Don't let yourself off the hook

One of writing's toughest tasks, with thoughts from Jesse Armstrong, and more on Chapter Four of my book.

Paying subscribers can hear me read this aloud here or on any podcast app (with some unplanned but atmospheric seagull noise in the background).

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It’s not easy to be really honest as a writer. It’s quite easy to be eighty-percent honest, but every percent after that gets a little harder. Unfortunately it makes a massive difference to the quality of the work.

Chapter Four of my book, In Writing: Conversations on Inspiration, Perspiration and Creative Desperation, is on this topic. It’s called ‘How Do We Tell The Truth?’ and in it I gathered some of the most enlightening things that writers have told me – from poets to journalists to screenwriters – about the persistent pushing needed to produce something that’s rich in meaning and feels true. It’s a critical part of the process.

Here are some of the things writers avoid – or weed out by editing – in order to make their work more honest:

• excessively using stock phrases and familiar language (clichés) instead of describing things as accurately as possible

• giving a character a brilliant line of dialogue, when we know that they wouldn’t be funny, mature or insightful enough to come up with it themselves

• inserting a fun tonal shift (‘I’ve always wanted to write a car chase’) that isn’t in keeping with the rest of the work

• shying away, in memoir, from the unflattering and exposing truth about ourselves – or failing to imagine the causes of other people’s bad behaviour