write whatever you want

as long as you'd want to read it

I sat down to write a new post today titled, “do i actually care about anything?,” which tells me that the herbs I take for depression are not working. I scrapped the idea (too miserable) and sifted through my drafts: fifteen near-complete entries I am already bored by. I’ve resolved their emotional questions, making them lifeless to me. I closed my laptop and fell into a rabbit hole of self-inquiry—do I even want to keep writing this Substack? Am I supposed to just do whatever it takes to keep up my weekly posting schedule, even if I don’t feel passionate about what I’m posting? Am I basically just a fucking content creator at this point?

But then I took a breath.

And I remembered I can write whatever I want.

When I remember I can write whatever I want, suddenly the thought of sitting at my computer isn’t draining. It becomes a space for play. I am led to reflect: what do I want to write about? What brings me pleasure? What would delight me?

Keeping up a Substack is lowkey hard. Writing a novel is (highkey) hard. I’ve been thinking about how, in order to sustain either, you have to be so tremendously interested in what you have to say.

I’m revising a novel that digs deep into some of my favorite themes: longing, fantasy, sex, aging, self-discovery. Also: digicore. I feel very strongly that nobody could write this book but me. That’s because it’s specifically tailored to explore the exact things I love. It’s voicey, it’s musey, because that’s how I like to write. At times it’s erotic and (in my opinion lol) funny, because I need it to be! I’m going to be with this project for years! I need it to keep me entertained!

You might be thinking it’s a bad idea to write a literary novel about a subgenre of music familiar only to chronically online teenagers with clinically recognized anxiety disorders. You might be right! But I’m betting (praying) that you’re wrong. Because I think when we write about something we love, that energy of pleasure, of fun comes through, whether or not the audience loves that specific thing too.

woman in a prairie dress who loves 100 gecs

When I started taking writing seriously, I realized I needed to refuse to make work that bores me. If I value anything at all over my own interests, I’m never going to finish anything. I need to be eager to come back to the page. This doesn’t happen every day, but honestly, when drafting my novel, it usually did. I wanted to keep writing because I wanted to know what would happen next.

Same with this Substack. Yes, I think about deleting it pretty much every week, lol. But that’s only when I start to fuse my Self with my ideas of how others perceive me. I truly believe that the reason I’ve been able to write dear diary every week for nearly a year is because I write what delights me. Even when I write about something emotionally challenging I gain some kind of pleasure from it, because I am satisfying a deeper exploration of something important to me.

I was in a workshop once when a student asked how we can tell when our own writing is good. I empathized; I, too, have tried to crack this code. I’ve assumed the answer lies within a standard of measures decided by an outside person or institution. I’ve attempted to read my work through the eyes of another, someone Worthy and Important who might confirm, once and for all, that I am a “good” writer.

But then the answer to her question came to me very clearly. It’s not about anyone else’s eyes at all.

I know my writing is good when I want to read it.

Would you subscribe to your own Substack? Would you buy your own book? I think that’s what we need to be asking ourselves. If you can’t finish your draft or you haven’t stuck to your Substack posting schedule, I wonder if your answer to these questions might be no. I mean, I don’t know! But it’s worth asking! And for those of you who, like me, are writers without an agent, I think it might be especially important for us to just write what we love, because I don’t know, maybe we’ll never get agents! Maybe we’ll never publish! And if that’s the case, I want to know that at the end of the day, I have a final product that I can print out and genuinely enjoy reading. I want to write something that makes me forget my phone exists. I want to write something that teaches me about myself, that entertains all my personal hyperfixations, that makes me feel something.

I think we can get hung up on what we think people want from us, or what we want to project. Like, here I am on Substack, but maybe I want you to know that I am not a content creator, I’m a writer, and I don’t just write diary entries, I also write literary fiction and actually I even read translated literature and actually, also, I even take it quite seriously (this is all hypothetical). I could publish something I might call an “essay” and I might replace words with their fancier counterparts and I might frame it all within a metaphor about like, the tree in my backyard, but I’d be trying to prove something. Because, personally, that’s really just not me. It might be a good essay! But I’d be bored reading it, even though I wrote it.

If I write what I want to read, it’s never boring to me. This pleasure, this delight!, lures me back to my novel, back to my Substack. It returns me to my why.

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+ Reading: Since I last gave a reading update, I finished Intermezzo by Sally Rooney (it’s good, sorry), and I also read Old Enough by Haley Jakobson (there was a nonbinary love interest!), Margo’s Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe (listened on audio—did you know Spotify Premium includes audiobooks? This was v fun), and The Ravishing of Lol Stein by Marguerite Duras (I want to say ‘kinda gagged by this one’ but i need a youth to confirm that i’m using that word right. What I mean is that I was astonished). Currently reading Soft Core by Brittany Newell. I’m at the part where the protagonist becomes a dominatrix. See?? We’re having fun over here.

+Writing: I’ve been reworking my third chapter and generally taking pleasure in it! I had maybe only one meltdown that sounded something like: oh my God, this is going to take forever, this is going to be so much work, I’m not going to be able to query until 2028, why am i doing this, can I just watch summer house, what’s the point of anything. Then I literally just kept writing. lol. That’s how we do it, you guys.