Write for Yourself (And Other Lies)
Here is the cycle. It happens every time. I hit save on the final draft. Maybe it’s 2:14 AM on a Tuesday. Maybe it’s noon on a Sunday. The timestamp changes. The feeling doesn’t.
I pace the kitchen. My skin feels tight. I just finished ninety pages where the protagonist drowns…twice. I drink coffee. I stare out the window at the empty street.
Then the sun comes up. The manuscript is just a file on my desktop. 450KB. I go to the grocery store. I stand in the cereal aisle. I want to shake the guy buying Bran Flakes. I want to tell him I just killed a man in Chapter 9. He just wants fiber. The checkout clerk asks if I want a receipt. I say no.
The doubt always moves in. Give it three days. I open the file. The words look flat. The jokes fall apart. The horror feels cheap. The document is just pixels on a screen. I don’t need a mirror. I need a witness. I need someone to look at the blood on the page and tell me it is red.
We tell new writers to “write for yourself.”
It sounds noble, but it’s mostly nonsense.
Writing for yourself is great for diaries. It’s great for the first draft. It gets you through the messy middle where the plot holes live. But “writing for yourself” is a closed circuit. You send the signal out, it hits the wall of your own skull, and it bounces back. Eventually the signal degrades. You can’t be the creator and the audience at the same time. You know how the trick works. You can see the wires.
The silence that can follow a finished project isn’t peaceful. It’s a vacuum. In that vacuum, your brain starts to eat itself. You wonder if you wasted six months. You wonder if the emotion you felt in Chapter 4 is actually on the page or if it stayed in your head.
You don’t need an award. You don’t need a viral tweet.
You need a Katherine Harrison.
You need the Goodreads notification that pops up when you aren’t looking. You read the words. She doesn’t just say “good job.” She calls it “Black Mirror fed through a poetry machine.” That feels good. But then she lands the heavy hit. She writes: “we’re already halfway to these futures, and we signed the user agreement without reading it.”
She got it! She saw it on the page!
The circuit closes. The light turns on.
That feeling isn’t vanity, it’s proof of life. It’s the realization that the thing you built actually exists. It landed. You aren’t crazy.
Wanting that validation doesn’t make you weak. It makes you a writer. We don’t write to talk to ourselves. We write to be heard. It is okay to admit you need someone to listen.
The work isn’t done when you type the last period. It’s done when someone else reads it.
I’m going to hit publish on this. Then I’m going to pace the kitchen. By Thursday I’ll be refreshing the stats page wondering if anyone got it.
The cycle doesn’t stop just because you name it.
Miles to go…