values reveal your true voice

january 29 | weekly warm-up

Write about a moment in the past week that holds some emotional charge for you. It could be an unexpected phone call, a personal achievement, something you observed from a distance, a family setback, anything that had an emotional impact on you.

Explore the moment’s significance to you. What values were being highlighted, challenged, or brought into focus? You can use the following prompts as guidance: What was important about this moment? Does it have a deeper meaning or is it part of a pattern in your life? What about this moment is a shared, universal human experience? What did or can you learn from the event?

Don’t edit as you go and write with as much emotional honesty as you can. Make honesty the goal, not clever words and sentences. Your truest voice is revealed when you are radically honest about what moves you.

“If you don’t care about the things you’re writing about, you will never discover your true voice. Your voice does not exist when you’re trying to write a book in a genre you hate because you think it will be an easy way to make a quick buck. Your voice does not exist in the thin and cheap places of your heart or the shallow end of your soul. Voice lives in the deep waters and the dark places of your soul, and it will only venture out when you make sure you’ve given it space to move and room to breathe.” — Holly Lisle

In my personal storytelling workshops, I usually advise writers to choose a topic that has an emotional charge for them, a topic or story that showcases their personal values. Sometimes this request is met with quizzical looks because we don’t necessarily think about the values that we’re writing about when we set out to tell a story. Our ideas often start with a memory, scene, feeling, or vision. 

Let’s say you keep having this desire to write about what it was like having monthly dinners at your grandmother’s house growing up. You might not know why these particular memories keep asking to be written, but through writing them you discover that you valued the family connection and it’s something that is missing from your life now, and that’s how the arc begins to take shape. Our stories communicate our values whether we realize it or not. The story you tell of how you faced certain challenges and made certain choices, or how you came to be who, where, and how you are now, allows others emotional and intellectual insight into your values.

We touched on this in our January session when we talked about Maslow’s hierarchy of needs as a reference for certain motivations that all humans have. When we talk about values, we’re just driving deeper into this concept and getting more specific about how these needs manifest for each of us in unique ways.

When you write stories that reveal your values, there you will find your most authentic writing voice. Values are the language of your soul, after all. 

So you show up to your journal to write a memory or reflect on a feeling that you’re having and through the writing you discover that underlying that entry point, there are core values that are being translated through the story. Values that are being honored, dishonored, questioned, or examined.

Part of our exercise this week is to read one or more of the essays below and notice what values are being addressed through the story. 

In “The Year I Grew Wildly, While Men Looked On” by Ashley C. Ford, she is writing from the perspective of her 13-year old self whose body is maturing faster than she’d like. What values/needs did 13-year old Ashley have that were being dishonored and/or dishonored? How did she convey this to us? 

In “Lost Cause: On Estrangement and Chosen Family” by Sassafras Lowrey, she writes about distancing herself from her biological family, and how she came to reshape her definition of family. What values/needs were dishonored by her biological family? What values were highlighted in her chosen family? 

In “I will never run again” by Mikala Jamison, she writes about body dissociation, eating disorder, and her path to body acceptance. What values/needs were not being met through running? Likewise, what values/needs were being met through weight-lifting? What other values does the writer express in this piece?