Why Do You Write? How Knowing Your Answer Changes Everything

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Welcome to the Inside Creative Writing Podcast, the weekly discussion of craft and technique for writers of fiction and creative nonfiction. And now, here's your host, writer and educator, Brad Reed. Episode 40. Today, we're exploring a question that a lot of writers don't give enough thought to. Why do I write? Knowing the answer can change everything about your writing.

The Importance of Knowing Why You Write

Let's dive in. Okay, so why do you write? I want you to actually attempt to answer that question right now. You can even pause the podcast for a few minutes if you need to and give it some thought. Why do you write?

All right, so hopefully you paused and took some time to think about that. You may have come up with some answers like many other writers do. Answers like, you know, to make some money and build a writing career or maybe to process trauma, to feel powerful in a world where I don't often feel powerful. Maybe to get followers and subscribers on social media. Maybe to just connect with somebody, even if that's only kind of imaginatively through your story. A lot of writers say things like, because I have to, right?

There's something inside me that just drives me to write. I have to write. To create beauty is another reason that writers say that they have to write. Maybe to impress others or gain recognition. Sometimes that's a reason a little bit under the surface that we don't really pay that much attention to, but it's there. Maybe it's to leave something behind in this world, kind of make your mark on this world by leaving your writing, your thoughts behind.

Maybe it's to make sense of the chaos of this world, and there's plenty of that to go around right now. Maybe it's to say what you couldn't feel like you could say out loud, right? You can say it through writing. Maybe it's just to prove to yourself that you could do it. I could write a book. Maybe if, maybe your answer is, I don't know.

For a lot of writers, that's actually their answer is, you know, I've never really thought about it. I'm not sure I know why I write. Or maybe it's a mix of a whole bunch of different things all kind of mashed together that drives you to the keyboard or to the pen or pencil to do some writing.

So, if you're feeling bold, I would love for you to share your reason on the webpage for this episode over at the show's website. You can just search for Why Do You Write on there, and it should take you right to this episode with a place to leave some comments. I'd love to see what your thoughts are there, what you came up with.

Personal Stories of Passion and Pressure

But that's what we're going to explore today, is this big overarching question, why do I write? And we're going to find to find out why the answer to that is so powerful in our writing lives. So, I want to start with a little bit of a personal story about my previous life. I've done a whole bunch of different jobs in my life. As you may know, I'm a high school English teacher now, creative writing teacher.

But I didn't, it's not what I always did, right? I went back to college in my 40s to do that. And before doing that, I had a whole bunch of different jobs and different businesses and things that I tried.

So, I'm going to take you all the way back to high school for this first little story. I was in love with music in high school. I was learning to play the guitar. I was learning to play the piano or the keyboard, a little bit of drums, all this stuff. I just loved making music, writing music, and especially performing it with other people. Started a little band in high school that was absolutely terrible.

Started some other bands after high school that were actually pretty good. And we had a lot of fun with. It brought me so much joy. I had so much passion for writing and making music, especially with other people. Loved it. And I was convinced this is my life's calling.

This is what I want to do, right? So, I was living in a small town at the time. I couldn't exactly pick up and go to LA or New York or anything, but I knew that I loved to record music as well.

So, I thought, I'm going to start a little recording studio here in my town. I invested a bunch of money in it. We rented a location for it. I ended up spending money remodeling it into a studio and, you know, put the site up and started doing this as a business. And boy, did I record some terrible music, terrible artists, right?

But they were willing to pay me. And what I noticed is that very quickly, my passion was gone, right? It was still fun sometimes to do it, you know, I loved doing it.

So, it was kind of fun. But that drive, that passion I had for it started to go away pretty quickly because suddenly now I wasn't doing it for me. I was doing it for this artist who I was only really recording their music because they had money to pay me and I needed money. I've invested all this, you know, in all this equipment. And pretty quick, it started to just feel like a job. That happened to me again.

It's happened to me a bunch of times in my life. But the other one that I want to talk about is not too long after high school. I was pretty young right at the dawn of the internet, right? Right when suddenly businesses were realizing, oh, we probably should have some kind of website out there.

So, I started playing around with website design and I found it was really fun. It was almost like a new form of art that I could put out there for the whole world to see, right? Back then, putting something on the internet was a big deal, right? Businesses used to advertise that we have a website, right? Back when virtually nobody did.

