This is the second post in my series of daily posts for the month of April. To get the best of my writing in your inbox, you can subscribe to my Substack.

It’s quite late in the night, but I feel excited about the fact that I’m actually writing and publishing something for the second day in a row. I have a feeling that many of these posts will be about writing itself, which I’m always hesitant to talk about, because I have an implicit belief that writing about writing is boring and self-indulgent.

And I actually do believe it’s true: only writing about writing would be very boring. But it just so happens that at this particular time in my life, I’m thinking a lot about writing itself, and so it makes sense that I’ll be doing that mildly annoying meta thing for a little bit. (Don’t worry, we’ll be back to the regularly scheduled programming of talking about feelings and philosophy and neuroscience soon.)

The best thing I can do to help myself write well is to be honest. To actually say what I’m thinking, not what I think I should be thinking. I expend an inordinate amount of energy trying to figure out what I “should” say, based on some external objective, like “being interesting”, or “capturing the reader’s attention and holding it for the duration of a piece”, or “seeming like a smart person”. Rather than just saying what I feel like saying, I try to figure out what would be the most stimulating and eye-grabbing and viral thing to say. And I also try to figure out how to say it in such a way that it sounds nice and lyrical, so that it grabs your mind and tugs it along this wild rhythmic syncopated journey.

But it’s so much easier when I just say the words exactly as they arise in my mind. It’s easier, and I think in most cases (I want to believe that it’s all cases), it actually sounds better lol. It feels really awful when I’m trying to police every single word as it comes out, to discern whether I’m putting it well, whether I’m using a tantalizing metaphor, or an adjective that makes someone’s eyes perk up like “woah, that sounds cool, what does that word even mean?”

The problem is that unabashed honesty has a cost to it. Can I tell you literally everything that’s on my mind right now? Part of me wants to say “yes! say it all! put it all out there, all the cards on the table, total creative freedom, utter vulnerability, we’re all gonna die anyway so.” But there is this other part that says: there are goddamn consequences to saying things in public. Sure, in my private little journal, I do say whatever I want, because I know that I’ll be the only person who ever reads it.1 But a public blog is not a private journal.

All of this begs the question of how to be honest, what to be honest about. And as an exercise in honesty, let me tell you that I have absolutely no idea. This is the single greatest struggle I have as a writer. There are so many things I could be telling you about, some of which I feel comfortable sharing, some of which I feel uncomfortable sharing, and I don’t know how to choose. (And I do know that only sharing what I feel totally comfortable sharing is a recipe for putting out a bunch of half-hearted bleh.)

I have to be honest about the things that most call to me. The more honest I can be about the things I care about, the freer I will be, and the freer I am the better my writing will be. I have to be honest with you about how badly I want certain things: like more intimacy and connection with the people around me, and a clearer understanding of wtf this shared reality of ours is, and a sense of validation from the people I idolize even as I try to remember they’re just some guy. I have to be honest about how badly I want some kind of message from the aether telling me that all of this toil and self-doubt and curiosity and anxiety means something or is leading somewhere, while also maintaining conviction that wherever this goes I will be one hundred percent okay.

I don’t want to share all the struggles I have with writing because I want it to look like it’s effortless, like I have my shit together. But anyone who has actually tried this knows how obviously untrue that is, how the moments of effortless flow are so often interrupted by gruelling agony. I don’t want to glorify the struggle for its own sake, I don’t want to romanticize misery, but I also don’t want to cower from acknowledging how difficult it is to do something creative, and try to do it well. I want to tell you the truth, for your own sake and for mine.

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  1. Note that even the words in my journal don’t count as total transparency, because there are things in my mind that I would prefer not to say, even just to myself. There are shimmering vibratory patterns of energy in my subconscious that could conceivably be formed as words, but which I prefer to keep as an unverbalized buzz, fenced off from the arena of my inner monologue. Everyone has such vibrations. ↩︎