You Can’t Decide What a Story Is For Until It’s Been Told

A Writing Practice for Telling the Truth to Yourself

This post is part of my series How to Start a Writing Practice: A 7-Week Experiment. Read the full series here.

“Should I mention the part about Nazis?” My friend’s eyes, little half moons of worry. He admired his mother. She had been a spy in WWII. Espionage, seduction, lives saved…but as her dementia progressed, other stories began to emerge.

“I just want to make sure her stories aren’t lost,” he said. “I want to create something for my grandkids. I’m just not sure I want to tell them about that. What do you think I should do?”

I told him what I tell most people when they feel unsure in their creative process:

You can’t decide what a story is for until it’s been told. Sometimes you have to get it out first, and let it tell you what it wants to be.

People often think writing is about craft, talent, or having something important to say. All true.

But this series is not about that.

It’s about creating a personal, embodied writing practice where you can tell the truth, figure things out, offload a bunch of feelings, and not turn any of it into a story, a lesson, or a legacy before it’s ready.

In this series, you'll develop a writing practice as a way to:

• regulate the nervous system

• notice the habits of the inner critic

• loosen perfectionism

• give difficult thoughts somewhere safe to land

• tell the truth to yourself, first

  
  

This is writing for process, not product.

You’re not creating a class, a blog post, or a Substack essay.You’re creating a space to be with your stories. To let them move through you. To let them disrupt, clarify, or heal, in their own time.

And here’s the part that matters most:

You don’t have to share anything. Nothing you write needs to be “good.” This isn’t a class, a productivity hack, or some high-pressure optimization.

It’s a way of building embodied self-trust. Learning to listen to yourself. Trust your own authority. Recognize what’s true for you before anyone can get into your head and tell you what to think, buy, believe, or become.

We’re swimming in information, mis-information, opinion, noise, and carefully engineered persuasion. Much of it is storytelling designed to pull us away from our own inner knowing.

What we’re doing here is using storytelling to move in the opposite direction. To help you reconnect with your truth, your edges, and your inner landscape.

When you know what’s already moving through your own mind, body, and heart, you become harder to rush, flatter, or manipulate. What feels confusing begins to sort itself out. Where you felt stuck begins to open. What doesn’t belong loses its grip.

Not because you figured everything out. But because you learned to listen to yourself.

In this series, I’ll share low-risk and high play antidotes to hustle culture. Consider it an experiment in decolonizing your writing.

The practice is designed for people who do not want another thing they’re supposed to do. If it fits into your life, use it. If not, let it go.

This essay originally appeared on my Substack Sensitive Matters. You can check out more of my writing there.

Read the next post in this series