled about how, when she had her ovaries removed, her dog became her surrogate child —the one she never was able to conceive but desperately wanted. And when she lost her dog, it was like losing a part of herself all over again. The grief was too much, and she became frantic in her efforts to bring home the one living creature that gave her life value. Maybe if she’d acknowledged that she kind of lost touch with reality and went overboard, she wouldn’t have felt the need to say —on a publicly recorded television show —that she must have this dog, because she knew it was hers. Though she tried to appeal to our sense of pity by telling us she’d lost her ovaries and she and her husband had separated over the dog, the audience probably ended up feeling embarrassed, instead of sorry, for her.

Guess what? The dog was not hers. The animal control officer checked the microchip twice, and, yep, the dog was registered to the original family. So that made Distraught Woman look even more pitiful, especially since she technically broke the law by breaking into someone’s home and stealing their dog.

You don’t want to write in such a way that your reader starts cringing and telling themselves, “No, no, no, we don’t need to know about that.” If you’re writing for your own edification, it doesn’t matter what you record. Feel free to put down as much garbage on paper as you’d like. That’s the point of private journaling. And also first drafts.

But then editing is like the animal control officer who tells us, “Nope. You were wrong here. Sorry to tell you the truth.”

Editing doesn’t have to be harsh, either. Remember all the things I’ve been hashing out about the inner critic? (You can find some of my thoughts on the inner critic here and here.) Sometimes we need a cheerleader to tell us, “This has good bones, but I’d love to help you make it shine,” rather than a judge who frowns and says, “You need to severely cut this entire chapter, because it’s self-indulgent.”

Sometimes you will have to be your own editor. In fact, I highly recommend that you learn the basics of revising. You will want to become familiar with sentence structure, spelling, grammar, and punctuation, but also semantics. Go deeper when you have mastered the rudiments of language. That’s when you can give yourself license to edit according to your unique voice, rather than the way you learned how to underline and circle and cross off dangling participles or sentence fragments when you were in junior high.

There will be other times you need an objective party to help you see where your blind spots are. Hiring an independent editor benefits you in two ways: you learn more about yourself, and you learn more about editing. Then you can take what you learn and apply it to future essays and books and creative works of writing.

If Distraught Woman had spent more time in reflection before her episode of COPS aired, she might have caught herself before she voiced the bit about the removal of her ovaries. Instead, she may have stuck to the subject at hand, which was her missing dog and the dog in her possession.

I’m going to break off here for a moment and say that the fact that she had her ovaries removed and the dog was a gift from her husband isn’t wrong or bad to say. Likewise in your writing. (See what I did there? I just wrote an incomplete sentence, but it’s fine, because it’s my specific writing voice and style.) What you say —as in what you write —just needs to fit the context of what you are currently focusing on.

Don’t be the writer no one wants to read. You won’t always know who in your audience is rolling their eyes or slamming your book shut (unless they happen to also be the ones who troll your social media and leave scathing reviews of your books on Amazon). But if you learn to give yourself feedback and receive it well from others, you will grow.

Your writing will get better, because you are doing the inner work necessary to make it more powerful, meaningful, and impactful. Be honest. Be yourself. But also remember that there is a place, a time, and a season for everything. The present moment doesn’t hold the capacity for your entire life to be expelled on the page or screen. Be kind to your readers and kind to yourself, and the rest will eventually —blessedly —fall into place.