Why Everyone Should Keep An Authority List

Nov 05, 2024

woman holding brown umbrella — Photo by Edu Lauton on Unsplash

I'm just Josh. What does an average guy like me have to say? If you ever find yourself thinking that way, you should try an authority list.

Last year I wrote about how timelines can help us break writer’s block, because most of us aren’t actually blocked. We have plenty of highlight reels playing in our memories, we just tell ourselves that none of them rise to a story-worthy level. So writer’s doubt is what really ails us.

Authority lists confront writer’s doubt more directly than timelines do, even though similar principles apply. So here are three reasons to give this tool a try. If you do, I’d love to hear about the results!

1. Everyone is an Authority on Something

I assume when I push my cart past strangers in the grocery store that each of them has a wealth of knowledge from their life experience. That older gentleman with the baggy jeans and suspenders looks like a great handyman. Maybe he is a veteran with firsthand memories of Vietnam. That college student in sweatpants at the self-checkout register — maybe they have 30,000 fans on a gaming platform, maybe they are already a whiz at ecommerce.

Our default assumption about others is that they know valuable things that we don’t. So why is it so hard to believe the same about ourselves?

You don’t have to be a leading expert on thoracic medicine to write a gripping memoir. Sure, the trendy topics these days are things like trauma, addiction, and gender ambiguity. But some of my favorite books are about simpler things, or subjects that might not seem glamorous.

David Mas Masumoto’s Epitaph for a Peach draws from years of farming experience, but really it’s a book about preserving family traditions, adapting to change, and facing uncertainty. In fact, it’s Masumoto’s lack of confidence in farming that’s compelling. Novella Carpenter’s Farm City, similarly, is propelled as much by her ignorance and the pickles she gets into as an urban farmer as it is about agricultural innovation.

Time and again I find myself advising other writers to lean into the mess. So that might be one place to start if you don’t feel like you have anything authoritative to say. What are the sources of your self-doubt? What story might you tell if you stopped trying to present yourself as a sage handing down wisdom from on high, but instead wrote bravely into the messes that you know so well?

2. Lists Unlock Ideas

Memory is a network of interlocking experiences. Trigger one memory, and it will awaken others. The story-worthy idea might be the last one in your list. But you might never have unlocked it if you hadn’t flipped every other trigger first.

So just start listing things that you could teach a reader something about or that you feel you know well. Here’s what a short list might look like for me.

Parenting
Songwriting
Baseball
Gardening
Teaching
Wildland firefighting
Wilderness conservation
Fitness

The more you add to your list, the more you’ll remember. Pretty soon you’ll agree with Flannery O’Connor that any of us who survives childhood has enough material to write for the rest of our lives.

3. Lists Lead to Scenes

You might have noticed that many of my brainstorming tools are sneaky ways to start thinking about scenes. So if you do a timeline of your life and start flagging story-worthy memories, I suggest that you pick one of those memories and draw out its own timeline. What happened that morning, leading up to your memorable event? What were the stages of the memory as it was happening to you? And what happened later in its aftermath?

Ideally, zooming in like that will lead you to specific moments in time. When a reader steps into my memory, they begin living it with me. So I don’t want to write an essay about all the years I played baseball, because that will lead to summaries and you’ll feel held at arm’s length from the whole thing. But if I write about my first year of Little League, when I stubbornly insisted on using a wooden bat, I can bring you up to the plate with me, let you feel the good vibrations of catching a pitch in the sweet spot.

So the authority list works best when we keep breaking each topic down to single places and times. It’s like playing with Google Maps, where you call up the aerial view of your town and keep zooming in until you reach the street view.

So let’s take wildland firefighting. I spent seven summers on U.S. Forest Service fire crews, so I can claim some authority on the subject. But I won’t get anywhere writing about firefighting until I break it down into something manageable, such as the different tasks it requires.

Wildland Firefighting

Initial attack (small crews)
Deployments (large crews)
Chainsaw work (cutting fuel breaks, dropping hazardous snags)
Hoselays (trunk lines, fittings, laterals)
Back burns (drip torches, pyrotechnics)
Mop-up (day shift, night shift, Pulaskis and shovels and McLeod tools)

None of that jargon means anything to you yet. But nested within each of those tasks are scenes, moments in time, little videos playing in my memory.

