What I Had to Unlearn to Keep Writing

For a long time, I believed the stories I was told about how a writing career is supposed to work. If you’ve got the goods, the right people will notice. If you’re patient enough, the gate will open. Just keep your head down and do the work; the system will reward merit.

What experience has taught me is that none of those ideas survive contact with reality. The fables persist because they’re comforting. They absolve institutions of responsibility and keep creators compliant. At the same time, they turn delay into virtue and silence into discipline.

Most of all, they keep you waiting. I waited longer than I should have. Which forced me to unlearn the outmoded conventional writing wisdom.

The hardest lesson was not learning how to write better. It was learning to stop outsourcing permission. Whenever my career stalled, it did so because I was trying to be selected instead of letting the people who pay the bills choose.

Being picked feels prestigious. Offeing other people choices feels risky. One flatters the ego; the other means being held to account.

But the moment you stop chasing approval, the whole situation snaps into focus. You begin to see which of your effots work because readers return; not because some gatekeeper nodded. You learn which arguments land because they spark replies, not because they conform.

And sometimes, you discover that your gut was right all along, but you ignored it while you tried to sound acceptable.

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