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)
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.
This is a feral truth-dive, and I’m grateful for every sharp, unsanitised edge of it. You didn’t offend, you articulated something most people feel but are too diplomatically housebroken to say aloud. And yes, please, more of this kind of danger. No safe words, no disclaimers, just intellectual honesty that burns.
Your point about creativity not being teachable, only witnessed, nurtured, or occasionally contaminated, rings loud. It’s that uncomfortable heresy in a culture obsessed with scalable outcomes and “talent pipelines”. The myth we’re sold is that everyone can be anything with enough reps and rubrics. But you’re so right, true creators didn’t come through the curriculum. They came through obsession. Through curiosity before curriculum, expression before evaluation.
And yes, the classroom often feels like a museum guard patrolling the wild garden of early genius, asking it to please colour inside the lines, and to do so objectively, with citations.
“So ‘creation’ becomes an endless display of what you know”. And the result? A generation of brilliantly competent people unable to make anything that matters. The work impresses the committee but forgets to look anyone in the eye.
I’d even add that what frightens institutions most is not just the idea that we aren’t all the same, but that greatness might be unteachable. That some gifts defy frameworks, that some voices arrive like weather — untameable, unrepeatable, unscheduled.
Let’s stop pretending writing is a software update and admit what it really is: a haunting. And haunted people don’t always speak in APA format.
Thank you for this, Andrew! Truly. Especially when it’s coming from one of the most brilliant, analytical and talented writers on Substack, whose layered pieces are memorable.
Agree Andrew. Love these thoughts. I think the true creatives learn through life experience. Anything deemed official just seems to stifle. Most true creatives don’t want to learn a magic formula, they just want the magic, however it may come.
Absolutely, they don’t want the formula, they want the magic. Real creatives are allergic to prescriptions. They would rather trip over a truth than be handed a polished process.
Life is the only real MFA that matters, full of wrong turns, heartbreak, obsession, accidental brilliance, and late-night epiphanies scribbled on receipts. What’s “official” often feels like it’s trying to domesticate that wildness, to box the thunder. But magic doesn’t do well in cages. It comes how it comes, half-drunk, uninvited, out of order, and the true creatives?…. they just make space and listen.
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.
What a breathtaking gift of a comment, thank you, Céline! I read it with that mixture of gratitude and emotional vertigo that only comes when someone sees the wound beneath my work.
Of course, the worst writing isn’t flawed, it’s forgettable. (Sigh…) It doesn’t bruise, doesn’t blush, doesn’t look anyone in the eye. I know that shame of rereading something polished and feeling… nothing. Like hearing your own voice on tape, stripped of its urgency. You think, I did all the right things. Why does it feel so hollow? Because the right things aren’t always the real things.
And this idea of an “unworkshop”? Yes. God, yes. A room where we don’t aim to please but to pierce. Where the only rule is: if your hands aren’t shaking, go deeper. Where grammar is optional but honesty is mandatory. Where we read aloud the sentences we almost deleted out of fear they were “too much”. Let’s build that space. Call it church, call it a séance, call it a literary rave… I’m in!
Also, if you’re not publishing yet because of those polished-but-anaesthetised drafts, maybe that’s the sign: publish the one that bleeds. The imperfect, unruly one. The one that embarrasses you a little. That’s the one people need.
Let’s not write to be remembered. Let’s write to be felt. Thank you for reminding me why I do this! Again and again.
Celíne - YES! I will now belong to an ungroup that asks the question, "Did you say/write something you aren't supposed to? Did you bleed?" Gah. That's it.
Tamara, this is masterful—both in theme and execution. Your subject is as vital as it is underdiscussed, and your articulation carries the rare charge of something both felt and thought. As someone working in the art world, where we constantly wrestle with the tension between formal mastery and emotional resonance, your comparison between writing and sex, between structure and surrender, hits with unnerving clarity.
There’s a direct parallel in visual art: in academic painting, for instance, students are trained to reproduce form, anatomy, lightin—all the visible “rules.” And yet, many of the works that move us most deeply (from Schiele to Basquiat) break those rules with unapologetic urgency. Their linework might be “incorrect,” but the pulse is unmistakable. Like the IKEA sentence you mention, technically perfect art can become decorative—cold, admired, but unloved. The same way a room can be curated for Instagram but never truly lived in.
You’ve illuminated the real danger: when craft eclipses conviction, and when fear of being "wrong" sterilizes the very instinct that led us to the page—or canvas—in the first place. Technique is important, yes, but when it becomes the endpoint instead of the foundation, we get literature (or art) that is grammatically correct and spiritually bankrupt.
