Be Yourself... An Remember That Desire Determines Who You Become

Two more tiny lessons for building a creative life of words

Writing in the Dark turns two on December 1!

In celebration of that big birthday, I’m sharing, over the next week and a half (here and on Notes), a few short and slightly updated tiny lessons from the in-depth two-part series (Part One, Part Two) I wrote last year on how I built Writing in the Dark (and, more broadly, the principles underlying my entire creative life). Writing in the Dark has more than tripled in size since this time last year, but these core lessons remain the same.

Here are two of the tiny lessons—more to come. ❤️

Be Yourself

In all of life—whether in writing or otherwise—it helps immeasurably to be who you actually are, to let yourself be seen and heard for your true self, and, in that way, to live and write as only you can.

What does that mean? To write what as only you can?

Well, only you can answer that.

But, it is a question worth dwelling on, entering into, sitting quietly (or fitfully) inside of until you feel your way to an answer. For me, being myself means many complicated things, most of which surface often here in this newsletter, and some of which I’ll speak of in a moment.

But one thing it doesn’t mean to be myself (or yourself) is having to write highly personal, intimate, confessional material. Absolutely not. Unless you want to, then go for it! Writing in the Dark is admittedly intimate. But there are many other ways to write, and I’ve written variously and eclectically over my three decades in print, always with a fidelity to writing as myself.

The idea of being yourself, really and truly, simply means you will benefit from writing in your own voice and from your own unique, specialized perspective—regardless of topic—in a way that no one else ever could.

No one but you.

It’s your writing, after all, and only yours, and it comes alive only in your actual voice. So, no matter what you are writing, you will want to warm it, shape it, angle, chisel and tune it until it resonates with your own fiercely unique register, tone, and timbre.

To achieve this, it can help to ask yourself, why are you writing what you are writing, with the emphasis on you.

Desire Determines Who You Become

As Maria Popova wrote in the Marginalian:

It is by wanting that we orient ourselves in the world, by finding and following our private North Star that we walk the path of becoming.

The most successful writing here on Substack seem almost universally to be those created by people with a blazing passion (or, at minimum, an insatiable curiosity) for the topic(s) they write about. In other words, they are fueled by desire to know, understand, illuminate, create, share, connect, etc., around a certain axis of ideas. This kind of passion and curiosity is palpable, infectious, and cannot be faked.

I know that my own curious passion has helped Writing in the Dark grow quickly and well from almost nothing. This newsletter is fueled by my burning belief in the power of language as an agent of self-discovery, human relationship, deeper meaning, and collective transformation—and that energy, in turn, fuels readership. In a crowded and noisy arena (which Substack has become) passion stands out. Therefore, it helps to be writing about what you care most about.

The intersection of writing and teaching—that is, the probing of what makes good writing sing and sear and how we can achieve that in our own work, and how doing so makes us better and makes the world better—truly excites me. I knew from the jump that if I launched a Substack it would be writing about writing and building a writing community because that’s where my desires live—that’s what I’ve always wanted and what I still want.

And, by the way, I love every chance I can get to think and talk about desire, about wanting—the verb. I love wanting, the heat and the ache of it, and the way it works, in the end, to not only fuel our creative practice, but indeed to define our lives. I believe it is the wanting we must nurture, the flames of desire we must fan, in order to sustain our creative practice over time, even when it’s hard. Also to reignite our creative practice after a necessary period of rest.

We have to want it and let ourselves feel—really feel—the vulnerability of that wanting. And it is profoundly vulnerable. Wanting is always vulnerable. Which is why we—especially women (but also many men)—learn to avoid it, on the false hope that doing so will protect us from pain of not getting.

But it won’t.

Walling ourselves off from wanting or dulling its ache with other distractions will only distance ourselves from ourselves, which may be the worst kind of suffering of all.

It’s taken me a long time to find the framework—let alone the words—for this topic. And I’m still not there, so forgive my clumsiness as I attempt to interrogate a territory as vast and dangerous as desire. I’m speaking about desire in a broad, deep sense of the word, the sense of it found in the word’s Latin root—“desidus,” which means “away from a star.” I could not love that more: the idea of our desire being a longing for a star! Maria Popova wrote gorgeously about this in the Marginalian, which is where I first learned of the etymology of the word desire.

As Octavia Butler writes:

All prayers are to Self

And, in one way or another,

All prayers are answered.

Pray,

But beware.

Your desires,

Whether or not you achieve them

Will determine who you become.

Love,

Jeannine

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PS If you want to keep creating through uncertainty, please join us now for Writing in the Dark’s The Art of the Scene intensive for paid members. You can upgrade here anytime to write with us in our safe, light-filled community.

We also have some upcoming live events for paid members (all on Zoom):

• Nov 25 1-2pm CT Silent Write-In

• Dec 13 12-1:30pm CT Open-Mic Salon

• Dec 16 1-2pm CT Silent Write-In

Again, we hope you’ll join us at these rebelliously festive year-end events. Thank you always for writing together.