Writing Without a Safe Word
Escaping the sterile safety of creative writing classes, and returning to risk, rupture, and the raw pulse of the page (for both a writer and a reader)
Taking creative writing classes is a bit like attending sex school: by the end, you may know every move, but something vital has vanished. You become fluent in technique, alert to rhythm, expert in pacing. And yet, your sentences begin to resemble IKEA furniture – well-assembled, functional, entirely devoid of wonder. There is a peculiar embarrassment in producing something that is technically correct but emotionally inert. You have built a house, but no one wants to live there. You’ve written the scene, but no one wants to stay the night. You feel safe, perhaps, but also vaguely ashamed… ashamed of not omitting, of not risking, of not leaving anything trembling in the dark. Because deep down you know: this isn’t what made you want to write. This isn’t what made you ache.
Because this isn’t just about writing. It’s about what we feel when we read something that moves – and what is missing when it doesn’t. We may not care how a sentence is built, but we know when one reaches under our skin and flicks something awake. We have read things that made us ache, blush, flinch, weep, and others so well-constructed they might as well have been made of marble: smooth, cold, untouchable. This is about that difference. About why so much of what’s written today feels safe, sexless, and dead on arrival.
You don’t need a Master of Fine Art to know when a sentence purrs or when it merely passes inspection. Any reader who has ever stayed up past midnight because prose refused to let them go (because it made them cancel trains, marriages, or at least brunch) already speaks the old, occult language of literary electricity. You feel it first in the gut: a microscopic quickening, a pulse just beneath the clavicle. And when it’s absent, when every page sounds like the minutes of a committee meeting dressed up in italics, you feel that, too. Your attention folds in on itself, wilting like cut flowers in a boardroom vase, and you wonder why modern stories so often resemble collaborative spreadsheets with narrative track-changes still showing.
Then there’s you – the reader harbouring a quiet, seditious itch to write. You have underlined whole novels whispering I could try this, only to sit at a blank screen and discover a stranger piloting your fingertips, one who writes in the tonal equivalent of corporate compliance training. Instead of raw wonder, out comes a voice that says “per my last email” between every clause, that triple-checks for balanced sensory distribution and morally hygienic subtext. Before a metaphor can even slip its shoes off, you are already logging it for possible revisions, worried the algorithm (or your aunt) might flag it as “off-brand”. The seduction that once lured you to the page dissolves into something polished, obedient, and vaguely LinkedIn.
Our age perfects performance while mistrusting presence, and nowhere is that pathology clearer than in contemporary prose. We are heirs to Puritans and PR teams alike, calibrating every utterance for market viability, sensitivity vetting, and search-engine favour – craft turned commodity, desire filed under metrics. The digital agora demands that even our epiphanies arrive tagged, captioned, and positioned. Risk becomes a liability line, ambiguity a UX flaw, pleasure an optional plug-in. Yet literature, in its most enduring form, has always made its home where danger and longing overlap: think of Sappho’s fragments smuggling eros past patriarchal censors, or Dostoevsky wagering salvation against nihilism in a single paragraph. Great writing traffics in what cannot be budget-forecast, spending language the way lovers spend nights they suspect might ruin them, but go anyway. Until we reclaim that willingness to be ruined, to embarrass ourselves before the unknown, our stories will remain technically impeccable, culturally responsible, and spiritually flat, the literary equivalent of safe sex conducted through a thick layer of corporate prophylactic.
Going back to the creative writing classes, some people emerge from such a workshop like someone who has read the Kama Sutra not for play, but for protocol. Every position annotated. Every metaphor stripped of its eccentricity. Every scene rehearsed to the point of sterilisation. Suddenly, spontaneity becomes suspicious. Improvisation, that sacred space where art and instinct meet, is treated like a flaw in craft. Risk is frowned upon. Ambiguity is an editing note. Your prose gets tighter, cleaner – more like a résumé than a revelation. And yet, writing, like sex, without risk, without that vertiginous sense of danger and discovery, is just… admin. Pleasurable in theory. Soul-killing in practice.
