What I Have Learned About Writing

But first, you must abandon.

If you want to write, you must be willing to abandon. To turn yourself inside out.

Writing is a wonderful companion, but she is not always a gentle one. It is in her nature to reveal the truth about the world, the truth about people, whether in poetry or fiction or essays or even a journal entry, and for you to listen with your pen poised to what she is saying.

You must write

This is a simple one. If you want to be a writer, you must write.

Every writer is different, but the thread that ties all of us together is the sheer act of it. Of opening our bellies, letting the work spill out.

Otherwise, writing makes herself quite available, and you might be surprised where you could find her. Some of the best writing I’ve read hasn’t been on the shelf of Barnes and Noble or the New York Times Bestseller list, but rather from the mouth of Eva at my local senior center, pink dress draped across her legs as her hands shake with passion. Or from Jesse, as he paints a world unseen and unknown as clear as ink in my mind’s eye. Or Doug, all the faux paws of the human condition slipping through his writing that seem to grab my heart in its hands and shake me. Or my dad, typing poems on his typewriter and ripping them out for me to keep.

She can be found in the Notes App, the back of a half-used napkin, a wrapper of gum, a grocery list. East of Eden is one of my favorite books, but you don’t always need to crack open Steinbeck in order to read good writing. Sometimes, it’s closer to home than you might think.

It is worth repeating: in order to be a writer, you must write.

Every day, or every other day, even if it’s for five minutes in your notes app. It will be bad, and then it will be worse, and then it will probably be the worst it could ever be, and then one day you’ll wake up with the most beautiful sentence on your mind, words spelled out like they've always been there. Like an archeologist digging through dirt to find treasure, so you must dig through all of the bad to find the good.

One note here before I move on. The bad writing isn’t worthless. Someone explained it to me once like composting vegetables. Even the worst of our work is fertilizer for the soil. Nothing is wasted.

No writer is ever poor.

She has pen and paper enough to create a wealth of her own. When writing Persuasion, Jane Austen was unmarried and in declining health while taking care of her sick brother in London, but she was rich enough to write a world for herself.

The list goes on. If you can write, you can create, and if you can create, you can be rich in words. So let yourself be rich.

It must come from the belly.

It is all from the belly.

If you write from anywhere else, you might find yourself less than satisfied at the result, at the lack of rawness, realness. But when you learn to reach deep inside your gut and lift out some lump from the blackness, that’s where the best writing lives.

Solitude isn’t always the most conducive.

When I first began to take writing seriously, I picked up a dozen books on the subject and tore through them all. Nearly each one said something similar: write with the door closed, house quiet.

It is some of the best advice I’ve followed, but it’s also rarely true that inspiration strikes in a closed room, or that you can even find a quiet room. The world is full of noise.

For me, inspiration strikes underneath the cypress tree of my local running trail. It strikes as I am sitting on the train, watching time move backwards, or as my mother hands my father his coat, as she stands on the porch to wave goodbye. There are all sorts of tricks the imagination can play, but if you do not live and experience life, and by this I mean the simplest of its pleasures (the sunrise at 5:37 am, the feeling of a dragonfly on your finger, your neighbor’s crooked teeth when he smiles), then you may come up dry.

Solitude for the sake of focus and productivity is a necessity for many (including me), but having the door closed on life and expecting its magic to spill up from my belly isn’t how this fine companion visits. To be clear, you don’t have to go on some grand adventure before writing a sentence, but it is important to stop and look out the window, notice how the farthest tree looks so small, is shaking so violently in the morning light, how the birds swoop in your front yard diving for beetles and worms. That’s where writing can be found, hidden in the grass too.

In a similar vein, inspiration is hardly ever convenient. You may be driving on the highway when an idea comes to you, and what else can you do but open your phone and record a voice memo so you don’t forget? In the middle of a client call; talking to your boss at work; right as you are drifting to sleep.

To not be distracted, however, is important. By a phone call, by a conversation, by someone wanting your attention. Mary Oliver called it her third self, the one who sits at her desk to write and then gets up to answer the door, tearing her away from the act of it. For Mary, it was her desk by the window that was most conducive, but for Natalie Goldberg, it’s the restaurants and local cafes that allow the perfect space for the imperfections of writing.

And so, keep distractions out and let life in. There are no rules. Everyone is different. There is only the mind’s stubborn patterns of being, its inclination to lean toward that which is most exciting. There is only the hand’s eager grip on the pen, writing too quickly that which excites it.

She will likely find you, even if you abandon her.

It’s in my nature to write. In fourth grade, we took a trip. I do not even remember where we were going, but I do remember sitting near the front of the bus next to an older girl and filling a spiral notebook with a story I had made up. It was exactly the kind of story you’d expect, a girl-finds-a-dragon-egg-on-her-walk-home-from-school type of story, but it was the first hint that writing was making herself a friend to me.

But what practical kid grows up thinking I’m going to be a writer! Not I. Instead it was teacher, then dentist, then SEO content writer (okay, we’re kind of back), then manager, then director of operations at a boutique marketing agency, and now here I am typing on Substack hoping to forsake all other titles for this one.

Somehow, it didn’t hit me until a year or two ago that I am a writer. Despite entering more poetry contests than I can count and scribbling short stories on any surface I could find, despite have a notes folder full of “Book Ideas”, each beat structured out, despite writing an entire novel in a handful of months (one which may have died while querying, or maybe just needs a rewrite), I haven’t thought of myself as a writer until recently, after taking more than six months off writing entirely and planning to never pick up a pen again. Funny how she comes back to me, sliding her fingers between mine as if no time has passed at all.

That’s quite dramatic, but in November of ‘24 I had a surgery, the recovery from which was much harder than anticipated. While rushing the healing process, I started a new job while still working my old job, working ~60 hours a week and pushing myself too hard physically. Writing was the easiest thing to abandon, but she didn’t abandon me.

And I’m glad for it, for waking up with her sitting on my pillow, following her as she leads me down the stairs to my computer. Cup of coffee in one hand, hers in the other, if this is all I do for the rest of my life, my list of complaints will be very short indeed.

The last lesson is short: I don’t know anything.

If you want to really learn what it is to write, what it means to fold yourself inside out and lay your hand on the page, open a book. See for yourself.