This post is Part 1 of a series, Formation Under Constraint: The Making of a Writer.
There’s a lot of chatter out there today about identity and intersectionality. These are thoughtful, important concepts rooted in excellent intentions, and some of the dialogue has revealed experiences that had been ignored, dismissed, or suppressed altogether. As a writer, I can’t help but applaud the reversal of any such trend. But in my personal case, I’ve found these concepts to be a bit too limiting.
They’re not wrong. They’re just not the approach I use when it comes to answering the question: how does my writing work come to be? Or, put more simply, where do you get your ideas and inspiration?
Answering in terms of identity (and the related concept of intersectionality) indicates who I am. But to give the most honest answer, I’ve needed to think about how I was formed — influence, not identity.
Influence, Not Identity
Identity and influence are related, but they’re distinct from each other. That distinction matters, because explaining my formation requires a discussion of pressure and sequence. I need to keep cause and effect visible, acknowledging that I’ve been shaped over time — often, but not always, without my choice or consent — by the conditions I’ve encountered. Formation isn’t a claim to virtue or authority, or to “lived experience.” It’s identifying what pressed on me, what constrained me, and what I had to adapt to in order to become myself.
Influence, in this understanding, isn’t a reference to aesthetic or abstract inspiration. It’s a delineation of the forces that demanded and trained my attention, and that set the boundaries within which I live today. Those same boundaries are what define responsibility and honesty when I write. My influences include the households and regions that shaped my ear for language; the kinds of authority I’ve learned to trust, question, and/or resist; the systems I learned to navigate without expecting them to bend; and the limits imposed by my own body and mind.
None of this is about moral standing, marginalization, or “other voices.” I’m not trying to settle any arguments, excuse any failures, or claim or grant any authority. Instead, I’m trying to explain why my work consistently returns to the same themes and structures: consequence, not catharsis; repair, not revelation; endurance, not escape; survival, not triumph. It also explains why I’m interested in aftermath, why I tend not to tidy damage away neatly, and why the truth of my stories often arrives late and bearing a significant — and inescapable — cost.
Why Formation Matters
My use of the word formation is quite intentional. Formation implies shaping through habit, repetition, and constraint. It’s not about self-invention. Most of what forms us does so under pressure: families that did their best but still fell short; institutions that mattered and failed; bodies that didn’t cooperate; systems that worked imperfectly or not at all. Constraint isn’t incidental to formation; it’s the medium through which formation happens.
That’s as true in my writing as it is in my life.
Over the course of this series, I’ll be writing about the influences that shaped my writing life: family and region, language and register, illness and endurance, faith and moral realism, class and authority, and fan fiction as a kind of craft apprenticeship. For me, these aren’t identity claims, and indeed I tend not to fit neatly into many common identity frameworks. Instead, they are formative pressures that shaped me — and that determine how my work behaves on the page.
This isn’t a manifesto. It’s an explanation.
Next Up: A Teacher and an Engineer — How My Parents Formed Me