If you get a chance, watch "Extras," a BBC sitcom co-written and performed by Ricky Gervais.

Gervais' style of comedy is immediately recognizable.  It's so painfully true, you will want to cry even as you're laughing.

Gervais has made a fortune saying things that none of us would dare say for fear of offending or upsetting the social order.  He pokes fun at the thin veneer of political correctness that hides what so many of us are privately thinking.

As writers, we'd be wise to learn from Gervais.  Gervais is painfully honest, especially when it hurts.

Three Kinds of Writers

Writers have many motives when it comes to what they do.

Some just do the job: churn out the page numbers, send it off to the editor, accept the royalty check and onto the next project.

Others want to impress.  They're the sort who deliberate over theory, eat up incomprehensible literary fiction, and embed arcane references to titillate the scholarly.  The universities are their stomping ground, and their highest reward a literary prize.  They're a literary critic's dream.  But the general public with their juvenile reading level don't get it, and these works of art linger on the bookseller's shelves, spurned in favor of more palatable popular fiction.

Then there are those who write because their heart commands it.  They see stories all around them, stories that need to be told, stories that evoke such deep feelings for them that the only way they can make sense of it all is to grab a pen and write.  There's no need to be clever, only honest and true to the story.  Often, it's the plainest language and simplest plot that move the heart most deeply.

Perhaps you know the three kinds of writers I'm talking about.  I often spot them as I'm browsing through a bookstore: the writer who pens books for the checks they bring in, the writer who sees his/her work as the highest art, and the writer who feels the story so deeply in his/her heart that to not tell it would be a crime.

The Heart Speaks Honestly

If you're not afraid by what you're revealing in your writing, then maybe you aren't being honest enough.

As writers, our imaginations create a version of reality that we want to believe.  Words become a screen to hide behind, making us look more worldly than we really are.

We're not used to being honest about what we know.  We're trained from a young age to say what is acceptable, not what is painfully true.

We also learn, as young people, to lie when we write.  For years of our lives, we had to fill up essay pages on subjects we didn't particularly care about.  We learned to write from our head, because our heart wasn't in it.  We wrote for ulterior motives: not to express what was honest or to share our deepest beliefs, but rather to impress our teachers enough to get a good grade.  We wrote what we thought sounded good.  We thought that was what we were supposed to do.

But all of that time in our head didn't help.

Did it help you?

Aim for Truth, Not Brilliance

The greatest stories have soul. They have a human heart.

They speak of the human experience in a way so unmistakable that each and every one of us can see ourselves in its pages.

That sort of knowledge doesn't come from the head.  It comes from the heart.

You can be the cleverest scholar on the planet, but if you haven't thrown yourself into living a rich life, you will have little worth writing about.

Writing that rings true requires an understanding of what life is really about.

And life isn't really about ideas and concepts and grand theories.

Life is about love and loss and risk-taking and courage and doubt and that eternal yearning to connect and be understood.

You don't need a lot of life experience to write stories with heart.  But you do need to be intimately acquainted with your own heart.  You need to be honest about what you feel and why you feel that way.  And you need to be courageous enough to write it down without restraint, without shame.  You have to ignore your inner censor.  You have to be willing to write down things that you'd never tell another living soul.

It takes more courage to write from the heart than it does from the head.

See if you have the courage.  Remember something embarrassing that happened to you, something so embarrassing you haven't told another living soul.  Then write it into a story, or a sketch, or a scene.  Have it happen to a character if you like, but keep it honest.

See how hard it can be to tell the truth.

That's why I love Ricky Gervais.  He gets what it's like to be an ordinary human being who says the wrong thing without realizing it, and then finds himself laughed at by those he wants to like him the most.  No one could ever accuse him of being an intellectual, but even intellectuals will admit that his comedy is smarter than his character is.

In not aiming for brilliance, only truth, we hit our mark.