Creative writing programmes, bless them, love rules. Show, don’t tell. Kill your darlings. Write what you know. These maxims are passed down like antiseptic tools in a surgical theatre – sterile, precise, and frequently wielded without anaesthesia. You learn to cut, trim, structure, format. You learn to be clean. But what you lose in mess, you often lose in magic. The very real, bloody, glorious chaos that allows for true artistic birth is often filtered out before the second draft. Consider Flannery O’Connor. Her characters are mean, twisted, often spiritually deranged. A grandmother gets shot in the chest by a serial killer, and it’s the most redemptive moment of the story. You think she worried about relatability? Likability? Whether the reader “connected” with the protagonist in the first paragraph? Of course not. She was mining something deeper… something holy in its strangeness.
Or Anaïs Nin, who wrote prose like whispered secrets between lovers. She let desire speak without disguise. Her metaphors didn’t wait for permission. Do you imagine her pausing mid-line to check whether her verbs were “active” enough? To ensure her sensory descriptions were evenly distributed across the five modalities? Hardly. Her writing is the opposite of workshoped: indulgent, fearless, at times incoherent, but always alive. The lesson here is not to write like O’Connor or Nin, but to write like someone who has not been taught to doubt their urgency.
That’s the rub, isn’t it? These programmes teach technique, yes, but they often teach doubt too. Not the good kind of doubt, the existential one that drives art and undermines certainty, but the bureaucratic kind. The kind that asks if your climax occurs too soon, if your theme is “landing”, if the stakes are “high enough for a reader to care”. These are not inherently bad questions, but they are managerial ones. And the best writing is often unmanageable. It breaks things. It seduces you into caring about the wrong things. It makes you uncomfortable in the ways you didn’t expect.
Still, let’s not pretend there is no value in writing classes. That would be as childish as pretending sex ed didn’t save lives or that grammar is an oppressive tool of the patriarchy (well… not only). A good class can sharpen your instincts. It can help you hear the music in your own voice, even if only to teach you when you have gone flat. You learn how to revise, which is a kind of spiritual masochism, returning to your own pages with a scalpel and asking, “Where have I lied?” And then cutting. You learn to take feedback from strangers named Keith who will ‘gently’ suggest that your third-person omniscient narrator sounds “a little too self-aware”, and you will resist the urge to die. You will survive. You may even become better.
And yet, the real danger isn’t in the workshop – it is in the workshop mindset. That anxious desire to please the room. That faint hum of conformity disguised as professionalism. You begin to write stories or essays that are smart, polished, even beautiful, but they never get under the skin. They impress, but do not haunt. You become the literary equivalent of a lover who always hits the right spots, but never once looks you in the eye. Every move is correct, and yet you feel unseen.
This is the curse of the workshop voice – that dry, clipped, emotionally restrained tone that haunts MFA circles like the ghost of Hemingway’s lesser cousin. You know it when you hear it. Sparse prose. Clean lines. A certain self-conscious restraint pretending to be elegance. It’s the missionary position of literary fiction: serviceable, safe, depressingly ubiquitous. And often, completely sexless. This is what happens when too many brilliant minds write with one eye on the syllabus and the other on their potential New Yorker acceptance letter.
It’s also why some of the best writers, those whose sentences pulse with aliveness, never set foot in a classroom. Or if they did, they left quickly, muttering something about combustion. Think of writers like Jean Rhys, who wrote drunk and desperate and incandescent. Or Denis Johnson, whose prose reads like it survived something just to make it to the page. These are not writers who worry about whether their story has enough rising action. These are writers who set fire to the structure and danced naked in the smoke.
But still, there is something sacred in the circle. When a writing class works, really works, it becomes something more than pedagogy. It becomes communion. Not the clean, wafer-on-the-tongue kind, but the sweaty, vulnerable, near-illicit intimacy of strangers baring themselves in sentences. You read each other’s heartbreaks and laugh lines and obsessions. You recognise yourself in someone else’s syntax. You start to understand metaphor not just as literary device, but as a kink. And you learn, slowly and then all at once, how to survive rejection. How to want again. How to fail well.
