“Writing isn’t easy for me, so I’m not really a writer.”

You and Hemingway, baby. He said, “Writing is easy, you just sit down at a typewriter and bleed.” So YES! Writing is objectively not easy! It’s cumbersome, it demands mental fortitude, and psychological sweat. It requires you to wrestle with all sorts of thing from truth to syntax to rhythm. It’s a muscular project.

Of course, you could train some GPT to do it for you, but let’s cut the pretense here. We know it when we read it. People don’t read & get hooked on your work because it was easy to write. They read & get hooked on it because they can feel you working through it.

One thing you learn after writing for a loooooong time is the more difficult something is to write, and the more you endure to find your way through it, the more satisfying and enlightening it is for your reader. So how do you endure? You use simple frameworks. Frameworks are the marble walls keeping you inside the arena. You can push up against them, lean against them, throw rocks at them, take a rest against them. Frameworks give you something to work against or push off from, but their main task is to keep you in the arena so you have no choice but to endure.

For real writers, writing isn’t easy. Frameworks help them stick to the process.

“It’s embarrassing to call myself a writer when no one is publishing me.”

It is so understandable to equate being a good writer with being a published writer. As writers, we spend so much time daydreaming, fully disconnected from the here and now. We’re connecting the thing we just learned about indigenous plant roots with the current headline about an intercontinental railway system and we thought those two ideas might work in our Substack essay about the politics of perimenopause. It’s wild how much time we spend in our heads.

And a publisher — someone paying us with dollars or exposure or both — is the connective chain pulling us back to earth, reminding us that we’re really here and really doing this. Getting published can make us feel real.

But does that make you a writer?

I think we can agree that Emily Dickinson, who only had 1-2 poems published in her whole lifetime and whose backlog of 1800 unpublished poems was only found after her death while her sister was digging around, was 100% a writer. Writing isn’t just for people with a long list of bylines. Writing is a tool of the people.

You’re a writer because you write.

“I honestly don’t even know where to start.”

We’ve all stared at a blinking cursor before, absolutely down-to-the-bone certain we’ll never have another good idea for as long as we live. Whether it’s a social media caption or the start of your memoir, beginning something requires equal parts courage and delusion.

But think about how you get into conversation with someone new. It can feel challenging, and sometimes anxiety-producing, because you think oh god what am I gonna say?! But then one thing changes and the whole conversation comes pouring out of you. They’re laughing. You’re riffing. It’s actually pleasant. What changed?

Someone asked you a question.

Sometimes all we need is a prompt. One little question to give us one little nudge. A prompt is a door someone opens for you, so you can walk through it with your history, your emotions, your opinions, and your own questions. Prompts are a writer’s failsafe.

When you put the pressure on the prompt instead of how you answer it, you’ll be entering a room full of your brilliant ideas.

“I’m scared to try writing in a new format.”

Like me, you probably reallllllly like being good at what you do. Look, it feels good to do things quickly and easily and without too many expletives shooting through your inner narrative! And so when you think about transitioning from writing on Substack to copywriting, or from writing your social media captions to outlining a book proposal, or from writing pure non-fiction to putting on your Sally Rooney-pants, that can feel scary! You are, objectively, heading into the unknown.

But here’s the cool thing: writing at any level, in any format requires the same exact fundamentals. The underlying principles of good writing don’t change just because the format does.

Once you’ve got the principles down, your voice will come through any kind of writing you try.

“writing isn’t a great way to make money, and, uhm. I need money.”

It’s been a difficult century so far, has it not? Wages are down and that includes what’s possible in a book deal, for a commissioned piece of writing, and even “steady writing jobs” have turned employees into contractors, making all work gig work. Counterintuitively, that means now is the best time to boost your writing confidence.

Because as jobs get scarcer, and AI gets more lucid, and people look for more shortcuts, engaging in the muscular project of writing makes you singular. It becomes your calling card. It automatically builds trust with your audience. It becomes a tool you can use whenever you need to break through the noise. Knowing how to write means knowing how to connect.

Want to land a huge grant? Submit for a job that isn’t even available yet? Sell your merch? Make your film submission stand out? Email your hero for coffee? Get permission to use a piece of music in your web series without paying royalties? Then you’re going to have to write!

You may not make money from writing the way you used to make money from writing. But yeesh, no one is making money the way we used to do anything.

If you have a writing process, you can navigate your way through tricky times like this with more ease and more confidence because you’ll make more of your own opportunities.