What to Reveal for Authentic Storytelling: An Interview with Hannah Anderson
Pastors, podcasters, and writers feel pressured to be authentic. Today’s listeners and readers expect the stories they hear to capture every detail with a transparency that past generations never required. You don’t have to be a pastor or a writer to feel this pressure. Social media allows everyone to tell stories, maybe more than we’ve considered.
The Psalmist’s prayer was that his words and meditations would be acceptable to God (Ps. 19:14), which is a prayer anyone loved by Jesus should also pray—but especially Christian writers and storytellers. But how do writers and storytellers navigate these tensions between the cultural expectations around authenticity and the desire to honor God? Or are they even in tension?
To seek Christian wisdom on the topic, I asked Hannah Anderson, a thoughtful Christian author and regular guest speaker for the GCD Writers’ Cohort, to comment on what she deems authentic storytelling.
Hannah Anderson spoke at the 2023 HopeWords Writers’ Conference about authenticity, and I had the opportunity to chat with her. In this article, Hannah answers some of my questions, exploring what authentic storytelling might entail for us as we seek to glorify God with our words.
* * *
[Timarie Friesen]: There’s an expectation for storytellers to disclose all—oversharing—but, Hannah, you say authentic writing requires that things remain hidden. What sort of things?
[Hannah Anderson]: The principle that most shapes what I choose to disclose is the principle of modesty. Now, the language of modesty is generally misunderstood. At best, it means a kind of humble self-deprecation; at worst, it’s hiding in shame, particularly hiding our bodies. But modesty isn’t a question of what is hidden so much as from whom something is hidden. Modesty is a question of how much of yourself you can safely expose based on whether the people around you will honor and protect that vulnerability. In terms of our body, modesty is a question of who we can unveil ourselves to, trusting that they won’t take advantage of us. So it’s about the boundaries of a relationship. It’s the difference between unveiling oneself in the safety of marriage vows, entrusting your body to a physician or caregiver, or parading down the street naked. In every case, you’re exposing yourself, but the latter is understood as dangerous (and even illegal) because there are not safeguards or commitments that can honor that level of vulnerability.
In this respect, writing authentically does not mean writing transparently or fully exposing oneself. Writing authentically means writing modestly, choosing appropriate boundaries for what can be shared based on whether the context, medium, and audience will honor it. For me, this means safeguarding vulnerable things—people, experiences, pain, and even joys that would be harmed by sharing them in an unprotected way. I’m not withholding them out of shame or fear so much as out of reverence.
This is one reason why I don’t write too explicitly about my children. I speak about “our family” or my own experience as a mother. But my children are inherently vulnerable, and I simply don’t trust the world to do right by them. I don’t trust the world to honor their sacredness. Curiously, this sometimes also means not sharing good things that are particularly precious to me because sharing them would diminish them. If the general public wouldn’t know what to do with them—how to treat them with the deference and affection I believe they deserve—I don’t offer them up. I think this is something of what Jesus means when he cautions against casting pearls before swine: don’t give precious things to people who won’t value them.
[Timarie]: You believe a writer should tell what’s true about life, not self. When a writer humbly dissolves into the background, the reader can unfold, and transform (as Ephesians 4:29 says—words “good for building up as fits the occasion . . . may give grace to those who hear”). How might a writer tackle telling their own life experience while allowing a reader space to process and grow?
[Hannah]: Well, I think it’s important to remember that the writer also needs space to process and grow. This is one of the main reasons why it’s almost impossible to write in a way that is “true to self.” Which self? The self I was yesterday? The self I will become tomorrow? The self I want to be but am not yet? As living beings, we are constantly changing and growing. This means that what we put down on a page reflects our particular thoughts and self at that moment. The process of publishing exacerbates this even further because there is often a delay between writing something and its release. Whether you like it or not, you will be a different person by the time people finally read what your former self wrote.
So, this is one of the main reasons I suggest writing toward shared realities. I’m not suggesting you deny or overlook the particularity of your life: I’m suggesting that you find the universal within your experiences and share that experience insofar as it communicates a deeper reality. At the end of the day, the work of a writer not to offer up themselves (which as we’ve discussed is already impossible) but to offer up observations, name connections, and suggest patterns of our shared humanity. We use language to capture what is true about the world that we all inhabit. And you see this in the very best writers, because even if I deeply disagree with a writer’s position on an issue or even how she chooses to live her life, if she can capture the truth of a common human experience, I learn from that.
