When someone thinks of their life’s purpose, they imagine some big, bold undertaking, a passion project that reverberates for years after someone’s gone. And yet, our purpose, and especially the purpose we put into our writing, doesn’t have to have such audacity in order to be powerful. The truth is we never know how our stories will touch someone or what will resonate. In fact, I was reading a collection of essays this morning that surprisingly brought together several different pieces of a puzzle into a beautiful, cohesive whole, of which the nonfiction book I was reading was only a part.
It is possible to imbue our writing, especially fiction writing, with our purpose, and in doing so to be subtle about it. If you’re not an author who does this, if your purpose is loud and bold about what it hopes to accomplish, I want you to know that is great. It’s awesome, even. But sometimes when we’re writing, our aim may only be to tell a great story and in doing so, we end up using our purpose as a subtle shade of creativity in the process. And, too, is awesome in its own way.
How do you cultivate subtlety when writing with your purpose in mind?
First, you need to know what your purpose is. When I began writing romance, for example, my purpose was to tell stories that made people believe in love and happy endings, even if they didn’t see those in their own lives. Now, I wouldn’t say that isn’t my purpose, but rather the characters I choose to tell these stories also tie into my purpose. If someone who feels as if they don’t belong, or they don’t want to go along with the path others have set for them, see themselves in my stories, well that’s my purpose too.
For my romance my purpose is pretty forward. I love writing love stories, especially ones on the steamier side, and my characters reflect the stories I want to tell. I assert there’s a difference between writers who are in a specific genre just for the money, and not because their heart is in it, or it falls in line with their purpose, and those who find a way to write aligned to their personal authenticity and truth. To me the stories feel different when I read them, as I experienced often during the early days of the paranormal romance boom when authors were writing paranormal romance who really weren’t paranormal or sci-fi geeks at heart. The ways the authors spoke about their books were different, and well, there’s a lot I could say about that, which I probably will in a future blog.
Getting back to purpose in writing, it could be as simple as creating a world that people like you would enjoy and want to inhabit. Again, that could come across big and bold on the page, but if you don’t tell anyone else about your desire, but simply share your stories, then the purpose could become shaded in subtle clues that only people who know would pick up on, and those kinds of stories are fun to write too.
I guess what I’m saying is you don’t need to beat the person over the head with the purpose of the book. Sometimes the story demands that, and as authors, it’s usually best to go along with the story. But when it doesn’t, it’s okay to be a little more subtle and simply let the story tell itself.