Recently, I abandoned the pipe dream of writing a book for commercial success. Now I focus on creating worthwhile content, commercial viability be damned. My fascination with many subjects but long-term attraction to few makes me a generalist in a world obsessed with specialization.
My writing life is inundated constantly by mental snapshots, slowly morphing into a slideshow of potential genius that reads more like a dreadful PowerPoint presentation. My notebooks brim with half-finished metaphors and archival oddities, including phrases and passages that feel brilliant in isolation but refuse to anchor a page. I’m learning that the weight of the words isn’t found in what’s clever, but in what’s chosen and how it’s deployed.
In my early writings, I mimicked the masters without developing a truly unique voice. Honestly, trying to sound brilliant all the time is a drag, yet aiming for simplicity feels like self-sabotage. I used to mistake friction for failure. When readers miss my point or push back, I retreat into isolation, convincing myself I’m simply out of step. But writing doesn’t require consensus. It requires honesty. I’m slowly learning to trust the process over the reaction. But the worst part is when there’s no reaction at all, and since I left social media, the only feedback I get is usually complete silence.
In the past, some readers have told me my prose resonates with them, even as I suspect it’s doing too much performing and not enough showing who I really am in between the lines. I want clarity, but simplicity feels like dilution; complexity feels like armor. The gap between how my words land and how they feel in my head is where I’m learning to live as a writer. But when I speak, the challenge is even more frustrating. I often say the opposite of what I mean or something completely different. My habit of rambling in speech sometimes infects my writing, especially when I use speech-to-text apps, but poring over even these notes often reveals accidental gems.
For all my faltering, my words still feel inadequate. This sense of inadequacy has kept me from publishing the vast majority of my essays and musings. But I’ve come to realize that the weight of the words can’t be measured by immediate reception or even by sheer accumulation. The words I’ve written are only the starting point. They must continue to build on one another, not stand in isolation from those that came before them. Writing is all about letting the work gather mass until it can stand on its own. For now, that means trusting the accumulation as necessary groundwork for my best writing to emerge.
People aren’t as dumb as they think, but convincing anyone of their own depth is a fool’s errand. Humans will always default to noise, even if it’s nonsense. If I’m good at anything, it’s trusting my own slow accumulation of material over what’s loud and immediate. If I’m successful at anything, it’s being unconventional. I need to write with more conviction, not because I’ve solved the inadequacy, but because I finally understand that weight isn’t a quality of a handful of sentences people like to quote from you. The weight of the words comes from continually showing up long enough for the work to outgrow you.
~ Amelia Desertsong, October 25, 2024
