unsent letters: a practice for radical honesty
"The secret of good writing is telling the truth." - Gordon Lish
Before I get into the weekly story work exercise, a reminder that registration for The Transformational Storytelling Intensive closes on Friday, January 9. You can learn all about it here. You can find my other January workshops here.
My new book, Story Work, has launched, it’s a new calendar year, and I’m returning to the rhythm of my practice here on Substack, which is choosing a monthly theme and sharing weekly story work reflections through that lens.
If you’re new here, story work is my approach to reflecting, reclaiming, and reimagining the stories of our lives. It involves looking at your life experiences as creative material that you have the power to shape.
The weekly story work reflections that I share here explore universal human experiences, drawing inspiration from themes found in literature, philosophy, science, spirituality, and more. Each theme offers perspectives meant to spark personal insight, creative expression, and deeper self-understanding.
Approaching our stories from different angles helps us learn new things, not just about our writing, but about ourselves and about life. Each exercise serves as a doorway into the places that hold mystery and meaning for us.
I’ve been doing this series since 2023, and a few of my favorite past themes were: against the grain, ordinary people, masks we wear, body language, and really, I guess they’re all favorites in how they reflect where I was at the time. You can find more of the archives here.
an invitation to intimacy
I’m always looking for creative portals that lead to deeper honesty.
Pathways to greater freedom of expression. Letter writing is one of the most powerful tools I know for examining the inner workings of our relationships to ourselves, to others, to life.
When I think about writing a letter, I think about intimacy. It’s like delivering your inner world directly into someone’s hands, without the distraction of the public gaze. When we write to someone or something, our delivery can be more emotionally precise. The words arrive more clearly, more directly, with a certain familiarity that removes the need for performance.
I often use letter writing as an exercise in my work with clients who want to access deeper levels of vulnerability. Vulnerability with a vague audience can be hard. But when you imagine writing a letter to someone you know, intimacy becomes more accessible. The writing softens and the truth deepens, revealing a more unguarded narrative.
Have you ever used letter writing as a way to say what you were afraid to say out loud?
an invitation to speak freely
Letters also help us tune into our natural voice.
When we write an intimate letter, we’re typically not concerned with performing literary greatness or perfect grammar. Instead, we focus on getting to the heart of what needs to be expressed, what matters, what we want the reader to feel or understand.
The impact of our writing is in its truth, its soul, its heart, its rhythm. These elements shape our voice, the vibration, the essence that makes our expression unmistakably ours.
Giving ourselves permission to speak freely is how we begin to recognize our own voice. And that can be scary, let’s just admit that. Putting words to the hard thing. Letting it loose and hearing it clearly.
It can feel like revealing your naked body, because there it is, your soul bare on the page, every tender fold visible. A letter is a container where we can feel like at least we are revealing ourselves in a private room. We are speaking to a recipient who understands our language, our references, our shared context.
And even when the letter remains unsent, we receive the gift of catharsis, the release that comes from radical honesty. This is what makes an unsent letter especially well-suited for story work—it doesn’t require an audience. There’s no obligation to resolve anything outside of yourself. The sole purpose is truth-telling. It’s saying what needs to be said, even if only to yourself.
Over the next few weeks, I’ll be offering letter-writing invitations and different ways to approach this practice through the lens of story work, using unsent letters as a way to access deeper honesty, insight, and creative freedom.
And the letter won’t always be to a person. There are no rules, and that openness is part of what makes letter writing such a powerful stretch for both creative and personal growth work.
If you were writing a letter you never had to send, what would it finally allow you to say?
Let’s explore this through our weekly exercise.