So, I loved that building of something new and being on that cutting edge. So, of course, I took that love and enjoyment of just creating that content and I started hiring it out, right? I started doing websites for anybody, any business that wanted to have a website and could afford to have a website. I started meeting with them and, you know, building out these websites for them. And pretty quick, I was not having fun anymore, right? I was not enjoying the process of building these because it wasn't, I wasn't doing it for me, right?

I was doing it for them. I was doing it for that paycheck that came at the end of that. And so, that company did not last very long either because I didn't want to spend my life building websites for any random business that walked into the office and wanted one.

The Dangers of Turning Passion into a Job

So, a large part of what we're going to talk about today is how turning passion into a job can rob us of the passion and the joy that we felt. So, in both of those examples, they started with a joy and a passion for this thing that I turned into an obligation, right? I turned it into something beyond what I was interested in, what I was enjoying.

Now, as I've been thinking back about my own writing journey and even about this podcast, my journey doing this podcast, I can see that I have fallen back into this trap again over and over again many times, right? That I realized this same element is in play. Writing now, and I've been doing a lot of introspection on this, which we'll talk about here in a minute, but writing right now feels close to that same edge where the love and the passion that I have for it is starting to dissipate because my perspective is in the wrong place. My answer to that question, why am I writing, is off a little bit, right? It's become more about the end result and how I could get it out in the world than it has been about the process of writing. And this podcast in the past has felt the same way at times.

Too focused on listener stats, right? How many people are listening. Too focused on things like search engine optimization, right? Where's the site ranking? Is it, you know, is it, how's it ranking on iTunes, all of that stuff. It's really easy to fall into that as the focus.

In fact, as I was thinking about this in the past, when I've paused the podcast for extended periods of time, I can see now looking back with some perspective that it's because I've done that to my joy and love of talking about and teaching about writing, which I love to do. I'm so passionate about just sitting down and talking to people about writing. But there were times where I started to get my perspective off a little bit and that joy, that passion left. And those were the times usually that I was, I was like, why, why do I do this? Why do I do this podcast, right? I don't know if that's actually come through in any of my podcasts.

I'm still really proud of the work that we've done here at Inside Creative Writing. And I'm excited about where we're headed with it. But I can admit that at times it has been, at least from my perspective, a little bit disconnected from what I really want to be teaching and talking about. Not that what we've put up here on the podcast isn't valuable and isn't something I'm super interested in.

But there are times when my perspective has gotten a little bit, a little bit out of whack. So I'm doing something different today. I don't know if you can tell. I have this microphone that's a directional microphone.

So it's supposed to weed out all the sounds around me other than my voice. But if I had what's called an omnidirectional microphone that was picking up everything, you would probably hear seagulls in the background. You might even hear the conversation of a couple of surfers as they walk by. You might hear some car doors opening and closing behind me because I'm literally sitting We do want people to be able to read them and connect with them.

But when that's our perspective, when that's our priority, whether we realize it or not, writing becomes about the outcomes, right? As we're writing in the back of our minds, maybe even to the point where we're not even conscious of it, we're thinking about followers, right? Fans. We're thinking about that eventual publishing deal. We're thinking about the content that we're creating and how we can monetize that or get that out in the world some way.

So in other words, writing becomes about the end goal, not the process. We turn writing into a job, just like I did with music, just like I did with web design. And at least with music and web design, I was making some pretty good money at those things, right? Turning writing into a job is a job that for the vast majority of us is bringing in zero dollars, right? Maybe you've figured out how to make a few bucks here and there, but for the vast majority of people who write, let's be honest, we are not making any money, right? And yet, even with that, we're not primarily writing for us, we're doing it for some future reward, future goal that when you think about it is in almost every way completely out of our control.

How many times have we heard the stories about amazing writers, right? Famous, well respected writers that have had rejection after rejection after rejection after rejection. It almost feels a little bit like hitting the lottery, right? When you get a book published. And in a lot of ways, it is, right? It's that perfect timing of an agent looking for exactly what you have and you know, having it be good enough that it's ready to just roll with.

So yeah, that's kind of the perspective that I'm coming from today's podcast with. And what that perspective causes is a ton of pressure, which is really the last thing we need when we're trying to be creative and do something like write a novel, write a short story, write whatever it is, you know, memoir, whatever we're trying to write, the last thing we want is pressure getting in the way of that process. And what that pressure causes is things like abandoning drafts because they aren't marketable, right? We're halfway through a rough draft. We've invested a bunch of time and energy, but we just have that feeling in the gut, like, man, there's just not a market for this right now. Or who, who would want to read this thing, even though I'm into it, who, you know, is this, is this something that an agent would even want?

