On Writing Truthfully
There is a version of every poem I have ever written that is safer than the one I published. A version where the feeling is wrapped in more sanitized language. Where the wound is dressed before anyone can see it. Where the speaker stands a little further back from the thing she is actually saying.
I have learned—slowly, through years of drafting and revising and throwing things out—that these safer versions are also the worse ones. Not because honesty is the same as rawness. Not because beautiful language is dishonest. But because the reader can feel when you have stepped back. They can feel the distance between the writer and the truth she is circling, and that distance is the difference between a poem that stays with them and one they forget by afternoon.
“The goal isn’t to persuade—it’s to tell the truth beautifully, and to invite the reader into a shared, authentic moment.”
What Honesty in Writing Actually Means
When I talk about honest writing, I don’t mean confessional writing in the sense of exposure or disclosure. I mean something subtler: the willingness to say what you actually see, feel, and think—even when it is complicated, even when it contradicts itself, even when it doesn’t resolve into a lesson.
In my poetry collection A Woman Full Grown, I was writing about the interior life of women—desire, grief, strength, the quiet negotiations we make every day. Some of those poems took me to places I wasn’t expecting to go. The honest version of a poem about love sometimes arrives as a poem about loneliness. The honest version of a poem about strength sometimes arrives as a poem about how tired strength can make you.
That is what the honest sentence does. It takes you somewhere you didn’t plan to go, and when you arrive, you recognize the place—because it is true.
For Aspiring Writers: How to Stop Hiding on the Page
If you feel yourself pulling back from what you are really trying to say, here are the questions I ask myself:
What is the thing I’m afraid to write? Usually the answer to that question is exactly the thing the piece needs. Not because we should always write our fears—but because where there is resistance, there is energy. Something is alive in that fear.
Am I writing the scene, or the scene behind the scene? In Intimate Strangers, I started off hesitant about being so raw in describing the scenes of passion between the main characters. I admit I was a little embarrassed at first. I moved past the embarrassment as I got to know my characters more deeply as I wrote their story. They were so vividly alive in my imagination that I could not water down how I know they would love each other. That meant creating more than a titillating sex scene…it meant bringing their vulnerabilities into the story.
Read the draft aloud. The places where your voice goes flat or speeds up are the places where you have stopped trusting yourself. Go back to those passages. Slow down. What is really happening there?
Don’t tidy up the ending. We are trained to want resolution—a lesson learned, a wound healed, a door closed. But life doesn’t always offer that, and neither does the most honest writing. Let the poem end where it ends, not where you wish it would.
Readers, this is also something to look for in books you love: the sentence that makes you set the book down for a moment. Not because it is shocking, but because it is exactly right—because someone told the truth so precisely that it feels like your own.
Anna M. Figueroa is the author of four works of poetry and literary fiction, including A Woman Full Grown and Intimate Strangers.
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