I’ve been thinking about why I write, and I’ve realized something that feels important to share: I don’t write to catalog my feelings. I write to create them in you.
There’s a common assumption that writing is fundamentally about self-expression, about reaching into yourself and pulling out what’s already there, then arranging it on the page for others to witness. The writer as emotional archaeologist, carefully dusting off their inner life and displaying it under glass. And sure, that’s one way to approach it. But it’s not mine.
When I sit down to write, I’m not asking “what do I feel?” I’m asking “what do I want someone else to feel?” The distinction matters more than it might seem.Think about the last piece of writing that really affected you. Maybe it was a novel that made you ache for characters who never existed. Maybe it was an essay that shifted how you understood something you thought you knew. Maybe it was just a single sentence that landed in your chest and stayed there. Whatever it was, the writer succeeded not because they accurately transcribed their own emotional state, but because they constructed an experience in language that generated something new in you.
That’s the work I’m interested in. I want to build feeling the way an architect builds a space, thinking carefully about what materials to use, where to place the weight, how light should enter. When I’m writing about loneliness, I’m not necessarily lonely in that moment. When I’m writing about joy, I might be sitting in a gray room feeling nothing in particular. What I’m doing is arranging words in a sequence that will, if I’ve done it right, create an encounter with loneliness or joy in whoever reads them.
This isn’t deception. It’s craft. A composer doesn’t have to be heartbroken to write music that breaks your heart. An actor doesn’t have to be in love to convince you they are. Why should a writer be limited to only evoking what they happen to be personally experiencing?
There’s also something liberating about this approach. If writing is just emotional documentation, then you’re stuck waiting to feel something worth documenting. You become dependent on your moods, on life serving up experiences intense enough to merit recording. But if writing is about creating feeling, then you can work anytime. You can be deliberate. You can revise not just for clarity but for emotional precision, asking not “is this true to what I felt?” but “does this generate what I want the reader to feel?”I’m not saying personal experience doesn’t matter. Of course it does. You draw on everything you’ve lived, everything you’ve felt, everything you’ve witnessed. That’s your raw material. But the alchemy happens when you stop treating your own feelings as the product and start treating them as just one ingredient among many in something you’re building for someone else.
When I write about memory, I’m trying to trigger that specific vertigo of remembering in you. When I write about desire, I’m attempting to make you feel the wanting, not just understand that someone once wanted something. When I write about beauty, I’m hoping you’ll experience a moment of recognition, of seeing something as if for the first time, even if you’re just reading words on a screen.
This is why I revise so much. Not to get closer to some authentic truth of my experience, but to refine the mechanism of transmission. Does this word create the right texture? Does this sentence have the rhythm that will carry someone forward? Does this paragraph build the atmosphere I need before the next moment lands?
I want my writing to be an instrument, not a mirror. I want it to do something, make something happen in the space between the words and whoever’s reading them. Your feeling, when it arrives, belongs to you entirely. I just want to be the one who set the conditions for it to emerge.
That’s what I’m after when I write. Not confession, but conjuring. Not reporting, but building. Not showing you what’s in me, but creating what might bloom in you.