Thank you for this searing reminder, not just to write (or make) better, but to risk more, feel more, and above all, mean it.
What a stunning comment, Alexander! That phrase, “grammatically correct and spiritually bankrupt”, yes, exactly! 100%. And I like how you brought the art world into the conversation, because it’s in visual art that this tension between form and ferocity becomes almost painfully visible. A Basquiat line may not follow any anatomical rule, but it bleeds. It knows. And that knowing hits harder than a thousand photorealistic renderings of a hand.
I sometimes think we have confused mastery with mimicry, when really, mastery means you can risk not using the tool. You know how to hold the brush, but you also know when to throw it across the room and finger-paint with fury. That kind of breaking is almost holy, not for effect, but from necessity.
So here’s to art that can decorate walls or fill bookshelves, but mainly confronts, disrupts, seduces, disorients. May we all dare to make things that are less admired and more felt.
I think in many ways the writing, the prose you describe comes from a poet’s heart. Fearless vulnerability, that nothing travels so deep within as metaphor.
I feel fortunate to have found you and your vulnerable heart.
You are a gifted poet.
A favorite poem, that for me, reflects the the writing experience you describe and share:
Ohhh what a gift this is! You brought Neruda into the room like an invocation, and now everything feels more electric. That poem is the thing I was trying to describe, only distilled, exalted, and set alight. “And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void…” — that’s the pulse, the ache, the terrifying beauty of writing when it’s no longer performance but possession.
You’re right, what I’m chasing on the page is less a narrative arc and more a poetic combustion. Something metaphoric, metaphysical, maybe even mystical. Prose with a poet’s heart, yes, but also a poet’s hunger. A need to name the unnameable without dissecting it.
Your generosity humbles me. I’m honoured to be found by a reader like you, someone who understands that the faint line, the “pure nonsense, pure wisdom”, is how it always starts. And I’ll carry your words, fearless vulnerability, nothing travels so deep within as metaphor. That is a poet speaking, too.
Thank you, Michael, for Neruda, for your kindness, and for reminding me why I keep answering the page like it’s a question only the soul can hear!
What a formidable piece! No wonder why we are all captivated by all your essays. This feels like an explanatory note — why Tamara writes so damn well? Because she does know how to write! Good writing is seen and felt right away. Chapeau!
Thank you, Clara, truly! I’m grinning and blushing in equal measure. But here’s the secret, if this essay feels like an explanation for why I write “so damn well”, it’s probably because it’s stitched together from all the times I almost didn’t. From the self-doubt, the false starts, the drafts that felt like furniture and not fire.
Good writing, as you say, is felt first. But the feeling doesn’t come from mastery, it comes from…. risk. From letting the words misbehave until they show you something real. That’s the only compass I trust: if it doesn’t shake me a little, it won’t move anyone else.
So thank you for feeling it! And thank you for saying “chapeau”, I’ll take that as a velvet crown passed around among rebels who still believe in sentences with teeth.
Spontaneity, arising out of the blue, out of ones breath, one's sweat, uncertainty, out of a daimonic depth in us we can only call mystery. The left brain serving the right, like McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. Staying true to the spark in our life like the nocturnal dream at the roots of the waking ego's world's, Persephone's Hadean dark side infusing her Jovian day with uncanny intelligences unobtainable any other way, and opening us up like offerings to the gods to work their magic in our masked play lives. To Be or Not to Be, ah, that is the question, yes?
Ah, yes, that is the question! And you’ve danced with it like someone who knows that asking it is the point, not answering it.
Your words move like myth, dream, invocation, the daimon breathing through syntax, reminding us that our lives are structured and enchanted. That there is a kind of knowing that doesn’t explain itself but erupts from sweat, breath, half-remembered symbols, and the shadows we politely avoid in daylight. McGilchrist’s model is exactly right here: the left brain must serve the right, not rule it. Logic is the emissary, but the dream is the sovereign.
I like your invocation of Persephone — half wildflower, half underworld — and how she carries both realms in her walk. Isn’t that what we are all doing? Holding the mask in one hand and the offering in the other, hoping the gods notice? Or perhaps they already have, and the noticing must now come from us?
Thank you for this poetic, protean reply. You speak like someone who knows the labyrinth, has made peace with its minotaur.