And we abandon that, right? Trying to go find the thing that's going to meet that moment in the market. Sometimes it, it causes us to hold back on what we write about. That's the kind of things that we say with our books, because we don't want to offend people with it, right? We're imagining those readers, sometimes our parents and siblings, right? That we don't want to offend, right?

So, oh, I can't write about that. I can't include that in my book or some imagined audience is going to be offended by this. Or we've invented a version in our mind of some agent and we picture them reading this and thinking, oh, this, you know, this doesn't quite fit the mold of what we're used to publishing.

So, you know, we cut it out or we don't explore an interesting direction that might've been open to us. One of the worst parts of that pressure is the way it creates the inner self-talk in our, in our brains, right? We chide ourselves if we miss a day, a week, or God forbid a whole month of not writing, not focusing on a project, almost like a terrible boss who knows exactly how to get under your skin, who knows how exactly how to say the worst things they can possibly say to make you feel like shit, right? That's what our inner brains do when we're under that pressure, right? You're not a real writer. You'd be sitting down to write every day or what you are writing is garbage, right?

All of that stuff that comes from that pressure of trying to have that end goal in mind rather than the process that we're in. This pressure brings about comparing ourselves to other writers who are succeeding at the thing we're trying to do, right? If our ultimate goal is publishing a book, then every time we hear about somebody else publishing a book, there's that little or maybe big reaction in our gut that says, ah, it should have been me, right? That's one less opportunity for me to get published, right? Where if we're just invested in the process, then it doesn't really matter, right?

So what? Somebody else got published. That's not what I'm trying to do. I'm trying to write the best possible book that I can write right now, right? The book that's most true to who I am and the story that I want to tell. Not want to sell, I want to write.

The Pressure of Outcomes in Writing

There is freedom in that, realizing that it's the process that matters, not the end goal that matters. It causes us to write out of fear, often convincing us that we're wasting our time, right? Why am I writing this thing? That we're not good enough to write the thing that we're working on, that our platform, whatever that is, right, is not big enough. We don't have enough followers on Twitter or Twitter. I'm not going to call it the other thing, or Blue Sky or whatever it is.

We don't have enough followers at TikTok. We don't have enough followers, so we'll never get a publishing deal. So I need to be writing stuff and talking about stuff that will, you know, will energize this specific audience. It's all getting our perspective off. Basically, what it does is we give our joy and creativity over to something that is outside of our control, which we never want to do with our art.

So almost the entire writing world, especially online, is built around this view of writing, right? That the ultimate goal should be publication and book sales. If you go look at the most popular writing resources online, they're obsessed with it, right? That's the selling point is come to us, we'll teach you this course, this whatever, and you'll get published, right? The ultimate goal is, let's get you on the bestseller list.

So here's the kicker, and here's where I really want to go with this, because I'm not trying to throw out the idea that publishing or sales or anything is not important, right? We do art, we do writing because we want to share it with other people, right? So I get that part of this is getting your book out into the world so that other people can experience it.

But here's the, here's the dichotomy. I'm not sure that's the right word, even as an English teacher. Here's the problem. We'll simplify it down a little bit, right?

Here's the problem with that. If you write focused on publishing and sales and fame, that almost never leads to writing that actually gets published and sells a bunch of copies and makes you famous, right? Because you're, you end up writing stuff that isn't true to who you are.

Now, does it happen? Of course, right? Do formulaic unoriginal books get published? Do they make some money for the writer? Do they make a name for them? Sure, they do, right?

But is that really what you want from your writing? Is that how you would answer why you write would be to create formulaic unoriginal books that make some money? You know, if that's true and that's your answer, I can tell you there's a lot easier ways to make a buck out there than trying to break into the publishing world with stuff that you're not passionate about a hundred percent.

So to turn out stories you're not passionate about that, don't resonate with who you are and how you see the world to make a few bucks. It's just not a fulfilling writing life. It's not an artistic writing life for sure.

So why turn your art into a business and suck the joy out of it, right? By thinking about that end goal. I doubt that was the reason you came up with when I asked you the question at the beginning of this podcast, right? I bet your reason wasn't to turn my passion and joy into a business so I could make a buck, right? And lose that joy along the way.

Now, if it is, if you're like, no way, dude, I really do just want to write whatever I need to write to make money. That's probably not the podcast that you're going to be into, right? You probably need to go to another podcast that's really focused like a laser on, you know, how to publish, how to build a platform, all of that stuff. Because we ain't it, right? You know, I have started countless novels over the years, dreaming of commercial success, publishing contracts, imagining being out on book tour, talking about it, but I could never seem to finish them, right? I always ran out of gas at some point when I had that perspective.

