Category: On Writing

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

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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What Finishing a Piece Actually Feels Like

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Finishing a piece of writing is not what the productivity literature suggests it will be. The advice — celebrate your wins, acknowledge the achievement, feel proud of what you’ve done — assumes that finishing produces a clear positive emotion that needs to be recognised and reinforced. Sometimes it does. More often, the experience of finishing is more complicated than that, and the complication is worth paying attention to.

The most common feeling at the end of a piece, in my experience, is not satisfaction. It is something closer to deflation — a sudden absence of the pressure that the unfinished piece had been exerting. The piece was taking up space: in the mind during other activities, in the early hours of the morning, in the gap between one task and the next. When it is done, that space empties. The relief is real, but so is the strangeness of the empty space.

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The Writer Who Reads

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Reading and writing are discussed as related activities, which they are, but the nature of the relationship is less often examined. The standard advice, read widely, read in your genre, read the writers you admire, is correct as far as it goes. It does not go very far. What reading actually does to a writer, and how it does it, is a more interesting question than the advice suggests.

The most direct effect of reading is the least interesting: vocabulary, exposure to sentence structures, familiarity with how different kinds of prose move. These accumulate passively. A writer who reads enough will absorb a working knowledge of how language can be arranged without consciously studying it. This is real and useful, but it is also the minimum. It is what reading does for any attentive person, writer or not.

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The First Draft Problem

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The first draft has a problem that most writing advice obscures: it is not a draft of the piece. It is a draft of the thinking. And thinking, in its early stages, is neither coherent nor presentable. It circles, qualifies, contradicts itself, arrives at the wrong place, and occasionally surprises the writer by going somewhere better than intended.

This is not a malfunction of the first draft. It is the first draft doing exactly what it is supposed to do. The problem arises when writers mistake the first draft for something it is not — for a preliminary version of the final piece, which will be corrected into shape. A preliminary version of the final piece would only require editing. What most first drafts actually require is a reckoning.

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The Difference Between a Voice and a Style

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Voice and style in writing are often treated as the same thing, or used interchangeably, in ways that blur a distinction worth keeping clear. They are related — a writer’s voice and their style are not entirely separable — but they are different in kind, and the difference matters practically.

Style is the set of choices a writer makes: sentence length, vocabulary, the presence or absence of metaphor, the density of the prose, the relationship between clauses. Style is, to a significant degree, learnable and transferable. A writer can adopt a style, adapt it to different contexts, and move between styles depending on what a piece requires. A journalist writing a feature article and a technical writer explaining a process may both write well, in very different styles, without their style being in any meaningful sense their own.

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