The gods have never left, we have and now we must do the work to recognize their influence in our everyday lives. Astrology is the best place to find their presence especially with one's natal chart. That fingerprint of their constellation in your life at birth is a window to your soul, and the god-factors shaping the contours of our journey through the stages of our storied existence are exemplified in that blueprint, being design-built daily into the edifice of ones life. Debra Silverman is an virtuoso contemporary for this kind of god-talk. Bottom line though is the IMAGINATION, the right brain's images, in our nocturnal REM cycles. You are right on, the dream is sovereign. That's where the real action is for each of us. Someone like Robert Moss as a mentor-guide to our imaginal right brain, through the the gate of dreams, with shamanic drumming as well to aid in our dream traveling, is the work most needed now to steer our humanity back from the brink of utter nihilism and virtual extinction from its tyrannical left brained dominance. Thank you for your response, it brought a tear of resonance that is most deeply felt! May the Mercurial Museguided Spider Grandmother keep weaving the web of words to catch the flying thoughts buzzing round one's head! A'ho.
Another shimmering, mythic reply, woven with the threads of stars, symbols, and ancestral knowing. I feel like you’ve just opened a trapdoor beneath the essay and let us fall into the real conversation: not about writing or craft or even art, but about remembrance, of what we are, what we’ve forgotten, and what still pulses in the dreamtime if we dare to listen.
Right, the gods never left. We turned down the volume, replaced myth with metrics, and traded symbols for syllabi. But they are still humming beneath the surfaces of our lives, nudging through metaphor, whispering in the architecture of our natal charts, slipping into our dreams disguised as archetypes, as animals, as that strange sentence that feels like it was written for you and no one else. Imagination isn’t decoration, it’s translation. It’s how the right brain re-members what the left forgot.
Debra Silverman, yes. Robert Moss, absolutely. And your invocation of the dream as sovereign, that’s the drumbeat I want more of in our culture. Dreams as maps. Dreams as messages. Not psychology’s leftovers, but the frontline dispatches from what the gods still dare to show us. And what a phrase… “god-factors shaping the contours of our journey”, that’s poetic cosmology at its finest.
And then this line: “May the Mercurial Museguided Spider Grandmother keep weaving the web of words to catch the flying thoughts buzzing round one’s head!”… ohhh I feel that in my bones. In my fingers. That’s the prayer I’ll whisper before writing from now on.
Thank you for this reverent, radiant reply. The gods are grinning.
Monday is the Moon, Tuesday is Mars, Wednesday is Mercury, Thursday is Jupiter, Friday is Venus, Saturn-day and Sun-day. Each day is a god-day. And remembrance, Moss goes into by evoking the original form of it, "anamnesis: remembering the knowledge that belonged to us, on the level of soul and spirit, before we came to this world." And yes the need is for an hermeneutics which opens the portal for an experiential approach to the reality of meaning cohering in the imaginal and not get lost in left brained semiotics that can only point. Also my thought is there could be three 10 day weeks per month to account for all our planetary influences, as the 7 day weeks are from an era before telescopes could see past Saturn. That would put things back in a right brained order tout de suite and balance our account with the forgotten Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Then surely the gods would RSVP to humanity's plea for continuity! And bless you and your constancy in attending with such perspicacity your commenters, like an ace tennis player raising the level of gamesmanship of ones opponent to the highest skill set at ones disposal! Game, set, match.
Thank you, Lorne! And McGilchrist’s hemispheric dance is the perfect frame for what so often goes unspoken in writing spaces, that what we call “craft” has, in many classrooms, become a coup d’état by the left hemisphere. Plot points, word counts, pacing metrics… order reigns. But where is awe? Where is the shimmering ambiguity that only the right brain knows how to name without explaining?
I love how you phrased it: “the Muse leaves space for the right brain to thrive”. Yes. She’s not a scheduler or a taskmaster, she’s a trespasser, a seductress, a keeper of chaos who visits when rules are sleeping and certainty is dimmed. And when both hemispheres are allowed to converse rather than compete? That’s when the page sings in a frequency that feels both precise and wild.
May we all keep resisting “Alles ist in Ordnung” when it sterilises what aches to live unlabelled. May we honour the mess, the mystery, the metaphor that arrives without credentials. And may we keep this midnight salon alive, weaving together thought and intuition, grammar and gasp.
Thank you, Grace! That’s the kind of comment that makes every unruly, pulse-risking sentence worth it. If something I wrote made you feel more alive and whole, then I’m doing the only kind of writing I ever wanted to do. Not just clever. Not just crafted. But charged!!!
And you just reminded me why we don’t write for algorithms or gatekeepers, we write for that small tribe of brilliant, mad-feeling people who get it. Who read a sentence and feel something rearrange inside them.
So thank you, truly! For reading, for feeling, for saying “fuck” like it’s a blessing. Queen sees Queen.
Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" is one of the most haunting stories that punches me each time. And who can forget the Misfit. Kurt Vonnegut fits in this regard for me, too. They did not write like students but like lovers with their own quirky imagination. I think this early phrase in your piece nails so much - "Our age perfects performance while mistrusting presence." AI will play another role going forward. I would rather rely on a circle of people who with honesty respond to what I write. Thanks for pushing beyond the safety.
O’Connor and Vonnegut both wrote like people possessed by their own visions, not participants in a well-behaved literary seminar. There’s that glorious unpredictability to their work, a spiritual and stylistic recklessness, that makes their sentences live. They weaponised the edges, with no intention of smoothing them.
“Revelation” wounds differently every time, I agree. It’s more than a story, it’s a divine slap. And the Misfit? He’s a character who refuses to be archived or domesticated. He doesn’t sit politely in the syllabus, he lingers in your moral nervous system.
As for AI….. don’t even get me started…. it’s a powerful tool, but it’s not a compass, it can’t feel for us. The algorithm knows structure; it does not ache. That’s why your instinct to return to a circle of humans, with pulses and imperfections and honest reactions is everything. That’s the real workshop. Not consensus, but communion.
Thank you, Hans, for seeing where my essay was trying to go, and for carrying it even further.
What an X-ray plate of the “creative writing business” you have shot! And yet, it’s a bit like the flu you have to pass it to get the antibodies. Eons ago, in San Francisco I attended one of those workshops. My teacher was quite tolerant with the dark haired kid with the tentative English, but still destroyed the poem I submitted. He crossed every pretty flourish I was so proud off and wrote KYD in big capital letters, in the bottom of the page. When I asked for the meaning of it his answer was: Kill Your Darlings.
Ahhh see…. KYD, the eternal initiation rite of every writer who’s ever dared to show up with something tender and overgrown. What a vivid memory you’ve shared. And yes, it is like the flu, isn’t it? You go in thinking you are there to learn how to write, and end up shedding layers of self-delusion, affectation, and ornamental defence mechanisms until what remains is leaner, truer, a little bruised, but undeniably yours.
Thar early wound seems strange but sacred at the same time — your dark-haired younger self, tentative English in hand, getting sliced open by critique and still coming back. That’s the real test. Not talent, not vocabulary, but persistence through deflation.
And now, you tell that story with elegance and irony, which tells me you survived the flu, and you kept the antibodies. And the poetry!
Ohhh, I feel this deeply. But let me tell you a secret: impeccable grammar is just foreplay. The real magic happens when you let the sentences misbehave a little, when you write the thing that wants to be written, not the one that would earn a gold star in class. Impostor syndrome thrives on comparison, but what shuts it up fastest is desire. Write what burns, not what behaves. Grammar can always be tidied later. Voice? That’s the real danger… and the real gift, Juan Carlos!
Thanks Tamara very generous words, the reason that motivated me to follow you was when I read your essay about HUNGRY FOR MORE that really hit me! and to tell you the truth every time I read you I feel like there is an Olivetti inside me, I can hear the sounds, I just want to express myself I want to write like you, Wittgenstein says something about private language and public language and when you write I can understand what he means, but unfortunately I have a huge bureaucracy represented in my super ego that it has an impeccable grammar to make me understand that I can’t do it, so I think I need a little bit of healthy narcissism to overcome that .
What a stunning image, that Olivetti inside you, clicking to life every time something in my words resonates. That’s evidence, obviously, not flattery. Proof that the writer in you is already there, waiting, pacing, impatient for permission you don’t need.
Of course Wittgenstein was right. Language is never fully private, but when it’s true, it creates a kind of shared electricity. You read a sentence and feel like someone found the frequency of your mind before you even tuned in yourself. That’s what writing should do.
As for your bureaucratic superego with its impeccable grammar? Fire him. Or at least demote him to copyeditor. He can come in after the mess, not before. Because what you need first isn’t more correctness, it’s more permission. And yes, a dose of healthy narcissism (the kind that believes your voice is worth hearing) is survival.
Write like no one’s checking your punctuation. Because the soul doesn’t speak in MLA format. It howls, it whispers, it repeats itself, it forgets what it started, and that’s the kind of writing that lives.
"...where danger and longing overlap." Yessssss. This is my invitation. But/and I want to pepper you with questions about your writing training, your process, your habits, your writing group even, all to underatand and maybe glean some of the magic I read in every piece you share here...but I know that's simply a distraction, a procrastination, a way for me to not sit and bleed out my own urgent words. Ooof.