And even when I did finish them, I didn't even really like the book, right? I have written a book that I myself didn't even want to read. It wasn't until I decided I was going to write the book that I wanted to write, regardless of its marketability, that everything changed for me.

So the book that I have released in the last couple of years here, I knew that it would have very limited market potential. I mean, it's about a woman who loses her religious faith after a major natural disaster. Think about the two things it has going against it. First of all, in order to write a book about a woman losing her faith, I have to start with a woman who is incredibly invested in her faith, right? That turned off a lot of readers and a lot of agents, right? Who read the first chapter or two and thought, The marketing success, I would 100% do it again, because like I said, that story came from my gut, and now that I've created it, I know it's going to always be in this world for whoever wants to experience it.

You can't put a price on that, I don't think. Maybe someday it falls into the hands of some movie producer somehow, right? And he calls me up and says, hey, let's make this into a film.

Let's make this famous. Maybe Oprah calls me and says, I found this in a used bookstore. I want to put it up. Right. That's not gonna happen, but if it did, amazing. At least I have this story that I'm proud of, that I am excited for people to experience and that I would read had I not wrote it, right?

What are we writing for if not that, right? What are we writing for if not that feeling that I am proud of this piece of work, whether it succeeds or not, I am proud that I wrote this and brought this thing that never existed before into the world. Now, I don't want to give the impression that projects we are passionate about can't end up in commercial success. They absolutely can. In fact, it's when we tap into our passion and the honesty of our lives that we have the best chance of writing a story that resonates with people and agents and publishers are people, at least until the AI takes over everything. Agents and publishers are people, right?

Our true stories with real honesty and passion will resonate with people. So I want to give you an example of this from one of the writers who has inspired me the most in my writing journey. Her name is Cheryl Strayed. If you don't know her, she's the author of the memoir Wild, was eventually turned into a film. She's written a bunch of other books since then. And as much as I love the book Wild, that's not the piece that I want to talk about today.

That's not the piece that had more impact on who I am as a writer than anything else I've ever read. Now, I don't want to build it up too much because you may read it and go, eh, right? But for me, at least, this is the writing that I initially read that made me want to become a writer and want to become a very specific type of writer.

So the essay that she wrote is called The Love of My Life. It was published in the sun magazine in 2002. I'm not going to read it here. It's a little bit long to do that. Plus, it's her writing and I'm not just going to, you know, break copyright and throw it right here into my podcast. I do want to tell you a little bit about it.

And then if you want to read it, which I highly, highly recommend, you can head on over to the show's website and just search for the title of this episode. There's a little search tab right at the top of the page. Just search for what am I calling this? Why do you write? And you will find a link to there in there to this essay online.

So this essay blew me away. I had never read anything so raw and so honest as this piece of writing. It felt like, I'm just going to say a confessional, but that's not quite the right word, right? She writes this as an experience of going through a profound grief and how it threw her life just completely off track. She reveals in this essay some of the things that other people would never tell anyone, right? She basically reveals some of the most shameful things that she's ever done.

Not out of kind of a, you know, the ability, you know, the attempt to shock people, but to be honest, right? To be raw, to tell people this is what grief can feel like. And it is just so profound and so insightful and so gripping that I didn't know writing like this existed or that people did it, right? And when you first read it, and I would imagine when she was first writing it, she was not saying to herself, Oh, somebody is going to snap this up and pay me money for this thing, right? That's not what it was about. Right?

It's not super polished. I'm not saying it's not good writing because it's excellent writing, but we can tell that the story and the message is the most important thing, over trying to sound fancy. You know, you don't leave the saying, wow, she's an amazing writer. Well, actually you do, but your reaction is not that. Your reaction is being completely sucked into the story and the vulnerability of this writer.

So writing that comes from necessity, right? You feel like she had the need to tell the story is where we get that emotional impact. It comes from that honesty, not that polish or not that worrying about what is going to get published or what somebody will pay you for.

So I encourage you to read the story. The Love of My Life. Again, it's 2002 in The Sun. You could just Google that and find it, or I will have the link at the show's website.

But I, I was exposed to this writing in my very first creative writing class when I went back to college in my forties, right? And I just kind of took a creative writing class on the side because it sounded fun. I was going to school to be a teacher. Why not, you know, dabble in creative writing a little bit. I'd done a little bit before and had fun with it. And this was maybe the first essay that we were giving, given, and it changed my world, right?