[Timarie]: Can you give us an example from literature of effective vulnerability in writing?
[Hannah]: One of the surest ways to capture vulnerability is to simply tell the truth about our humanity. To be human—to be a creature—is to be called to dependence. So for me, literature that effectively communicates vulnerability is not necessarily literature that exposes the author, but literature that tells the truth about the vulnerability of life. That vulnerability may be physical, emotional, or spiritual, but it names the truth about our humanity.
A book that I believe does this well is The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. It’s a deceptively simple story but masterful in the way it parallels the pilot’s physical vulnerability after crashing in the Sahara dessert with the emotional vulnerability of the young boy (the eponymous “little prince) whom he meets (hallucinates?) there. But The Little Prince is also a good example of an author writing with and through his own experience toward more universal truths. Saint-Exupéry was himself a pilot and had also been stranded in the Saraha in 1935 (an experience he wrote about in his 1939 memoir Wind, Sand, and Stars). But even though he writes The Little Prince from the perspective of the pilot, the book is so fantastical and creative that the pilot’s experience acts as a vehicle for something larger. We’re not reading about his fears and hopes and dreams; we’re reading about our own. And in this way, Saint-Exupéry models that personal details themselves are not the end. They are the way we get to the real thing. Or as he puts it in the book, “It is only with the heart that one can see rightly; what is essential is invisible to the eye.”
[Timarie]: What safeguards might a writer put in place to discern if they are oversharing or communicating authentically?
[Hannah]: First, I’m very careful to not tell other people’s stories. Obviously, an event doesn’t belong to any one person so I’m not saying that we can’t tell stories that include other people. But I try very hard to not speak for them or assign them motives, thoughts, or perspectives when I tell my part of a story. I’m also very intentional to not expose other people’s sins because this has the potential to reduce them to their worst possible moments. And it’s not “authentic” to only tell part of who they are.
Another safeguard is that I try to not write publicly about something while I’m in process—when an experience or thought is new or fresh. Writing is a wonderful way to work through things, and I highly recommend it as a means of understanding your own life. Publishing those thoughts and experiences while they’re still developing is another thing entirely. I know other authors take a different approach to this, especially folks whose writing career came through blogging or column writing. The demand for sheer output pressured writers to expose more and more of their process in real-time. The gap between a thought coming into their heads and posting it publicly became very small. But I think that we need to intentionally cultivate time between writing about something we’re experiencing and releasing it for public consumption. If nothing else, it gives us an opportunity to gain perspective on our thoughts and decide 1) if we still think that and 2) whether we actually want to share it with others. Of course, we’ll never come to the end of thinking, but I’m just advocating for the distance to decide what we actually do think.
[Timarie]: Thanks for your time, Hannah. Do you plan to return as a speaker for the 2024 HopeWords Writers’ Conference?
[Hannah]: Yes! I’ll be back in Bluefield, West Virginia with Travis Lowe and the whole HopeWords crew. This year’s conference (2024) includes folks like Daniel Nayeri (Everything Sad Is Untrue), Mitali Perkins (Rickshaw Girl), Dr. Justo Gonzalez, and Jackie Hill Perry. We’re going to focus on the question of living between cultures and the unique potential it holds for creativity. On the one hand, there’s the possibility of cross-pollination. But beyond that, existing outside the center of a particular culture grants you a vantage point that simply isn’t possible if you’re in the mainstream. To my mind, this topic is quintessential HopeWords insofar as the conference itself has emerged out of an unlikely place. But it’s also an essentially Christian way of creating. To be a citizen of God’s kingdom is to be both in the world but not of the world—to live in-between. In this sense, our faith holds rich possibility for insight and creativity because it resides in both the “already” and the “not yet.”
Note: Hannah’s book Life Under the Sun: The Unexpectedly Good News of Ecclesiastes releases November 1st, 2023. To learn more about Hannah Anderson’s books, please visit her website sometimesalight.com.
Timarie Friesen leads the GCD Writers’ Guild and enjoys connecting writers with resources. She writes short stories and articles and works as an editor of fiction for a small publisher.