On Not Being Kerouac

I am no Kerouac. No Bukowski. No Ephron either, though I would take a sliver of her timing and all of her nerve.

And maybe no one else is.

That is one of the stranger things about writing now. We live in a time that has made instant gratification feel not only possible but overdue. Everyone is meant to have a platform, a voice, a following, a launch plan, a pre-order strategy, a neat origin story, and some faint sense of inevitability. As though talent were a thing you could announce and then wait to be recognised for while refreshing your inbox.

It is tiring.

The internet has done something peculiar to creativity. It has flattened the distance between making a thing and demanding an audience for it. A person can write three paragraphs in the Notes app while waiting for a latte and by lunch be explaining their “author journey” beneath a professionally lit headshot. Somewhere along the line we stopped quietly becoming and started publicly debuting.

There is now a strange pressure to appear fully formed before the work itself has had a chance to grow bones.

Writers are expected to brand themselves before they have even figured out what they sound like. We are encouraged to optimise, strategise, position, cross-post, engage, convert, expand, monetise. None of these are inherently evil things. Writers have always needed readers. Artists have always needed patrons. But something about the speed and hunger of it all makes me want to gently close the laptop lid and go stare at a tree for a while.

I write the word vomit in my head and heart. I write because I can. Because I am sixty-one and, after years of raising children, surviving life, feeding people, soothing people, building things, carrying things, and being useful in every direction at once, I now have some time and attention to give to words. To meaning. To the slow business of finding out what I think by writing badly enough at first to get somewhere true.

That, to me, is the work.

Not performance. Not visibility. Not becoming a tiny content machine with a curated vulnerability schedule.

The work.

I read something recently by Cedar Jones that said the instant gratification we crave does not exist, that the success some of us think we deserve is not real, that we are not master writers or misunderstood geniuses owed recognition by a world too stupid to clap on cue. Fair enough. It went on to say we are students of a craft that goes back thousands of years, and that we must remain studious.

Also fair enough, though “studious” does sound like someone who owns nicer stationery than I do and means business about it.

Still. The point stands.

Go outside. Look at things. Shut up for five minutes and pay attention. Study bark patterns, clouds, old women at bus stops, the way someone reaches for their coat when they are angry but trying not to show it. Watch teenagers pretending not to care about each other. Watch married couples navigating supermarket aisles like long military campaigns. Watch the woman in the café stirring her tea long after the sugar dissolved because she needs the movement more than the tea.

Get off your screen long enough to remember that human beings existed before they began performing themselves into rectangles.

Keep writing. Keep reading. Keep listening. Do not assume success will mould itself to your desires as though it were your shoe size.

All true.

But I will never be the hungry young writer in a black turtleneck, smoking outside a bad apartment, drinking rough red wine in a dingy bar and eating soup as if that proves something. First of all, I do not smoke. Second, if I am wearing a turtleneck it had better be a nice one. And if I am drinking red wine and eating soup, the restaurant will also be nice. I have paid my dues in less flattering fabrics.

There is a particular mythology around writers that I seem to have missed by arriving late. The mythology insists the serious writer must suffer photogenically in youth. There should be cigarettes. Drafty rooms. At least one affair with somebody emotionally unavailable. You should be broke but intellectually radiant, surviving on coffee, lust, and literary certainty.

I arrived instead with children, grief, recipes, tax returns, mortgages, airport pickups, and enough lived experience to know that most genius is simply sustained attention wearing comfortable shoes.

Writing did not arrive for me wrapped in youth and mystique. It arrived after life. Or rather, after enough life to have something worth examining.

And perhaps that is why I do not panic the way younger writers sometimes do about whether the world is noticing quickly enough. I understand urgency in other forms now. Real urgency. Hospital corridors. Immigration paperwork. Phone calls at strange hours. Watching people you love suffer while the kettle boils anyway because somebody still wants tea.

Compared to that, publishing timelines feel almost theatrical.

Of course I would like readers. Of course I would like the work to travel. Of course I would like the book to find a home and make its way into the hands of people who need it. I am not above wanting that. I am human. I would be thrilled. I would probably become briefly unbearable in private.

But publication is not the reason I write.

I write because something in me is less noisy once I do.

Because I have stories and fragments and old griefs and ridiculous observations and the sort of memory that will not let a thing rest until I have turned it over properly. I write because I want to discover what the story is, not just what happened. I write because words are one of the few places where I feel both honest and hidden enough to keep going.

I think people sometimes misunderstand this about writing. They think writers write because they have something to say. Often we write because we are trying to figure out what the thing actually is. The page is not a performance of certainty. It is evidence of inquiry.

At least for me.

And I suspect that is partly why modern writing culture can feel so exhausting. So much of it rewards certainty. Strong takes. Clear identities. Confidence masquerading as authority. Everyone is expected to become their own publicist while simultaneously remaining emotionally accessible and algorithmically visible.

I find it all faintly grotesque.

Not the sharing itself. I love sharing work. I love readers. I love discovering a sentence written by somebody three thousand miles away and feeling instantly less alone. That remains miraculous to me.

What exhausts me is the pressure to convert every human experience into a marketable identity.

You cannot simply write anymore. You must build presence. Build audience. Build anticipation. Build community. Build a funnel, which still sounds less like literature and more like something involving industrial drainage.

Sometimes I think the internet has mistaken visibility for intimacy.

The loudest voices are not necessarily the truest ones. The most viral work is not always the work that lingers. And perhaps worst of all, many genuinely talented people are now convinced they are failures because they are not scaling at the correct speed.

What a terrible thing to do to artists.

Some of the best writing I have ever encountered lives quietly. Small readerships. Tiny magazines. Essays passed between friends. Dog-eared books bought secondhand and underlined by strangers. Sentences that altered me completely while accumulating almost no public noise whatsoever.

The internet would call these things unsuccessful.

The soul would not.

If no one ever publishes me, I will still write.

That feels important to say plainly, because so much of modern creative life is tangled up with the performance of ambition. Ambition itself is not bad. God knows women of my generation were trained to apologise for wanting anything at all. I am not pretending sainthood here. I would love the work to matter widely.

But the writing itself must remain separate from whether applause arrives.

Otherwise, the whole thing becomes too fragile to survive.

Because there will always be someone younger, sharper, more fashionable, more visible, more productive, more disciplined, more online. There will always be someone announcing a six-figure book deal while you are still trying to decide whether a paragraph works.

If your only relationship to writing is external validation, the silence will eventually kill it.

And if that is all writing ever is for me — words from my head to your eyes — then that is not nothing.

That is the work. That is the offering. That is the little bridge writing makes between one life and another.

Maybe one day these words will find the people who need them.

Maybe they already are.

Either way, I will still be here.

Not in a dirty turtleneck.

But still writing.