On Process: Why I'm Journaling My Writing Life Here
I used to believe that writing was about the finished piece. The published story. The poem that finally worked.
Now I am less sure.
On Substack and on svarnac.com, I share stories, poetry, and essays about media, movies, and a woman's experience in the world. That space is for what I make.
Here on Tuhat, I want to try something different. I want to write about how I make it — and why.
Not craft tips. Not advice. Just an honest journal of the process:
- What it feels like to stare at a blank page for forty-five minutes
- Why I wrote three versions of one sentence and still don't like any of them
- The strange, quiet victory of finishing a draft you know will change tomorrow
- How being a woman in the world shapes not just what I write, but when I dare to write it
This will not be polished. That is the point.
If you are a writer, too — or someone who wonders what a writer's life actually looks like between publications — I hope you find something recognizable here.
First entry: today, I sat down to write a short story. I wrote four words. Deleted them. Made tea. Sat down again. Wrote eleven words. Kept three.
That is not failure. That is Tuesday.
I carved up something to post.
Carefully. Slowly. The way you shape a sentence you actually mean.
And then — because this site is new, because every platform has its own secret logic, because I clicked "new" thinking it meant "post" — it all vanished.
Poof.
Not even a warning. Just the clean, indifferent blankness of a form that has never met a metaphor it couldn't erase.
Here is what I learned in that second, staring at the nothing:
Writing is not about avoiding the collapse. It is about what you do after.
You explore. You go on digital adventures. You press buttons with innocent confidence. And sometimes — often — you fall flat on your keyboard.
That is not failure. That is process.
That is what it means to be a writer who is still learning, still pressing wrong buttons, still showing up to the page even when the page just ate your lunch.
So this is my first real post on Tuhat. Not the polished one I carved up. This one. The one written after the delete.
Because writing is not the absence of mistakes.
It is the decision to keep talking anyway.
I have been thinking a lot about what it means to be a writer on platforms that were not built for writers.
Substack understands me. It wants my stories, my poems, my essays on movies and media and a woman's experience in the world. It formats itself around me like a welcome mat.
Svarnac.com is mine. I can do anything there. Break lines, embed images, rearrange the furniture.
But Tuhat?
Tuhat does not know what to do with me yet. And honestly, I do not know what to do with Tuhat.
It asks for abstracts and keywords and publication types. It wants me to categorize myself before I have even said anything. It is a database dressed up as a home.
So I have decided: I will stop trying to fit.
Instead, I will use Tuhat the way I use a notebook with ugly covers. The outside does not matter. What matters is what I fill it with.
And what I want to fill it with is the truth of the writing life.
Not the glamorous version. Not the "I woke up at 5am and wrote a masterpiece" version. The real one.
The one where you delete your own post by accident.
The one where you stare at a blinking cursor for twenty minutes and write nothing.
The one where you finish something, feel proud for an hour, and then hate it by morning.
That is what I am here to document.
Not because I think anyone needs advice. But because when I was starting out — when I was afraid to call myself a writer at all — I would have loved to see someone else's mess. Someone else's wrong click. Someone else's ordinary, unglamorous Tuesday.
So consider this an invitation.
If you are a writer on a platform that confuses you. If you have ever lost work to a bad interface. If you have ever felt like everyone else knows the rules except you.
You are not alone.
I am over here, on Tuhat of all places, pressing the wrong buttons and starting over.
And I will keep showing up.
Not because I am good at this. Because I am a writer.
And that is what writers do.
I realize something else, too.
The first post I lost? It was good. Not perfect, but real. It had a line about how writing is like walking through a dark room and trusting your hands will find the wall. I liked that line. I might steal it back someday.
But here is what I did not expect: losing it made me want to write more. Not less.
That is the strange gift of this work. Every delete, every rejection, every draft that goes nowhere — it either stops you or it deepens you. There is no neutral.
So I choose deeper.
Not because I am brave. Because I am curious. I want to know what happens when I keep going. What happens when I show up to a platform that confuses me and I stay anyway. What happens when I write without an audience in mind, just a question in my hand.
That is my real subject now. Not stories or poems or essays on movies — though I still write those elsewhere. Here, my subject is the trying.
The trying to say something true. The trying to build a habit. The trying to be a writer in public, without a net, on a website that does not even have an undo button.
That is the whole point.