"Why Don't You Write Something More Appropriate?"

I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again (right now, in fact): I don’t have control over what I write.

Okay. that’s dramatic. You got me.

I do, in fact, have *some* control over what I write. When a company is paying me cold hard cash to cover a topic or create some copy, sure. I’ll write about that celebrity or that mansion in Beverly Hills or that event or this take on that situation and blah blah blah.

You’re right. I do have some control over what I write, what I pitch, and what I say “yes” or “no” to covering. But ultimately, I’ll write what the people will pay me to write. Call me a sellout, I double dog dare you.

The thing is, those are the pieces that aren’t for me. The ones that I pitch because I know they’ll align with a company’s voice. The ones that take me hours to get a few hundred words down because the act of stringing those sentences together is like extracting my own teeth with a dull, rusty knife. Gruesome, tedious, painful, and messy.

Those pieces? They sometimes take me days to finish. My brain will wander around in the fog, wondering how the fuck someone would actually pay me to write some bullshit. It will get me out of my seat every few minutes to change the laundry, wash the dishes, answer an email—anything to avoid the blank page and the pressing deadline.

That’s not to say everything I write is like that. If that were the case I’d have, obviously, given up this dream a long time ago. Sometimes the pieces that I pitch purely for clicks and cash are still a joy to create. They excited me. They make me laugh. They leave my stomach rumbling from forgetting to make lunch and my mouth parched from missing my water goal.

And then? There are the other pieces. The pieces that I write purely for me. The ones that are full of typos on the first draft because my fingers can’t keep up with my racing mind. Sometimes they’re full of sex. Sometimes they’re full of sorrow. Sometimes they go viral and sometimes they don’t even get published (as any writer can tell you, you never know what the masses will gravitate toward).

For as long as I’ve been writing (which has been a very short while compare to other “real” writers with their glossy books and their Wikipedia pages), one thing I haven’t shied away from is talking about the hard stuff. Whether it’s hard truths, hard embarrassments, or hard judgements.

From parental figures to relatives to friends and to strangers, I’ve gotten asked time and time again on piece after piece: Why did you write this?

Maybe it was offensive. Maybe it was crude. Maybe it shook something inside of them they didn’t want to see or maybe it shed light on a part of me they were hoping wasn’t there.

Whatever it is, I write things that shake people. Sometimes they shake me too. But the reason I write what I write, whether I regret it later or not, is for one reason only: I have to.

You don’t need to like it all, trust me, I don’t either. But instead of hiding away from the hard, face it with me and together, we’ll do some stuff that scares us.