I sat there reading this essay thinking, oh my gosh, I didn't know writing could be like this. And I wanted to know how she did it, right? How did she put this together that was so engaging and so powerful?

Now, like I said, you may read this and go, yeah, that was, that was all right. Maybe it had more to do with where I was and my own emotional journey at the time. I don't know. All I can do is share it with you and put it out there as something to read to kind of get a better idea of what we're talking about here.

Now, her piece is nonfiction, right? This is her talking about her real life. So I'm not saying that every book has to be about your own deepest, darkest secrets that you'd never tell anybody.

But now you're going to put out in this piece of writing for everybody to read. That's not what I'm saying. What I am saying is that even if we're writing genre fiction, you know, sci-fi, horror, that kind of stuff where we're writing about completely fictional people, completely fictional worlds, we are still striving for honesty, craft, and voice. We're still telling stories that come from our guts, right? That come from our life experience, exploring difficult things because that's what connects with people, whether it's in genre fiction or literary fiction. And what's interesting is it's those three things that we sacrifice when we put getting published first, right?

Our honesty starts to go away and we don't want to be quite as honest with the reader. We don't want to be quite as maybe gritty or dark or real or combative. What's like, there's another word that I'm not thinking of here, right?

But that starts to go away. We start pulling back on that a little bit to please the masses, right? Our craft begins to go away because we're no longer thinking about ways to push the boundaries a little bit more, to go in a different direction with purpose. We're starting to think about that model of what's getting published and how do I attract a following? How do I build a platform? How do I reach an agent?

And your voice ultimately goes away, right? The one thing that you have, whether you've discovered it or not, is your voice. So three things that are almost immediately sacrificed when we put getting published first. I think if you talk to any writer of really good fiction, whether literary or genre fiction, you're going to discover that the story has come from deep in their guts and not from a study of what agents are looking for at the time, right? We want that honest storytelling that happens when we are not thinking about the end product and how we're going to market those things.

Craft-Based Writing Approach

So in this podcast, I'm going to call kind of this, this viewpoint of writing. We're going to call it craft-based writing. Now this isn't a system. I'm not coming out with a book on craft-based writing, anything like that, right? I'm just trying to frame it as a concept in my own mind to remind me when I'm writing and I'm starting to get that little pull, you know, that I should be thinking about publishing and all of that stuff. I want to remind myself that I'm a craft-based writer.

When I'm making these podcast episodes and choosing topics, I want to remind myself that this is about craft-based writing. It's about learning to write what matters to us as writers individually. It's learning to write without apology or without fear, but it's still learning to write with care, with skill, with technique, because our stories are worth that, right? We honor the stories that we have in us by writing them with great skill, with great technique.

And so this podcast will still focus on these sort of things, right? Because your stories are worth the time and the effort to be told as well as possible. So we're going to be letting go of the outcome, right?

So I always think in metaphors, right? So I want to imagine writing as being more like a walk along an ocean shore. You're stopping along the way to pick up rocks. You're exploring the tide pools. You just kind of, you know, even if you're a planner and you have your story planned out, there's something about changing this perspective from enjoying and finding true passion and joy in the process that still feels like that exploration along the beach, right? We're just I'm writing and I'm in the middle of a book, the little voice in my head says, you are wasting so much time on this story.

Why? Why? Why are you writing this one? Right. I don't know if that happens to you. It happens to me all the time.

Behind that voice is this perspective that it's only worthwhile if it gets published, right? It's only worthwhile if a ton of people read this thing or if it makes you some money, which is a lie, right? Art, creating art and writing is included in that. The process is the art, right? That's where the joy and the passion is located. Amazing if it becomes commercially successful, right?

That's that's very cool and many writers have written many, many books before they have that first one that really connects anyway. So none of it's wasted time. All of it. We're getting better. We're improving our craft. We're learning to tell stories better.

So you may feel a slight shift in the change of this podcast going forward. It's not going to be profound as I look back on the past podcast episodes, which I've been doing a ton of as I have been re-uploading them and formatting them for, you know, the 2020s. I'm really proud of that work that's in there and I think it does connect with this point of view really well. Just know that going forward, we're not going to be talking about getting published. We're not going to be talking about building platforms. We never have, right?

But I really want to focus more on the process of writing, right? Discovering those stories that are important to us and learning how to honor them by getting them on the page in the best possible way that we can. It's my firm belief that if we do that, the end goal takes care of itself if it was meant to be.

