“If you tell the truth, you don't have to remember anything.” — Mark Twain
This is a lesson for writing too.
If you’re writing about the truth of your own life, you always have a source of inspiration.
If you’ve written truly about your life up to this point, then as long as you continue to write truly about your life in the present, there will be a logical flow.
You’ll know you’re lying when you try to write a sentence and it doesn’t feel right, doesn’t make sense.
When it gets really trippy is when you go inside your head to try to figure out why it doesn’t feel right and the idea you have mentally recorded is the exact same as what you’ve written down.
That’s when you realize you’ve been lying to yourself. And then the writing becomes spiritual work. When did you start lying to yourself? Why? What is the truth? Then re-write the memory file in your mind.
If you try to press on without doing the internal work, you’ll head off in a direction that doesn’t feel aligned. Because often there will be other lies built upon that foundational lie from the past. When you go back and correct it, it’s destructive and scary at first, you’ll realize things you didn’t know about yourself, desires you didn’t know you had.
But then, once you correct it, you’ll have this creative pipeline that is aligned with who you really are. Your true self interacts with the world through your senses and those experiences turn into words in a very natural way.
It’s possible to remember the lies. You can be a fiction writer.
Brandon Sanderson writes 1,000-page fantasy novels. How does he keep everything straight in his head? He must have some sort of system for recording and organizing.
I guess that’s just a different kind of writing. Telling stories. Creating worlds. Imagining what’s not real.
What I’m talking about in terms of telling the truth applies to personal forms of writing. Recounting your lived experiences, recording your thoughts and feelings. Journaling especially. But also poetry, creative nonfiction, memoir.
Even if nobody was ever going to read a word of it, there would still be value in writing for yourself. To get your thoughts straight, catharsis for your emotions.
I keep coming back to this idea that writing is spiritual. I think about therapy. You have a conversation with a therapist. You’re doing most of the talking. They’re just asking you questions mostly. It’s words. You can say them out loud or write them down.
This process of telling the truth in your writing is similar to talking to a therapist. You get your own internal narratives out in the open. The tricky part is being objective enough to assess your own narratives from a third-person point of view.
Then, once you have the assessment, you write more. You progress. You get closer to … honesty with yourself, alignment, truth, spiritual enlightenment.
And what you write is automatically art. It’s expressed human experience. So it’s like a two-for-one deal. You’re doing your spiritual work and making art at the same time.
I wish everyone spent a lot more time doing this. I crave conversations that are actually honest. Imagine if everyone journaled publicly and honestly every day. Then, when you go to hang out with someone, instead of talking about work and the weather, you can jump right in … “Hey, noticed you’ve been thinking about this.” “Hey, noticed you’ve been feeling this way.”
We have these wildly powerful modern technologies for connection and communication. We can share our experiences in the form of text, audio, photograph, and video. And we can communicate in real-time via those forms as well. Information spreads faster than ever before.
But the fundamental problem remains the same. The technology doesn’t help us with the spiritual work. What are we writing, saying, recording? What place does that come from? What is the intention? Are we telling the truth?
"I tell the truth even when I lie." —Modernity