Eventually, if you are lucky, you begin to unlearn. You take what the workshop gave you and begin to violate it. At first cautiously, then with glee. You break rules not to rebel, but because you have outgrown them. You let your characters stumble. You let your plots unravel. You let your sentences meander into places you didn’t plan. You stop asking if your work “works” and start asking if it breathes, if it touches something dangerous, if it seduces not with competence but with presence.
You stop writing like a student. You start writing like a lover.
So yes, take the class. Learn to build tension. Learn how to tease with syntax, how to linger before release. Learn how to climax in a single line. But then – walk out! Leave the syllabus folded on the floor. Read forbidden things. Write what embarrasses you. Chase ideas that make your pulse race. Make a mess. Risk too much. And for the love of everything holy and profane… leave something to chance!
Because it’s in that space – between precision and impulse, between mastery and surrender – that art, like sex, and meaning still happen.
With syntax teased and structure undone, from the mess, with heat and intention, breaking rules and writing like I mean it, unapologetically unedited,
Tamara
I love this. It's a very difficult topic, and my take here may offend, but I'll follow your advice and write without the endless safe words and hedging caveats.
I don't believe creativity can be taught. It can be nurtured when the seeds are already planted, but if the building blocks aren't there, you cannot systematize their development. Technique is what is taught, and it's taught by people who also learned through technique.
The saying "those who can't do, teach" is often misused, but I think that's the deep message. As far as I can tell, people who we consider to be talented all have stories of being able to do things before they could even describe what they were doing, and many are never able to describe it, precisely because it wasn't learned through curricular frameworks. Hence, teachers are people who did the curriculum and learned a process, which was used to fill the innate talent gap.
Most talented people were doing, long before they knew WHAT they were doing. Often this starts young, and by themselves, where the self-consciousness and obsession with technical data hadn't yet impinged on their creative minds. They learned through this relentless practice, which was relentless not because of goal orientation, but because of natural inclination. They were drawn, called, and in turn put in the work that wasn't really work at all, but expression.
By the time they get to that high school art class, or writing workshop, they're stifled and frustrated by rules that either don't apply, or are already understood intuitively. But the classes are not for them; they're for the people who did not find their calling at age 7, staying up past their bedtime endlessly doodling and unknowingly refining.
Once you're in the curricular framework, what matters is the performance of knowledge. You pass the course by demonstrating what you've learned, and if you do this well enough for long enough, you get a PhD. So "creation" becomes an endless display of what you know and what you can do, and it comes across as soul-killing admin, as you put it. See nearly all academic writing for proof of this concept.
No amount of technical mastery can compete with the endless "doodling" of a creative mind following their inclinations. And people push back hard against this because 1) it's not sellable in courses and 2) it commits the ultimate sin in this culture by daring to suggest that we're not all the same blank slates that can be perfectly molded by just the right environmental conditions.
Thank you as always, Tamara. For not playing it safe and for sharing your obvious talents, unapologetically.
Tamara, I don’t know how you do it, but every essay you write manages to reach into my ribcage and rattle something loose. Your words breathe and live. Reading this was like being seen in a way I didn’t expect but desperately needed. I’ve admired your writing for a long time, and what continually stuns me is not just your command of language, but your courage to say what so many of us are too scared to admit: that we’ve been writing like we’re being supervised.
One line in particular knocked the air out of me: “You become the literary equivalent of a lover who always hits the right spots, but never once looks you in the eye.” That is exactly the shame I’ve felt when re-reading my own polished but emotionally anesthetized drafts—ones that check every box but somehow fail to pulse. And that’s why I don’t publish.
What I love most about your writing is how you always bring me back to why I wanted to write in the first place—not for approval, not for publication, but for that raw magic of turning feeling into form. You remind me that the most dangerous thing a writer can do isn’t being messy, but being forgettable.
One idea your essay sparked for me: maybe we need “unworkshops.” Not just spaces where rules are suspended, but where risk is required. A kind of writing circle where the only criterion is: Did you say something you weren’t supposed to? Did your sentence bleed?
Thank you for writing this. I learned from every paragraph—and more than that, I felt every one. Your work isn’t just technically masterful—it’s alive. Please don’t ever stop.