Stop trying to squeeze your writing into current trends, and for fuck sake stop trying to predict the next ones. Maybe you were meant for fame—moderate to grand, or maybe you were meant for obscurity, or any of the valences in between. It really doesn’t matter. Write because you can’t help it, because it’s a haunted house you keep volunteering to go back into. On a long enough timeline, we all fade away. Trust that your words will find their readers.
If you’re waiting to feel inspired, you’ll be waiting for a long time.
Write in the notes app while crying. Scribble in a physical book. Bang away on your poor keyboard. Write on the fucking walls, literally (there’s a reason all kids feel the compulsion to do this). Write in a meeting. Write when you’re tired, bored, deeply unlovable. Write sentences you don’t understand yet.
Drafts aren’t precious. Your neuroses are not sacred. No one cares about your perfection. They’ll care though about what if anything you made them feel.
Why do you think you need to get published by a certain date or age or arbitrary deadline? Time is obsolete in the face of art. When it comes to literary ambition, at the core of it, all that should matter to you is your craft. The rest, as they say, goes with god.
All your favourites wrote absolute trash at some point. You’re not special, nor above revision.
Write badly. Read good books. Write a little better. Read better books. Keep going.
What the hell are you doing reading so much writing about writing (yes, including this right here)? Go engage with some real literature, enter the worlds, stop trying to decode what works and reverse-engineer it or some such, just live inside those books for a while, and then get to work.
You’ll never write like anyone else, thank God.
"No matter, try again. Fail again. Fail better." Samuel Beckett
damn. did my mom put you up to this