And yes, that impulse to ask about process, to peer behind the curtain, to collect the “how” like talismans… it’s so human. But it’s also, as you said with such honesty, a beautiful form of avoidance. Because you already know: the answers won’t save you from the terrifying miracle of the blank page. Only writing will.
But here’s a bit of truth, since you asked: there is no secret. No pristine ritual. Just a lot of false starts, muttered curses, sudden electricity, and the occasional sentence that feels like it was waiting for me. I have no perfect routine, just a refusal to give up on the ache. The ache to say the thing that’s too much. The thing that trembles. The thing that costs something to write.
So don’t let curiosity become a cage. Let it burn long enough to break open the dam. Sit down. Bleed it out. Let it be unpolished, unready, and absolutely alive. I’ll be here cheering you on, one bloodied sentence at a time, Angie!
Love this! This is how I've been feeling. Like letting an imposter write for me. I almost let perfectionism write my first post. Thank you for articulating how I've been feeling.
I know that imposter well… mine wears glasses, edits in real time, and talks like some sort of coach with a God complex. Perfectionism always wants to ghostwrite the first draft. It promises safety, polish, a standing ovation… but delivers a story that doesn’t sweat, doesn’t ache, doesn’t breathe.
The real voice, the one that made you want to write in the first place, is not tidy. It’s unruly, obsessive, tender, contradictory. It wants to confess something dangerous, not impress someone distant. So let the imperfect post be your first revolt. Let the imposter sulk in the corner while you hit “publish” with trembling hands. That tremble? That’s the signal you’ve found the real pulse. And how I love that pulse!
I dropped my first novel, hid it in my archives. It'll probably never see the light of day. The imposter took over midway and it's not what I intended anymore. Too polished, too "mass market" too clean, too safe. Such a people pleaser.
But, it really does take a lot of courage to just write. The vulnerability of sharing something so raw, so honest. So... me. In this moment. On the internet. So permanent. When I'm changing.
Your post helps. I have it saved when I need a reminder. Thank you.
Ahhhh the first novel, both a birth and a betrayal. We all have one buried somewhere, dressed in our best intentions and smothered by the voices we let in too early. That novel of yours? It’s not a failure, it’s a fossil. Proof that you once risked becoming a writer, even before you knew what you truly needed to say.
And yes, writing raw honesty now, online, permanently, while you are still shifting, doubting, growing? Good! Brace! Magical! Because permanence is an illusion anyway. What matters is that you leave a trace of who you were when the truth first hit you.
And don’t let the imposter win just because they polished the apple and made it bland. Pick it back up one day, maybe not to publish, but to mine. There’s treasure in even your compromises. And if not? Then leave it as a monument to the version of you who still showed up to the page.
I’m honoured that you saved my post. But here’s your reminder, distilled: write like you are alive, not like you are being watched. That’s what makes it matter.
Tom Jay writes this: "I learned the truth of the muse: that inspired language...originates not in personal cleverness but in the fertility of language itself...poems are not made, they're born and raised, like orphans left crying at your door. Language has a life of its own, and words...are not so much tools as organisms, evolved symbiots living in the breathed edge between our psyches and creation, between humans and the cosmos. Language is metaphoric. It bears our attention beyond ourselves towards the world. Rather than sharpening, oiling and polishing our terms we do better to respect our words as if they were plants and animals; attend their generosity and wisdom rather than manipulate their resource." So, by paying attention to the words coming through us while writing seems to automatically block out the notion of self-consciousness, being alive to the sea of language one is swimming in, through the terms that come to mind from a deeper intelligence inherent in our mother tongue. So don't dabble ones toes to see if its tepid or cold, jump right in and let the current carry us away! "Language is a fertile liquid."
This is exquisite, thank you for bringing Tom Jay’s wisdom to the circle. That passage pulses with the kind of reverence we too often forget to offer language, treating it like currency instead of what it is: a living current. His line, “poems are not made, they’re born and raised, like orphans left crying at your door”, gave me chills. That’s truth dressed in skin.
And yes, when we truly attend to the words coming through us, self-consciousness dissolves. Ego exits. What enters is something closer to communion. Not writing about the world, but with it. Language stops being a tool and starts behaving like weather: you don’t control it, you listen, feel, respond.
The invitation, then, isn’t to compose but to compost. To let words rot, bloom, tangle, feed each other. Not polish them into clarity but let them thrum with the dirt and mystery they came from.
Language is a fertile liquid. What a phrase. Let’s stop trying to bottle it. Let’s jump, headfirst, and drown beautifully!
