Category: On Writing

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

What It Means to Write in Public

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Writing in public is not the same as publishing. Publishing is a technical act — a piece moves from private to visible, from draft to live. Writing in public is something more considered than that. It is the decision to think on the page in a way that others can see, and to stand behind that thinking as your own.

The distinction matters because it changes what writing is for. A piece written purely for publication — shaped around what will perform, what will be shared, what will attract the right kind of attention — is oriented towards reception. A piece written in public is oriented towards truth. Not absolute truth, but the writer’s honest attempt to say what they actually think, knowing that the attempt is visible and will be judged.

These two orientations produce different kinds of writing. And increasingly, the first has come to dominate.

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Writing for Search Without Writing for Algorithms

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Writing for search does not require writing for algorithms. This is one of the more useful distinctions a working writer can make, because it frees you from a false choice that most SEO advice presents: optimise or don’t optimise, be findable or be good. The choice is not that stark, and the framework below is built on the premise that it doesn’t have to be.

The goal of writing for search is to help the right reader find a piece that genuinely serves them. That is also the goal of good writing. The two objectives are not in conflict. They become conflated only when optimisation is pursued as an end in itself rather than as a means of connection.

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The Economics of Literary Prestige

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Literary prestige is a strange economy. It operates by its own rules, distributes its rewards unevenly and sometimes arbitrarily, and maintains its value partly through the mystification of how it is assigned. Like all prestige economies, it is most powerful over those who believe in it most — and most writers, at some point in their working lives, believe in it considerably.

This is worth examining not to dismiss prestige as meaningless — it is not meaningless — but to understand what it actually is, how it is produced, and what it costs the writers who pursue it.

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The Loneliness of the Working Writer

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The lonely writer is one of literature’s most persistent figures. We know the image well — the solitary figure at a desk, the lamp burning late, the world outside continuing without them. It carries a certain romance, and like most romantic images, it contains just enough truth to obscure something more complicated.

Writing is solitary work. That much is simply true. The actual act of writing — the construction of sentences, the working out of an argument, the finding of the right word — cannot be done in committee. It requires a quality of attention that other people interrupt, and most writers, if they are honest, guard their working solitude carefully. This is not antisocial behaviour. It is a professional requirement.

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Writing as Discovery — I Don’t Write Because I Know

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Writing as discovery is not a technique. It is not a method you choose, the way you might choose a structure or a style. It is something you either trust or you don’t — and most writers, at least early in their practice, don’t.

I used to assume that writing required certainty. That before I sat down to begin, I should already know what I believed, what I wanted to say, and where the argument would land. The page, I thought, was for articulation, not discovery. You worked out the thinking first, and then you wrote it down.

Experience has taught me otherwise.

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Why Some Writers Hide Behind Projects

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Some writers hide behind unfinished projects so effectively that neither they nor anyone around them notices it happening. Ask them what they are doing and the answer comes readily — a novel, a series of essays, a long project that has been underway for some time and is coming along, slowly, but coming along. They speak about their work with the fluency of someone genuinely engaged. They have thought carefully about what they are making. They can describe it in detail.

What they cannot do, or will not do, is finish it.

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The Myth of Inspiration — On Waiting to Write

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The myth of inspiration is one most writers accept without question. Ask someone why they haven’t written the thing they want to write, and the answer comes quickly: they haven’t been inspired yet.

They’re waiting. For the right moment, the right mood, the right convergence of energy and idea that will carry them through a blank page and out the other side with something worth keeping. They believe this convergence will arrive eventually, and that when it does, the writing will come easily — fluently, almost effortlessly, the way it looks from the outside when a writer describes their process in an interview.

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The Difference Between Publishing and Writing

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There is a moment most writers recognise, even if they rarely name it. It sits at the heart of the difference between publishing and writing — though we rarely separate the two. You finish something, a piece you have worked over carefully, and almost immediately the question arrives: where will this go?

Not: is it good? Not: does it say what I meant? But: where will it go, and who will see it?

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When Good Writing Is Mistaken for AI

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There is a quiet unease moving through the writing world — not loud enough to trend, but persistent enough to change how people work.

Writers are being told, implicitly and explicitly, that the very things they have spent years learning to do well are now suspicious. Clear structure. Balanced sentences. Consistent tone. Familiar punctuation. Even the em dash — long a mark of conversational precision — is increasingly treated as a red flag.

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What I Don’t Do When I Write for the Internet

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Most advice about writing for the internet focuses on what to add: more keywords, more structure, more optimisation, more output.

Over time, I’ve found the opposite to be more useful.

This post is not about technique. It’s about restraint — the decisions I consciously don’t make when I write for the internet, even when they might promise faster results.

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