Initial attack. Getting helicoptered out to a lightning strike with my buddy Tori, who disappeared from my life after that summer except on Facebook. It is a remarkable thing to spend two nights on a mountain with another human being with just a sleeping bag and a few MREs (Meals Ready To Eat) that feel like they are left over from WWII. Why was this kind of intimacy so easy to find in college? Why is it so hard to find in mid-life?

Deployments. I was dispatched with large crews to California, Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado, even northern Alberta (see “Mutiny in the North Woods”). I could write a whole essay on the strange phenomenon of the fireline romance, how all of the rules of conventional life seemed thrown out the window in fire camps. I saw unlikely pairings on every deployment and enjoyed one myself. It couldn’t have been that we felt a lack of accountability, because we were living cheek to jowl in tent camps with people we knew from our small towns. Was it that drawing close to a primeval force like wildfire, even the smoldering remnants of it that we scraped away at on night shift, awakened the kind of survival instinct that supposedly sparks a baby boom after natural disasters? The fireline romance afflicted (or enriched) firefighters of all ages: why?

Maybe it’s unfair of me to fall back on such dramatic memories. So let’s take a crack at songwriting.

I cut a demo years ago, performed at coffee houses, restaurants, and cafes through graduate school, and thought I might aspire to more. But I’m happy enough as a campfire guitarist now. Just as with firefighting, I could break songwriting into tasks or more thematic memories.

Songwriting:

Love interests
College music scene in rural Tennessee (idolizing The Naked Puritans, opening for the Gentile Groove Band, studying the roots of country music)
Playing a B&B on Valentine’s Day (yes, traveling room to room like a troubadour)
Chords and melody first, or the lyrics?
Imitation and originality

Love interests. I wrote my first song for a girl I thought I loved but now realize I never knew. It was the only time in my life I’ve ever been that possessed by a crush. Maya was a little puzzled by the whole thing, I imagine, and nothing came of it. But that experience unlocked something in my creative life. I wrote 80 songs during college, probably over a hundred by now, counting the ditties for my kids. During that time, I’ve pondered a perhaps unanswerable question: why did I write my best songs for women I didn’t really love? Does this say something about me – that my love songs are little more than fantasies – or about songwriting in general? Does the creative spark spring from something more like lust than like love?

Imitation and originality. It is a strange thing how certain chord schemes get baked into muscle memory. Even now while doodling around on guitar I find myself drifting into the depressive major/minor progression that I must have absorbed from Joan Osborne’s “One of Us,” or from R.E.M., or maybe Shawn Colvin. I can recognize the warmth that runs through U2’s oeuvre, how those melodies always launch up at the end rather than plunging down to the minor chord. But that’s not how my songs ever want to come out. Is it because I grew up in the 90s, a child of Alice in Chains and Soundgarden, and I cannot now escape that imprint on my sense memories? But I hear a similar melancholy in folk tunes, all those murder ballads, even the supposedly happy “Shady Grove,” which I performed at my wedding. So maybe what wants to come out in my songs is more a fundamental human truth than an echo of all my influences. When you get right down to it, where do songs come from?

The Question Is The Key

I believe there are two ingredients necessary to push an essay or a book forward. One is the scene, which we locate by zooming in to places and times, the highlight reel of our memories. The other is the question, the predicament, or the mess we find ourselves in.

As you make your list, keep one eye open for the questions that emerge from it. You’re not generating a list of topics to then “write about.” You’re generating a list of containers for memories to write through. If you’re not curious about anything that shows up in your list, if you don’t feel some urgency to wrangle beauty, order, and sense out of the mess, then the result will be either flat or incomplete.

Masumoto fears that shifting consumer demands mean the death of his heirloom peaches. People don’t care about flavor anymore, they just want shelf life and color. So he prepares to say goodbye to his beloved Sun Crests and to farming as an art. What comes out is a love song that ultimately revives market demand (he’s still happily growing those peaches today). But the book begins with urgent questions: What can I do? How can I live with myself if I lose this family farm?

David Mas Masumoto. From Good Eggs Blog.

The great thing about a list is that it triggers your memory network. Each idea you add to the list unlocks others. But all of this starts with owning your authority.

Say it with me: There is no such thing as block when you've conquered the doubt.

You have a story to tell. You have a life's witness that no one else does. Believe that. Turn your authority into a list. That list will soon be teeming with scenes, and hopefully some of those scenes will have built-in perplexities that you’ll need to write your way through.

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