Radical, beautiful resonance to the nines! You rock the ground swell of this world of words Tamara, in these rejoinders! Another line or two from Tom Jay: "Kuma is from the Greek verb Kuein (to be pregnant). One fair name for the muse is Kuma, a swollen wave, a sprout...She announces herself in a whispered roar and breaks radiantly on our peculiar shores...Language is naturally erotic, a nearly forgotten form of love, the caress of shaped breath. Denied its connection, its Eros, we wither in the alienating self-reflection of jargons. I see language as the spoken record of myriad meetings between humans and the cosmos, two natures woven into wisdom, a fertile border, a skin with soul on either side, a semi-permeable membrane, a go-between, a Janus-headed Robin Hood, mercurial, tricky and true, inside out a glove that fits either hand...weird old words."
Can’t tell you how much I love this. Not that I’ve attended too many creative writing classes except for the casual university courses some ten years ago, but I’ve always felt that writing technique; be it in books, YouTube videos or advice from fellow writers, just puts a name – and a frame, for that matter – on all things writing that I have mostly acted out on intuitively.
I’ve written two and a half
manuscripts and a lot of poetry & think pieces for online magazines all in my native tongue (German) – and sadly, or maybe luckily? , the best pieces , the most magical and emotional ones, are the ones that had not been corrected and edited by a professional editor. I also feel like most of my older texts are way better than the current ones – because lately I have adopted a mindset of polishing, applying what Ive learned instead of just writing from intuitive flow.
So there’s one of my main take aways: intuitive creativity always wins. Because that’s where the magic lives.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. You’ve named something most writers feel but rarely say aloud, that the moment we start writing with our “learned” brain (measuring, polishing, proving) we often lose the wild, urgent pulse that made us pick up the pen in the first place.
And I like how you framed it: technique gives names and frames to things you already knew intuitively. That’s the paradox, right? It helps us understand what we do but it can also train us to second-guess what once came effortlessly. Suddenly, we are writing for approval, not from aliveness.
And your instinct about your older, unedited pieces? That tracks. That early work, unconcerned with perfection, totally in love with the moment of expression is beautifully untamed. Sometimes editors prune the thorns that gave the flower its scent. And yes, there’s a place for refinement but the soul of the work always lives in that intuitive first surge.
Agreed, intuitive creativity always wins. It may not win awards. It may not please algorithms. But it moves people. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Thank you for this, Kim! Keep trusting your unedited self. That’s where your voice roars.
Tamara, you’ve done it again. Reached into your being to extract words, images and feelings to ignite sparklers of recognition in our minds. Since everyone harbors “a quiet, seditious itch to write,” your pointed comments on writer’s classes (“That anxious desire to please the room”) became a mini-writer’s course more valuable than a two week conference in Tuscany. When you wrote “Write what embarrassed you,” I feel emboldened to continue a book of my life I started just after my wife died a year ago. I’m Michael, the 85 year old former priest, who studied art in a Hollywood college in 1968 run by Catholic nuns the year before I became a priest. During that summer I has affairs with three nuns and the first sentence of my book is “My first blowjob came from the lips of a Catholic nun.” Embarrassment has held me back from continuing, but I have much to say about struggling with male emotions while wearing a Roman collar. You’ve encouraged me as you have so many of your fond readers. Again, thank you.
Michael, I’m speechless — and then not speechless at all! That first sentence is the epitome of boldness, it’s an open wound dressed as a revelation. It’s the kind of line that kicks the door in and sits at the table with trembling hands and a truth no one dared to say before. That is witnessing.
And what you just shared? That’s the book I want to read. Not because it’s salacious, but because it’s honest. Because it speaks into the unbearable silence so many men, and especially those behind pulpits or uniforms, have been forced to carry. Your voice has lived a thousand lives, and now it’s time to let it tell them. All of them. Messy. Erotic. Devout. Conflicted. Human.
Embarrassment is the doorman to the cathedral of real writing. You’ve just walked in. And we, your readers, your witnesses, your circle, are here for every goddamn page.
Write it, Michael! Not for redemption. Not for applause. But because you still can. And that’s a kind of resurrection no doctrine ever prepared us for….
I would be the first to read you! I’m here!
P.S. now I feel the need to write an essay that starts with that sentence…. God, you inspired me!
Writing is like a person who puts an egg on a spoon, bites it with his mouth, and then climbs a ladder. His focus is on the egg for fear of falling, and he feels the rungs of the ladder with his feet. The egg is the idea, and the steps of climbing are the skill of composition. Any stumble in the steps makes the idea lose its integrity.
