Writers Lab: Core Values

Good Friday afternoon, Lab Coats, and welcome to the last of our Foundational Elements for the Writers Lab! We’ll have a couple more weeks of our Storybelly Summer Project before wrapping it up and moving into some exciting — really! — fall writing.

Today’s post on Core Values is an essay open to all Storybelly subscribers. This week is informational — next week will be the Assignment. If you’d like to join the Writers Lab and own your very own Lab Coat (mixaphorically speaking) and write with a warm-hearted community of folks who have stories to tell, you can do that by clicking here.

And now — onward!

I love the scene in the movie Moonstruck where Loretta Castorini’s (Cher) mother Rose (Olivia Dukakis), who is married to a man she knows is having an affair, stands outside her NYC brownstone in the winter dark, with a man who has walked her home after meeting her for dinner. This is not their first encounter. He wants to come inside. No one is home. She tells him no. He wants to know why not. Her answer is six words of pure poetry: Because I know who I am.

She is calling on one of her core values as she makes this snap response. She knows this value to her bones. It’s deeper and more meaningful than the first part of her answer, which is practical: “No. I think the house is empty. I can’t invite you in because I’m married…

“… because I know who I am.”

Her values are so deeply ingrained she doesn’t need to explain them or even think about them. If you tried to dissect this scene with Rose the next morning, using the phrase “core values,” she would order you out of her kitchen.

But the writer, in this case John Patrick Shanley, would have been familiar with the term “core values,” and was certainly working with them as he characterized Rose for us. Moonstruck is a fabulous film to watch in order to see core values at work in all Shanley’s characters. He delivers these values through (among other things) his expert use of dialogue.

We’ll delve into dialogue (and film) more deeply this fall in the Writers Lab, and you’ll be prepped for it by having completed the Storybelly Summer Project.

For now, a refresher, as we get ready to tackle core values. This summer — which is soon over (unbelievable) — we have devoted time to figuring out what it is we DO on the page, what we write about, and WHY.

Earlier posts can be worked on in any order, any time:

Our Summer Project, Week 1
Your Mission
Your Mission, Part 2
What’s Your Vision?
What’s Your Vision, Part 2
The Manifesto: A Declaration for the Writing Life

Along the way this summer we’ve added in breathers and tools to help you think about your mission and vision:

20 Projects to Make a Poem
Sets of Three: A Simple Practice for Finding Your Voice

And so! 8 weeks of good stuff, eh? It’s also a way to get ready for Core Values—and for a fall of writing your heart out in the Writers Lab, now that you’ve got foundational work behind you. You have done good work. It will soon be time to move forward.

Whether you're choosing your next project or wondering if you should let one go, your mission, vision, and values become solid tools that can help you decide not just what to keep and what to let go, but how to shape each project.

I’ve shared my Storybelly Mission Statement and Vision Statement in previous Summer Project posts. Here are the Storybelly Core Values:

Empowerment

Community

Empathy

Education

Courage

Celebration

Each of these values has a one-sentence description of how it fits with and enhances the Storybelly mission and vision. I get so much guidance for Storybelly from this foundational work.

I’ll share more (including the descriptions) next week. In the meantime, be thinking about what your list of one-word personal or professional core values might look like. Use your notebook for ideas, thoughts, dreams. We’ll walk through it next week with lots of examples and good direction.

I will do this work with you. I don’t have personal core values in a written form yet for my writing — I’ve relied on my gut feelings and journaling over the years, and there’s nothing wrong with that, of course… but for this stretch of my writing life, I want something I can look at every day, to keep me focused on writing exactly what I want and need to be writing. So I’m going to be doing next week’s assignment right along with you.

The very act of writing reveals to us our core values. Perhaps those values shift as we grow, as we understand ourselves better, and as we think more critically about what we’ve internalized and inherited. So let’s assess, shall we?

At heart, core values are not aspirations, not goals, not even rules—they are fundamental truths you already live by. They shape how you write, what you choose to write about, the voice you write with, and how you navigate both rejection and praise.

Your values shape and define your characters. They give readers a lens through which to see your take on the geography of the human heart. They help heal us, comfort us, and shape our response to the world we live in. They are a kind of faith we live by.

The unexamined life
is not worth living.
— Socrates

So watch Moonstruck this week. I love this hymn to family in all its messy glory, in all its possibility, of being willing to forgive, to begin again, to laugh at life’s absurdities, and to hold close what we treasure.

Compare Moonstruck with another of your favorite films. Watch with intention. Comment below about what you’re watching, reading, listening to and discovering about the values inherent in how a writer/artist showcases a story, an essay, a poem, a character. How do they make you feel about your own core values as you write your way to a finish line, or tinker with a new idea?

And meanwhile, let me ask you: What is Rose Castorini’s core value at work in that scene from Moonstruck?

xo Debbie