You
Who exactly am I writing any of this for?
The key to any successful written piece rests inside the answer to two simple questions:
What do you want to say?
Who are you talking to?
If you can answer these two questions, 70% of your writing and communication problems disappear. And as a veteran writing expert and coach, I tell you these two short questions are very very hard to answer.
I have no idea what I’m doing here. Who is this piece for? The cancer stuff and the other stuff not cancer stuff? You know—all the rest of my life?
Who am I writing for?
Is it you? Recently, a person who loves me and is reading about my cancer journey asked: “What’s it feel like?” To be in my body feeling these things? That is the whole point of writing after all—to build a bridge that connects people through story. By providing insight into an experience not your own, you thus impart wisdom to another.
Not-cancer people: Can learn what it feels like to be in the cancer journey
Cancer people: Can get insight into what the cancer journey looks like or be validated in their own journeys
Other stuff: I have a whole lot to say about product, entrepreneurship, creativity, writing, life and etc. That can be a whole lot of other people.
Is it me? Writing is a way to explore and figure out who you are and what you think. Often, what you read is the tippy-top-tail-end of the whole writing journey. Maybe what’s happening here is the messy part to?
Here’s what I mean.
Last week, I tried to write an answer to the person who loved me. The essay began:
I have a memory….
It’s 2019, and I’m living in New York City with only 20 minutes to get from the Lower East Side to the Upper East Side; that’s where my aerials class is. If I’m late, they’ll lock me out of the session.
I missed my bus. There are 20+ blocks between me and my destination. It’s summer and hot. So what do I do?
I run!
Weaving through pedestrians and sprinting across intersections, I arrive with just a minute to spare. Then, I’m up in the air! Twisting, turning, climbing, spinning, and hanging for the next 60 minutes.
When I’m done with class, I decide not to take the bus. Instead, I meander back the way I came. It’s me and New York City in the summer. How it brushes against my skin and fills my senses!
Then there’s recently.
I am flipping through YouTube channels for a workout class. These are the keywords I’m looking for: beginner, senior, low impact, easy. Eventually, I land on a walking workout for 30 minutes, but it’s too hard. It’s too fast. They are working out like regular out of shape people instead of regular out of shape people with several handicaps. I tap out every few exercises to lay on the ground until my body finishes trembling.
The instructor keeps saying: “The barrier is in your mind.” But I know that’s a lie! My body is the barrier. No matter what I think I’d like to do or like to accomplish, it keeps me very contained in the reality of what it’s able to accomplish. So after the video finishes, I roll out my muscles and grit my teeth to keep from crying.
Then I stopped.
What was I trying to say? That’s it hard to be in my body? To describe the bitterness and frustration I feel daily about not being who I was? If yes, then is that to help those who aren’t in the cancer journey understand it better? If no, then what comfort can I offer those in the cancer journey themselves?
Then I went to an art class, and in the art class, I had fun playing with colors and brushstrokes like this:
Which eventually led to this piece:
“There’s a story there,” the art teacher said. She was interested in the very rigid and defined way the beautiful pink and blue do not mix in with each other. “I think there’s something for you to explore about why you did that.”
She and I were the only two people in class. She and I both are on a cancer journey—I as the patient and she as the person who loved the cancer person (who died). She’s more than a decade into her journey. I am not.
One of the first things I said in her class was: “I’m not at the grateful part yet.”
And she was kind and let me feel that way.
But here in this art class, I wonder if that’s what I’m writing for here, too. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t finish the essay I started? Because maybe it’s not just about cataloging feelings for others? Maybe I actually am trying to find a way to gratitude? And this is part of my journey through art—written and physical—to do that?
Writing is all about two questions:
What do you want to say?
Who are you talking to?
And when you can answer both, then you have a journey that takes you and those who read it out of the writing itself and into the living, breathing world.