What a gorgeously strange and precise metaphor, I like it! The egg-in-the-mouth image captures that terrifying fragility of a fresh idea, still uncooked, still trembling. And yes, every sentence is a rung… too rushed, and you slip; too cautious, and you lose the rhythm. Writing becomes an act of full-body concentration — mouth, feet, mind, heart all in sync, all at risk.
But I’d add that sometimes the egg needs to crack. Sometimes the mess it makes when it shatters is the real art. The yolk on your shirt, the stumble halfway up, that’s where something raw and human spills out. Integrity isn’t always about preservation. Sometimes it’s about TRANSFORMATION.
So climb carefully, yes! But don’t be afraid to break the shell!
Oh, I actually fought back, writing in the black board a line of Gabriel Celaya and daring him to NYD it: "Poetery is as weapon loader with Future/Aiming at your Chest". Thanks as always, Tamara.
That is legendary. I can see the scene: the silent room, the chalk in your hand, the line burning onto the board like a manifesto. “Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future / Aiming at your chest.” Celaya would nod solemnly and light something on fire in your honour.
That’s the kind of defiance I live for. Not petulant, not petty, just truth, fearlessly delivered. You didn’t argue. You declared. You met dismissal with poetry-as-bullet, and dared them to flinch.
Thank you for that story, Juan José! It’s a reminder that writing isn’t always about being understood. Sometimes, it’s about leaving the kind of silence that echoes.
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.
This is a feral truth-dive, and I’m grateful for every sharp, unsanitised edge of it. You didn’t offend, you articulated something most people feel but are too diplomatically housebroken to say aloud. And yes, please, more of this kind of danger. No safe words, no disclaimers, just intellectual honesty that burns.
Your point about creativity not being teachable, only witnessed, nurtured, or occasionally contaminated, rings loud. It’s that uncomfortable heresy in a culture obsessed with scalable outcomes and “talent pipelines”. The myth we’re sold is that everyone can be anything with enough reps and rubrics. But you’re so right, true creators didn’t come through the curriculum. They came through obsession. Through curiosity before curriculum, expression before evaluation.
And yes, the classroom often feels like a museum guard patrolling the wild garden of early genius, asking it to please colour inside the lines, and to do so objectively, with citations.
“So ‘creation’ becomes an endless display of what you know”. And the result? A generation of brilliantly competent people unable to make anything that matters. The work impresses the committee but forgets to look anyone in the eye.
I’d even add that what frightens institutions most is not just the idea that we aren’t all the same, but that greatness might be unteachable. That some gifts defy frameworks, that some voices arrive like weather — untameable, unrepeatable, unscheduled.
Let’s stop pretending writing is a software update and admit what it really is: a haunting. And haunted people don’t always speak in APA format.
Thank you for this, Andrew! Truly. Especially when it’s coming from one of the most brilliant, analytical and talented writers on Substack, whose layered pieces are memorable.
Agree Andrew. Love these thoughts. I think the true creatives learn through life experience. Anything deemed official just seems to stifle. Most true creatives don’t want to learn a magic formula, they just want the magic, however it may come.
Absolutely, they don’t want the formula, they want the magic. Real creatives are allergic to prescriptions. They would rather trip over a truth than be handed a polished process.
Life is the only real MFA that matters, full of wrong turns, heartbreak, obsession, accidental brilliance, and late-night epiphanies scribbled on receipts. What’s “official” often feels like it’s trying to domesticate that wildness, to box the thunder. But magic doesn’t do well in cages. It comes how it comes, half-drunk, uninvited, out of order, and the true creatives?…. they just make space and listen.
Yeah, that too! 😂😳
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.
What a breathtaking gift of a comment, thank you, Céline! I read it with that mixture of gratitude and emotional vertigo that only comes when someone sees the wound beneath my work.
Of course, the worst writing isn’t flawed, it’s forgettable. (Sigh…) It doesn’t bruise, doesn’t blush, doesn’t look anyone in the eye. I know that shame of rereading something polished and feeling… nothing. Like hearing your own voice on tape, stripped of its urgency. You think, I did all the right things. Why does it feel so hollow? Because the right things aren’t always the real things.
And this idea of an “unworkshop”? Yes. God, yes. A room where we don’t aim to please but to pierce. Where the only rule is: if your hands aren’t shaking, go deeper. Where grammar is optional but honesty is mandatory. Where we read aloud the sentences we almost deleted out of fear they were “too much”. Let’s build that space. Call it church, call it a séance, call it a literary rave… I’m in!
Also, if you’re not publishing yet because of those polished-but-anaesthetised drafts, maybe that’s the sign: publish the one that bleeds. The imperfect, unruly one. The one that embarrasses you a little. That’s the one people need.
