Considering content in your writing
Dear Wonderful Writers,
I was meant to do a 3-hour critique workshop looking at the larger issues (character, plot, dialogue) and the minute (word choice, rhythm, sound, the white of the page) at the 2025 San Francisco Writers Conference but had to cancel due to illness.
I’m encouraging you to think about it still for this reason…long story, mea culpa.
As many of you know I’ve chosen to live as a contemplative solitary in the Catholic Christian tradition. By choice, I minimally engage in many ways people come together. I also write and edit. And writers need to find an agent, a publisher or help self-publishing, doing a hybrid. We need a platform, a rigorous workshop, writer friends. There are many pieces to the puzzle.
But the single most important piece, in my view, is content. And how do we do that?
It is my deep conviction that each person on the planet has a distinct way of processing reality. A distinct form of perception, a distinct collection of associations to what is perceived. A distinct way of organizing perception. And the miracle is that the closer we get to our own manner of being on the planet, the more powerful and more universal our story is.This is a total paradox, but it’s true.
For 10 years after The Memory Room came out, I was trying to write about the breakdown of my marriage, my disillusionment with religion, etc. One entirely new draft every year, and it kept flopping. I was at the break point. I sent to my writer friends feeling I could not do another.
Garth Greenwell again indicated it was failing, but the 14 pages I wrote about Zaccheus made him think I could do a little book about such biblical figures. I stormed around a couple days. Then closed all my files, shut down my computer, got a notebook and a pen, and within three months had written the entire manuscript of This Is Why I Came which sold immediately to Counterpoint Press asking only that I consider changing one sentence. Which I did.
I bring all this up because this morning I opened that book to the brief chapter on Zaccheus. He was a tax collector who cheated, and so was deeply hated. He was also short. Curious about Jesus, as the story goes, he climbed into a sycamore tree to get better view. Jesus stopped, saw him, said he wanted to spend the afternoon with this hated person, which cause a bit of an uproar. As a result of that visit, Zaccheus gave what he had to the poor and returned what he owed to others 4-fold.
This story is told in fewer than 215 words, in the Gospel of Luke. So shorter than this email. But it has been read for over 2000 years.
I wondered what Zaccheus did for the rest of his life. After that one afternoon. That’s what I wrote about. It was fun and easy. It’s what I imagined.
Because tomorrow the Christian church in both East and West celebrates this once hated person, I read my Zaccheus chapter this morning. And it made me cry. Because I love this person, this character. I love what I imagined about him.
This is Why I Came has been out for 10 years this December. Yet last week I got an email from a stranger who is using these small chapters as a prompt for her own meditations. Reading them one a day. Out loud. And weeping, she said, often.
Why does this happen? Because thanks to Garth and others I came to see that my imagination is a biblical imagination. Bible stories are how I organize my experience. And it has been my way since I was about 3 years old. Even for the 20 years I was away from all churches entirely.
Why does this matter? Not because I’m talking a lot about religion (and to a readership that is likely, in part anyway, hostile to religion, which is fine with me). It’s that we want to find in ourselves the shape and contour of our own imagination. Whether we are writing a memoir, a cookbook, a YA fantasy, a blog, a literary novel.
Because when we find this unique manner of perception and our own way of organizing human experiences, we will stop making drafts that fail. We will stop making just more stuff. And will begin to make art. And our art will make people cry. Or laugh. Or hope. Because it is beautiful. And fresh. And new. And true.
As a human family, we do not need more stuff. We need art. Visual art, music, well-designed technology, well-designed buildings and coffee makers and choreography and clothing. We need art because it touches our deepest hunger. Our hunger for meaning.
Let us help each other locate the shape of our distinct and priceless individual imaginations.
Let us make our books from that place and no other. Let us be true to that compass. And make work that will be powerful for decades.With every best wish,
Mary
A freelance editor living in the Bay Area, Mary Rakow, Ph.D. works with local and global clients who hope to traditionally, self- or hybrid publish. She has blogged monthly for SFWC about the writing process and offers an Advanced Masterclass in Fiction at SFWC 2025 plus meeting with writers for Half-Hour Paid and 8-Minute Free editing consultations she gives a fee discount to SFWC writers.
A Mentor for PEN USA/West’s Emerging Voices program, an Instructor for UCLA Extension Writers Program, and presenter in workshops for Harvard Club of San Francisco, Rakow is rigorous and encouraging, insightful and kind.
A theologian with Masters Degree and Ph.D. from Harvard Divinity School and Boston College, Rakow’s debut novel, THE MEMORY ROOM was shortlisted for the Stanford University International Saroyan Prize in Literature, a PEN USA/West Finalist in Fiction and was listed among the Best Books of the West by The Los Angeles Times. She was awarded a $75,000 Lannan Fellowship and given two month-long Lannan Residencies in Marfa, TX.
Her second novel, THIS IS WHY I CAME earned excellent reviews in The Boston Globe, The Washington Post, The Atlantic, Harvard Divinity Bulletin, Commonweal, Christian Century, O Magazine, Ploughshares. It appeared on reading lists for courses at Princeton and Yale.
Interested in the visual arts, Rakow was commissioned to write the first book-length treatment of the artist’s work, MARTINEZ CELAYA, WORKING METHODS.
Mary is a beloved editor and writing coach. Always on the look-out for serious writers, she enjoys working with those just starting out and those with publications and accolades.
For inquiries please visit maryrakow.com
© Mary Rakow, 2025