So writing that brings you back to yourself is kind of the phrase that's been floating around in my head. You know, every writer I've interviewed on the podcast, I've asked the same question to at the end of the interview. And I ask them, if you could go back in time and talk to the version of yourself before you had any writing success, what would you tell that version of themselves? And as I've been listening back to these podcasts, none of them have ever said anything about getting published or building a platform or spending more time figuring out what agents wanted at the time, right? They all talk about things like, I just wish I would have taken more risk with my writing initially. I wish I wouldn't have wasted so much time with self-doubt.

I wish I would have trusted my instincts and written the things that I knew that I was passionate about, right? So that's what's important to these writers who have made it to that promised land, right? Of publication and some amount of success. What they're telling themselves is don't worry about that part of it, right? Focus on the craft and that other side will come. The wise words is going to be so short today, but it's so powerful.

Our wise words comes from Toni Morrison. This is in her novel Beloved and she says, You are your best thing. Oh my gosh, I get chills when I just say that simple little five word sentence. You are your best thing. I'm going to print that out and I'm going to put it up on my computer somewhere so that I can look at it every day when I sit down to write or podcast or do anything else. We are so full of second guessing.

We're so full of that inside voice telling us that we're not good enough. Somebody else is way better than you. What are you doing, right? You are your best thing and that's absolutely true. Nobody can write the stories that you will write. Even if somebody, even if you sat down and told somebody your idea, you told them your entire plot.

You told them the character names. You told them everything about it and then they went off to write their version of the book. It would be entirely different, right? Because it wouldn't be from you. That's the thing about writing, right? 30,000 plus words, 40, 50, 60,000 words.

There's no way anybody else can write like you write. You are your best thing. I love that.

Writing for Yourself

So our challenge today. I want you to write something that doesn't go anywhere. And I don't mean plot wise. Don't just write a story that has no point to it, right? I mean, it doesn't go anywhere else in the world but right there on the page or in the document on your computer where you're writing it.

So write something that only you will see. If you're not sure where to start with that and you're like, I don't know what you're talking about. You could focus on something shameful, right? That's something that we probably are not going to publish out in the world unless you're Cheryl Strayed and other very bold writers, right?

But focus on a story that you would never want a person to know about. You could write it either autobiographically. Autobiographically. That's what I'm trying to say. Autobiographically.

So you're telling the real story or you could give that story to another person, to a fictional character and have them walk through. And this doesn't have to be long, right? This could be a paragraph or two, but maybe it takes away and or takes off and you spend a lot of time with it.

But write this thing that you purposefully will never show to anybody, even if it was the best writing you ever did, you're not going to show it to anybody and just see what happens. See how that feels. See if it stirs something in your gut and makes your words come out in a way that is more your voice than maybe anything else you've written before. And then I want you to respect it enough to not turn it into content. Even if you love it, don't turn it into content, right? Don't shove it into a book.

Don't do anything with it, right? Just focus on something that is specifically for you. What I would love you to share, not what you actually write, but I would love for you to share the experience of writing this. How did it feel to you to do this kind of writing?

So again, you can head over to the show's website. Just search the title of this episode. Why do you write? And you're going to see the comments down at the bottom of that. I would love for you to throw just your thoughts in there, your experience of doing this little quick write. Before we go, I want to remind you about the story rescue guide.

I'm so proud of this resource that we've put out. It's called the story rescue guide. It is basically for anybody who is writing a story, whether you're in the first chapter or you're almost finished, but you're having that little nagging voice in your head that says, this something is wrong here, right? The story isn't working like I thought it would. I'm ready to chuck it in the garbage or at least start over. Or, you know, for whatever reason, something's wrong with it.

It's not what I wanted it to be. That's what this story rescue guide is for. It's basically a checklist that you go through and it has a bunch of different angles that you can look at your story and begin to figure out what in there is not working, right? What can we do to get this thing back on track?

So you can go to insidecreativewriting/src. That's the show's website/src. The SRC stands for story rescue checklist.

So I hope that you will check that out. And until next time, remember the best way to improve as a writer is by writing, getting those words on the page. I hope that's what you're up to at some point today. That's what I'm going to try to go do. If I can silence the self-talk in my voice and write after I post a little note on my computer that says you are your best thing.

So go be your best thing and I can't wait to see you on the next episode. Thank you so much for being here. Thanks for listening to the Inside Creative Writing podcast with your host, writer and educator Brad Reed. We'll be back next week.