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Finding Your Material: Why What You Write About Matters as Much as How You Write It
by Writing Workshops Staff
7 years ago
We tend to think of cooking as how you work a stove. Don't let the chicken dry out. Don't burn the garlic. Don't overwork the pie dough. What happens in the pan matters, of course, but it's not the only thing that matters. You don't have to watch many cooking shows before you hear a chef talk about the importance of working with quality ingredients. This refrain is as universal in the culinary world as any piece of writing advice is in our literary world. And not for nothing: what could be more important to a dish than what it's made out of?
Writers have a similar blind spot. We obsess over how to write this sentence, where to end the story, how to manage the pace. Only rarely do we talk about the other half of the process—the part that comes before the writing. As much art fails at the level of conception as it does at the level of execution. Stories are sometimes boring or overwrought because of the prose, but just as often the problem stems from an insufficient or poorly developed premise. The material itself was never rich enough to sustain the work.
So how do you find your material? How do you develop the instincts that lead you toward subjects, situations, and questions worth exploring on the page? The answer, it turns out, has less to do with inspiration and more to do with attention—and with building the kind of creative life that keeps you engaged with the world beyond your desk.
The Myth of the Lightning Bolt
There's a persistent myth that great writing begins with a flash of inspiration—a fully formed idea that arrives unbidden, like a gift from the universe. It makes for a romantic origin story, but it rarely describes how working writers actually find their material. More often, the seeds of strong writing come from sustained observation, from the slow accumulation of detail, from following a question long enough to discover that it leads somewhere unexpected.
Flannery O'Connor once noted that anyone who has survived childhood has enough material to write for the rest of their life. That's a provocative claim, and it's worth sitting with. She wasn't suggesting that every writer should mine the same autobiographical vein forever. She was pointing to something deeper: that the raw material of fiction and nonfiction and poetry is already all around us, embedded in the textures of ordinary life. The challenge isn't finding material. The challenge is learning to recognize it.
Consider how many published stories and essays begin not with a grand premise but with a small, specific observation. A detail overheard in a restaurant. A newspaper article that raises more questions than it answers. A childhood memory that suddenly looks different in the light of adult understanding. The writers who consistently produce compelling work aren't necessarily more talented than the rest of us—they've simply trained themselves to pay attention in a particular way.
Conception vs. Execution: The Conversation We're Not Having
In most writing workshops, the conversation centers on execution. Is the dialogue convincing? Does the structure serve the story? Is the narrator reliable in the right ways? These are essential questions, and good workshops help writers develop the technical skill to answer them. But there's a prior question that often goes unasked: Is this the right material for this writer at this time?
This isn't about whether a subject is inherently "good" or "literary." It's about the relationship between a writer and their subject. When a writer has found material that genuinely compels them—material they're willing to sit with through dozens of drafts, material that resists easy answers—the writing tends to have an energy and urgency that can't be faked. When a writer is working with material they've chosen for external reasons—because it seems topical, or impressive, or because someone told them it would sell—that disconnection often shows on the page, no matter how polished the sentences.
The best writing tends to emerge from a genuine collision between a writer's obsessions and the world they inhabit. Joan Didion wrote about California because its landscape and mythology were woven into her consciousness. James Baldwin wrote about race and identity in America because those subjects were inextricable from his lived experience. These writers didn't choose their material so much as recognize that their material had already chosen them.
Questions to Ask Yourself
If you suspect your material might be the issue—if your drafts keep stalling or your workshop feedback consistently points to a lack of investment in the story—try asking yourself a few questions. What are the subjects you return to again and again in conversation, in your reading, in your private thoughts? What makes you angry, or curious, or confused in a way that won't resolve itself neatly? What stories do you tell at dinner parties without being asked? The answers to these questions often point toward the material that will sustain your best work.
"As much art fails at the level of conception as it does at the level of execution. The material itself has to be rich enough to sustain the work."
Training Your Attention
If finding material is less about waiting for lightning and more about cultivating attention, then the question becomes: how do you train yourself to notice? How do you develop the kind of awareness that turns a passing observation into the seed of something worth writing?
One approach is to read widely and beyond your genre. Fiction writers who read only fiction tend to produce fiction that sounds like other fiction—recursive, self-referencing, disconnected from the messy vitality of the world. Reading history, science, journalism, philosophy, and memoir exposes you to the kinds of details, structures, and questions that can enrich your own work in unexpected ways. When George Saunders writes about theme parks and corporate culture, he's drawing on years of working in the real world before he ever entered an MFA program. That material—the specific texture of those experiences—is part of what makes his fiction feel so alive.
Another approach is to cultivate habits that keep you engaged with the world beyond your desk. Talk to people whose lives are different from yours. Read local newspapers. Visit places you wouldn't normally go. Pay attention to what's happening in your community, your city, your neighborhood. The writer who sits alone in a room waiting for inspiration is engaged in a very different practice than the writer who walks through the world with their eyes open, collecting fragments and questions and contradictions.
