Trust Your Stuff

In our Craft Capsules series, authors reveal the personal and particular ways they approach the art of writing. This is no. 279. 

We all have those bits of advice we keep on hand, share around. Kurt Vonnegut’s “Sound like yourself” is a lodestar. Brian Morton’s “Trust your stuff,” from Writing As a Way of Life: A Book About Art, Craft, and Devotion (Black Lawrence Press, 2025) is another.

I tell my students: All we’ve got are our guts and integrity when we set out to write.

Of course, in revision we interrogate those instincts, asking if our narrative choices are best serving our story. Therein lies the paradox.

A student wants to know if they are “doing it right.” As if uncertainty weren’t the only guarantee. Deep down they know their manuscript needs work, but my god, if tearing a thing apart isn’t terrifying…so they skirt the edges for a while, until they gather the gumption to go back in and reckon with their narrative’s intrinsic demands. 

Develop a good bullshit detector, says Steve Almond in Truth Is the Arrow, Mercy Is the Bow (Zando, 2024). That’s the only way we become better at calling out our own BS, and more adept at trusting ourselves from the outset. 

I like to compare a draft plagued by fear to my father learning how to ski at forty. Picture the poor guy: traversing the bunny slope crouched on his haunches like he’s set to take a dump. When a writer is afraid of their material, the reader experiences it as a backward lean. I dawdle in description when I’m hiding from the story. Trusting your stuff means taking the risk then committing to it, pointing the damn skis downhill.

When it came to my novel, Hidden River, there were a few things I trusted from the outset:

It would be a short book. 

One of my key characters would get off scot-free. There’d be no tar and feathering, no stain on his name. I knew this outcome, even though my agent’s intern said she wanted justice. I get it, sweetie. Don’t we all. But I had to trust my Gen X sensibility and do what felt true for this story, which takes place before #MeToo. The predator would die without consequence (though he did get death) because the world is like that: Predators live among us. They are our neighbors, our friendly joggers, our fellow commuters, our friends’ fathers.

I knew that the emotional build of the third act would not culminate in some bow-tied moral or dramatic ta-da. Maybe it bucks every rule in Save the Cat! writing guides. Perhaps it would have been more commercially viable or satisfying if I orchestrated a grand crescendo. But that note rang false. I had to trust the particular logic of this story. 

The only thing writers can control is what we put on the page. My work may not be for everyone, but I knew I wanted to tell a story that exposes the omnipresence of men like my character Len Sellers. I wanted to explore our cultural complicity, the fraught nature of desire, and how a traumatic past can stymie the present. I didn’t try to make the book something it wasn’t. The result is barely fifty-five thousand words, which may be another industry gaffe, but trust: I wrote what I needed to say.

Sara Lippmann’s most recent novel is Hidden River (Tortoise Books, 2026). She is the cofounder of the Writing Co-Lab, an online teaching cooperative, and the editor in chief of Epiphany magazine.