It’s a beautiful thing to recognize your preferred avenues of expression as a writer. Every single writer—or artist, if we’re going to expand this conversation the way it deserves—is different. This isn’t meant to be a a dogmatic rule-of-all-things, but it should be treated as a guardrail of infinite potential.
A Substacker will publish a 15,000-word article about how we all need to take things slow, and think differently, and pace ourselves, while clipping some interview with Donna Tartt that somehow “proves” beyond a shadow of a doubt that her way is the only way, and you convince yourself that’s the Way to Write, when you know deep within yourself that you rebel against that philosophy, but you’re so torn between a dozen different pieces of advice, opinions, and straight-up bullshit that you don’t know where to look anymore. On the other side the digital neighborhood, another Substacker will preach the exact opposite. Then somewhere else, carving down the middle of the faux-editorial backwash we’re spoonfed on a daily basis—regardless of where you are, because Substack is yet another social platform among a sea of social platforms, and anyone who denies that simply haven’t stepped out of their own delusion—is a writer who only knows how to sell solutions to problems they’re somehow comfortable writing about for the rest of their lives.
Don’t know about you, but I find the fate of the Substack course-sellers to be the most tragic. Could you imagine only writing about one educational/semi-helpful guru thing for the rest of your life? How boring. Anything that comes with teaching others in such a literal, step-by-step, dated way makes me want to rip random pieces of paper apart and set them aflame. I have a hard time believing these people actually enjoy what they’re doing. Maybe they do, but that’s likely because of the cash flow, and not because they’re passionate about creating article after article after article about the same, overblown, hyperbolic “HERE’S HOW TO MAKE OODLES OF MONEY WRITING THIS VERY SPECIFIC AND OVER-NICHED WAY” messaging. Or maybe they are. I guess judging these people is really blind of me, so I won’t try to push on that too much. But I will express my skepticism, as a writer who tried to do that once, in her own way, in a way that was genuinely helpful, only to find nothing but pain and misery and impatience and disgust and frustration and a complete lack of fulfillment that bled me fucking dry.
Every one of these writers—no matter who they are—on Substack seem to be building their identities and rhythms of publishing on glorified temper tantrums built on personal insecurities, and not truly thinking about the reader beyond the algorithm.
Don’t do this. Don’t do that. Write like this person. Don’t write like this person. Write six pages a day like Stephen King. Take years to publish one book like Donna Tart. Write magic systems like Brandon Sanderson. Go in blind like Pierce Brown. This is the best writer of all time. No, THIS is the best writer of all time. My mistake, actually, this is the worst writer of all time. My bad. So why are you following their example, again? Oh, because you’ve forgotten to think for yourself? That sounds familiar. Never mind, why are you not following them?I just told you they’re the best! Your writing voice can only be discovered if you follow Sylvia Plath’s writing routine, of course. No, scratch that. Virgina Woolf’s! No, actually, you need to think and write and be exactly someone else in order to embody a style you can only call yours… wait…
See the problem?
If you don’t, I’m gravely concerned for you.
I’m not going to be completely hypocritical here and boss you around with some fake nonsense about how your life is going to remain stupid and fickle and pathetic if you don’t follow my advice. But I will be brutally honest about how thinking and writing only for myself—in my way, on my time, and without any interference from the outside world—completely transformed my relationship with writing. Not in weeks. Not in months. Not in years. In days.
Do you understand that no one—literally no one—can write like you?
This is beyond perspective, and experience. This is beyond taste, and palate, and vision. While those things are exceptionally important—especially now, when most people are so disconnected from their own individual creative expression that they have a hard time seeing themselves among the drivel—they’re not what makes a writer who’s words are worth reading.
This is about creating and sculpting language in only the way you see, feel, and interact with words.
How you envision stories and thoughts and ideas and people and themes and loves and hates and messages and concepts and abstracts and literals taking shape through letters. Syntax. Patterns. Rhythm. The breathing in-between specific words. Syllables. You can feel it in how I write, maybe. Without editing, I write in many run-on sentences. If I’m aware, I will shorten them. Clip them. Add musicality and unexpected ideas in ways I like to do. Because the actual wordplay is a massive part of the expression for me. Whether I’m writing essays, or a quick thought to share on LinkedIn or Substack, or a piece of fiction gathering recognition and embodying a soul of its own in my computer’s veins.
As a writer, your relationship with words is sacred. It’s not something you can learn from someone else. I know this goes against so many teachings from phenomenally talented writers. But I don’t really care.
My job is not to tell you how to write.
It’s my responsibility—as a fellow writer on a never-ending journey of personal self-creation and writing writing writing—to encourage you to look deep within yourself, and take stock of what inspires you. What makes you move, and think, and create a certain why. What drives you to erase a sentence someone else would keep. What pushes you to think beyond the scope of the page, and what pulls you back. What weaknesses you possess that could be someone else’s grandest strength, and vice-versa. What makes you The Only Writer of Your Kind.
I hate quizzes, courses, exercises, templates, all that schlock. I absolutely despise the growing insecurity bred among people who just never understood or learned how to write for themselves, first, and so have to work backwards from pleasing the public (their mentors included) instead of discovering what sets their hearts and souls ablaze.
There is no point in writing anything if you’re only going to write like every other person before you.
Your voice has to come from a place that is uncopyable. Unidentifiable. Unique beyond any other thing you’ve come to see. Over-studying, over-editing, and over-learning from the examples of other writers will bog down your individual perspective and make you yet another template among the shopping mall of writers who could’ve been better than they are.
So, I encourage you, once again, to stop looking for inspiration from others.
Only you can decide how to write.
— Taylor Barnes.
You do so very well.