This doesn't mean that every story needs to be ripped from the headlines or rooted in personal experience. Speculative fiction, historical fiction, and all manner of imaginative work still require material—it just takes a different form. The world-builder still needs to know what makes a society feel real. The historical novelist still needs to understand how people actually behave under pressure. The material may be researched rather than lived, but it still needs to be specific, grounded, and deeply understood.
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Browse Online Classes →The Notebook as a Net
Many writers keep notebooks, but not all notebooks serve the same purpose. The kind of notebook that helps you find your material isn't a journal or a diary—it's more like a net. You're casting it out into the world and seeing what it catches. An image. A phrase. A question. A contradiction. A scene you witnessed on the subway. A fact from a magazine article that you can't stop thinking about.
The important thing is not to curate too early. Don't decide in the moment whether something is "useful." Just capture it. Over time, patterns emerge. You start to notice that certain subjects keep appearing. Certain types of people. Certain emotional registers. These patterns are clues. They're pointing you toward the material that's genuinely yours—the subjects and questions that your particular mind, with its particular history and obsessions, is uniquely equipped to explore.
Grace Paley talked about writing as the intersection of two events: something you know and something you don't know. The notebook helps you accumulate the things you know—the observations, the details, the fragments of overheard conversation. The writing itself is where you discover what you don't know, where you push into the territory that surprises you. But you can't get to that second stage without the first. You need material to work with before you can begin the real work of transformation.
Why Workshopping Material Matters
One of the most valuable things a writing workshop can do—beyond improving your sentences and sharpening your structure—is help you understand your relationship to your own material. A good workshop reader can often see what a writer is circling around before the writer can see it themselves. They can point to the moments in a draft where the energy surges, where the writing comes alive, and help the writer understand what's generating that electricity.
This is one reason why sustained workshop relationships are so valuable. A single workshop can help you improve a single piece. But working with the same community of readers over months—through an IndieMFA program, for instance, or a series of workshops with the same instructor—allows those readers to track your development across multiple pieces. They start to see your patterns, your tendencies, your strengths. They can say, with the authority of having read your work over time, "This is the material that makes you come alive on the page. Go deeper here."
That kind of feedback is rare and extraordinarily useful. It addresses the question of conception rather than just execution. It helps you find your material, not just refine your technique.
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Explore IndieMFA Programs →Getting Out of Your Head and Into the World
There's a reason so many writing programs and retreats emphasize the importance of place. When you remove yourself from your daily routine—when you write in a new city, walk unfamiliar streets, eat food you've never tasted, hear a language you don't speak—your senses wake up. You start noticing things again. The world becomes strange and particular in a way that the familiar often doesn't.
This isn't about exoticism or tourism. It's about disruption. The writer who travels to Paris or Dublin or Iceland to write isn't necessarily looking for Parisian or Irish or Icelandic material. They're looking for the shift in perspective that comes from being a stranger in a new place. That productive disorientation can crack open the work in ways that staying home cannot. You see your own material differently when you're looking at it from a distance—geographically, psychologically, or both.
Even without leaving home, you can create this kind of disruption. Visit a neighborhood you've never explored. Attend a community meeting or a religious service outside your tradition. Volunteer somewhere. The point is to put yourself in situations where you can't rely on your usual patterns of attention. When the familiar falls away, you're forced to look more closely, and that closer looking is exactly the muscle that good writing requires.
The writers who consistently find rich material are the ones who stay engaged with the world—who remain curious, who ask questions, who resist the temptation to retreat entirely into the life of the mind. Writing is a solitary act, but the material that feeds it comes from contact with other people, other places, other ways of being. The page is where you process the world, but you have to be in the world first.
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Explore Destination Retreats →Start with What You Have
If you're reading this and feeling like you don't have material—like your life is too ordinary, too uneventful, too quiet to generate the kind of writing you admire—take heart. That feeling is almost certainly wrong. The problem isn't a lack of material. The problem is that you haven't yet learned to see what's already there.
Start where you are. Start with the things you know. The town you grew up in. The job you work. The relationship that puzzles you. The question you've been turning over in your mind for years without arriving at an answer. These are not small subjects. In the hands of a writer who is paying attention, who is willing to sit with complexity and resist easy resolution, any of these can generate work that matters.
The great secret of finding your material is that it isn't really about finding at all. It's about recognizing. The material is already there, woven into the fabric of your life and your attention. Your job as a writer is to develop the eyes to see it, the patience to sit with it, and the skill to transform it into something that lives on the page. The skill part—the craft, the technique, the art of the sentence—is what workshops and mentorships and years of practice can teach you. But the material is yours. It's been yours all along.
Whether you're searching for your subject, developing a premise, or deepening work already in progress, WritingWorkshops.com offers online workshops, IndieMFA programs, and destination retreats designed to help you find and refine the material that's uniquely yours. Explore our student testimonials to see how other writers have deepened their practice with us.
WritingWorkshops.com is an independent, artist-run creative writing school and the official education partner of Electric Literature. Since 2016, we've helped writers strengthen their voice, develop a greater understanding of craft, and forge a path to publication.
