Writing for Everybody
“Tell me I’m light as a feather.”
Honesty protects me. As an artist, the call to be real is a responsibility with a burden attached. 2016, I didn’t know what being a writer meant or who I was writing for. I knew I wanted to strike others with poignant writing in the same way I was.
Pages would soak up ink until journals were all that remained of my thoughts—putting words on paper that weren’t for anyone else but me. And yet, deep down, within the unseen and unnurtured parts of my identity, I just wanted someone to respond to who I showed them I was. I wrote and watched myself grow up in words. As much as writing– the process of laying myself flat on paper– reduces my story to symbols and spaces, it was here I discovered who I’d been and who I became.
My writing reminded me of who I was, and I was responsible for character development in my stories. But writers must constantly remind themselves that there is truth outside of what is on paper. I am truer and more real than the words you read.
Write to yourself first. In this dialogue with oneself, in the serendipitous nature of creating, we twiddle with a cloth, a very particular nerve whose design involves the fabric of even the most ordinary person. Art for you is, inevitably, for everyone.
The artist is constantly in dialogue with themself; creating for yourself invites an audience of committed story listeners. Anytime I was honest, my writing cultivated a world for everyone else to see themselves. I didn’t care who read my work, but it meant something whenever people told me what it did for them. Those who were inspired as they watched me grapple with pain and lingering boyhood. And my personal evolution through consuming books and rap music. I was honest about the pain of growing up and the conflictedness of abandoning innocence.
I wrote a lot about pain and thought my words were the only thing that could breathe fresh air into the room. My work was having conversations with others' feelings and subconscious. Writers possess the untapped gift of creating flesh using emotions people don’t have words for, transmitting experiences and capturing and recreating whoever is reading.
Art bears witness to the existence and experiences of readers and watchers. Not many around me were talking about pain or even tended to the idea of vulnerability, but I knew that everyone shared pain. And what you create should be relevant and disruptive. Brad Schreiber, in “Music Is Power: Popular Songs, Social Justice, and the Will to Change,” describes Marvin Gaye’s “What’s Going On” as having “both sweet harmonics and the tone of an earnest discussion in the middle of a social gathering.” Pain was my discussion. Honesty is how artists turn pain into diamonds. Alchamizing grief involves laying it bare so that others can bear witness. You heal what you expose.
Very few creatives lack a surplus of experiences filled with pain and grief from which to pull words. I don’t know many artists with pain missing from their resumes. The difference between a hero's origin story and a villain's is what they choose to do with heartbreak.
I took my anguish and made it the subject of my honesty. And everyone who saw my words experienced my pain. We shared the same cup. In spirituals from the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, if an enslaved person was beaten or abused during the day, the group would collectively sing about it later in the evening. One person’s experience could fit within the consciousness of the entire community. Now, your hurt was everyone’s through song. When I memorize lyrics to a song, I remember the pain those lyrics allowed me to access.
Hip-hop inspired this ritual of creativity more than anything else—the ritual of writing about hurt and pain as a way to bear them. Paper and keyboards don’t talk back, but writing was one time when I didn’t need who was listening to respond but hold me and not tell me I was too heavy– to paper, I was light as a feather. Watching rappers grieve, gloriously, made me chase grief because I believed it would quell something if I could experience it in the ways they did. Ways that made it come out in word and song. As though, “If I expose my skeletons, I will do it in this way.”
Most rap fans value J Cole’s 2016 “4 Your Eyez Only” because he was unsheltered in his expression from the beginning to the end of the album. Through his introspection, he laid himself out in front of everyone. The presence and sound of grief, the weight of a poet’s voice, and the solemn backdrop made his words cut through sound and space to pierce hearts.
Kendrick Lamar’s “U” was sufferable, yet with obnoxious wailing and his drunken poetry. Beneath the cloth of painful expression is a burning desire to have someone bear witness and respond to what you tell them when you feel. Art made with pain is art made for everybody. That, with our sharing in the joys of healing, are ways we can connect.
In September of 2021, I flew from Tampa to Miami to watch J Cole perform live for the first time during the “The Offseason” tour opening show. After a nostalgic journey through his old mixtape classics and foundational works, he performed “Love Yourz” to close out his set. It was seven years after “2014 FHD.” Phones went up around the arena and began to sway in unison. The emotional energy could compel you to embrace a stranger at arm's length. As undressed as this record is, the pain it was colored with and the honesty he used gave it a scripture-like resemblance. “Love Yourz” are words rooted in J Cole’s voice and expression. The live performance played as end credits while I boarded my flight back to Tampa.
As a writer, I remember hiding my pain beneath metaphors, making others work to find out what was wrong. But honesty helped me unintentionally pen open letters to everyone who would give me a read. Emotions are the instrumentals for our stories. I write to myself and leave my journals lying around, hoping whoever finds them will search for me.
I now want my writing to be like songs we remember—songs that, even when we revisit them years later, like Cole’s, our hearts and eyes light up because we are reminded that this song was for us. Artists must return to telling their truth, especially in an era when lies add value and views to their art and content. Until we tell the truth, we may never write for everybody.
Told by: Kwon
