Category: On Writing

The discipline, the decisions, and the reality of writing as a practice — what the craft demands and what it quietly teaches.

Writing and Doubt

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Writing and doubt are constant companions, and the relationship between them is more complicated than the standard account suggests. The standard account treats doubt as an obstacle — something to be overcome, managed, or pushed through in order to produce work. The writer who waits for doubt to pass is a writer who does not write. This is true as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough, because doubt is not only an obstacle. It is also, in the right conditions, a signal.

The question is not how to eliminate doubt from the writing process — it cannot be eliminated — but how to distinguish the doubt that is telling you something useful from the doubt that is simply the discomfort of doing difficult work.

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The Difference Between a Subject and an Argument

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Subject and argument in writing are often treated as the same thing — but the difference between them is one of the most important distinctions a writer can make, and one of the least discussed. A subject is what a piece is about. An argument is what a piece says about what it is about. The two are not the same, and a piece that has a subject but no argument is not yet a piece of writing — it is a topic waiting to become one.

This matters practically because many writers treat the identification of a subject as the identification of a piece. They have something they want to write about — revision, memory, the internet, solitude — and they begin writing towards it, assuming that the piece will find its argument in the process. Sometimes it does. More often, the piece that begins without an argument produces a draft that covers the subject without saying anything about it — competent, sometimes interesting, but ultimately without the point that would make it worth reading.

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Writing and Solitude

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Writing and solitude are connected in ways that are easy to state and harder to live with. The connection is not simply practical — that writing requires uninterrupted time, which is more available alone than in company. It is something closer to structural: writing requires a particular relationship with one’s own thinking that company, however welcome, tends to interrupt.

This is worth examining because the relationship between writing and solitude is often discussed only at the level of logistics — finding time, finding a quiet room, protecting a writing schedule from interruption. These are real concerns, but they are not the whole of what solitude does for writing. The deeper connection is about what solitude makes possible in the mind, not just in the schedule.

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What Makes a Piece of Writing Stay With You

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What makes writing memorable is not always what makes it good. A piece can be well-constructed, accurately argued, and carefully written without leaving any trace in the reader’s mind after the reading is done. And a piece can be flawed in identifiable ways — overlong, imperfectly structured, occasionally overwritten — and still stay with the reader for years. The qualities that produce staying power are not identical to the qualities that produce quality, though they often overlap.

This is worth examining because writers tend to optimise for quality — for accuracy, clarity, and craft — without thinking explicitly about what makes a piece linger. And the piece that lingers is, in a practical sense, the piece that has done the most work. It has changed something in the reader’s thinking that persists beyond the reading.

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The Ethics of Writing About Real People

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Writing about real people is one of the oldest practices in literature and one of the least examined in terms of its ethics. Memoir, personal essay, journalism, biography, and much of the best narrative nonfiction depend on it. The writer who has lived a life has encountered real people, and those people are often essential to the stories worth telling. The question is not whether to write about them but how — and what obligations the act of writing creates.

These obligations are not primarily legal, though legal considerations exist. They are ethical: questions of fairness, accuracy, consent, and the power differential that exists between the writer, who controls the representation, and the subject, who does not.

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Writing and Memory

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Writing and memory are entangled in ways that are not always obvious. The most visible entanglement is the one where memory supplies the material — the writer drawing on what they have lived, observed, and retained to produce work that is grounded in experience rather than abstraction. This is real, and it matters. But it is not the most interesting thing that happens between writing and memory.

The more interesting thing is what writing does to memory. A writer who commits an experience to the page does not simply record it. They shape it — selecting what to include, deciding what order events occurred in, choosing which detail carries the meaning. And in shaping it, they change it. The written version of an experience gradually displaces the unwritten one, until the memory of the experience and the memory of the piece become difficult to distinguish.

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The Writer Who Stops

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When a writer stops writing, the stopping is rarely announced. There is no decision, no moment of closure. The writing simply becomes less frequent, then occasional, then absent — and the writer who has not written for three months looks back and cannot identify the point at which they stopped. It happened gradually, and then it was a fact.

This is different from writer’s block, which is usually discussed as an inability to write — the blank page that resists, the sentence that will not come. The writer who stops is not blocked in that sense. They could write. The capacity is there. But the writing does not happen, and the reasons it does not happen are worth examining, because they are not always what they appear to be.

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What It Means to Write Slowly

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Writing slowly is not the same as writing less. It is not a productivity position — a rejection of output targets or word count goals. It is a description of a particular relationship between the writer and the work: one in which the writing is given the time it actually needs, rather than the time available before the next deadline.

This distinction matters because the pressure to write quickly is not only external. Writers internalise it. The habit of producing at speed — of moving from brief to draft to published without the pauses that thinking requires — becomes a way of working that eventually becomes a way of writing. The fast writer produces fast writing: prose that is competent and complete but has not been given time to become what it might have been.

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The Problem with Writing Advice

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Writing advice is everywhere, and most of it is correct. Write every day. Read widely. Cut what you don’t need. Know your audience. Show don’t tell. Find your voice. These are not wrong. Applied at the right moment, by the right writer, to the right piece, most standard writing advice will improve the work.

The problem with writing advice is not that it is incorrect. It is that it is decontextualised — offered as universal principle when it is almost always specific to a particular kind of writing, a particular stage of development, or a particular problem the advice-giver happened to have. Advice that solved one writer’s problem becomes a rule. The rule gets repeated until it feels like truth. And the writer who follows it faithfully, in a context where it does not apply, produces work that is worse for having followed it.

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Writing Without an Audience in Mind

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Most writing advice assumes an audience. Define your reader, the advice goes. Know who you are writing for. Understand what they need, what they already know, what they want to feel when they finish. This is sound advice for most professional writing, and following it produces work that is clear, purposeful, and appropriately pitched.

It is also, for certain kinds of writing, a way of not writing at all.

The essay that is conceived entirely in terms of its audience tends to produce a particular kind of writing — competent, oriented, reader-friendly, and slightly hollow. The writer who asks, at every stage, what the reader needs, is not asking what they actually think. The two questions are different, and they produce different writing. One produces a service. The other produces a piece of work.

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