Let’s not write to be remembered. Let’s write to be felt. Thank you for reminding me why I do this! Again and again.
Celíne - YES! I will now belong to an ungroup that asks the question, "Did you say/write something you aren't supposed to? Did you bleed?" Gah. That's it.
100% that’s it!
unworkshop is a great idea!
Thank you.
Tamara, this is masterful—both in theme and execution. Your subject is as vital as it is underdiscussed, and your articulation carries the rare charge of something both felt and thought. As someone working in the art world, where we constantly wrestle with the tension between formal mastery and emotional resonance, your comparison between writing and sex, between structure and surrender, hits with unnerving clarity.
There’s a direct parallel in visual art: in academic painting, for instance, students are trained to reproduce form, anatomy, lightin—all the visible “rules.” And yet, many of the works that move us most deeply (from Schiele to Basquiat) break those rules with unapologetic urgency. Their linework might be “incorrect,” but the pulse is unmistakable. Like the IKEA sentence you mention, technically perfect art can become decorative—cold, admired, but unloved. The same way a room can be curated for Instagram but never truly lived in.
You’ve illuminated the real danger: when craft eclipses conviction, and when fear of being "wrong" sterilizes the very instinct that led us to the page—or canvas—in the first place. Technique is important, yes, but when it becomes the endpoint instead of the foundation, we get literature (or art) that is grammatically correct and spiritually bankrupt.
Thank you for this searing reminder, not just to write (or make) better, but to risk more, feel more, and above all, mean it.
What a stunning comment, Alexander! That phrase, “grammatically correct and spiritually bankrupt”, yes, exactly! 100%. And I like how you brought the art world into the conversation, because it’s in visual art that this tension between form and ferocity becomes almost painfully visible. A Basquiat line may not follow any anatomical rule, but it bleeds. It knows. And that knowing hits harder than a thousand photorealistic renderings of a hand.
I sometimes think we have confused mastery with mimicry, when really, mastery means you can risk not using the tool. You know how to hold the brush, but you also know when to throw it across the room and finger-paint with fury. That kind of breaking is almost holy, not for effect, but from necessity.
So here’s to art that can decorate walls or fill bookshelves, but mainly confronts, disrupts, seduces, disorients. May we all dare to make things that are less admired and more felt.
I think in many ways the writing, the prose you describe comes from a poet’s heart. Fearless vulnerability, that nothing travels so deep within as metaphor.
I feel fortunate to have found you and your vulnerable heart.
You are a gifted poet.
A favorite poem, that for me, reflects the the writing experience you describe and share:
Poetry by Pablo Neruda
And it was at that age ... Poetry arrived
in search of me. I don't know, I don't know where
it came from, from winter or a river.
I don't know how or when,
no, they were not voices, they were not
words, nor silence,
but from a street I was summoned,
from the branches of night,
abruptly from others,
among violent fires
or returning alone,
there I was without a face
and it touched me.
I did not know what to say, my mouth
had no way
with names,
my eyes were blind,
and something started in my soul,
fever or forgotten wings,
and I made my own way,
deciphering
that fire,
and I wrote the first faint line,
faint, without substance, pure
nonsense,
pure wisdom
of someone who knows nothing,
and suddenly I saw
the heavens
unfastened
and open,
planets,
palpitating plantations,
shadow perforated,
riddled
with arrows, fire and flowers,
the winding night, the universe.
And I, infitesimal being,
drunk with the great starry
void,
likeness, image of
mystery,
for myself a pure part of the abyss,
I wheeled with the stars,
my heart broke loose on the wind.
(Translated form the Spanish by Alastair Reid)
Ohhh what a gift this is! You brought Neruda into the room like an invocation, and now everything feels more electric. That poem is the thing I was trying to describe, only distilled, exalted, and set alight. “And I, infinitesimal being, drunk with the great starry void…” — that’s the pulse, the ache, the terrifying beauty of writing when it’s no longer performance but possession.
You’re right, what I’m chasing on the page is less a narrative arc and more a poetic combustion. Something metaphoric, metaphysical, maybe even mystical. Prose with a poet’s heart, yes, but also a poet’s hunger. A need to name the unnameable without dissecting it.
Your generosity humbles me. I’m honoured to be found by a reader like you, someone who understands that the faint line, the “pure nonsense, pure wisdom”, is how it always starts. And I’ll carry your words, fearless vulnerability, nothing travels so deep within as metaphor. That is a poet speaking, too.
Thank you, Michael, for Neruda, for your kindness, and for reminding me why I keep answering the page like it’s a question only the soul can hear!
Wonderful, Michael.
What a formidable piece! No wonder why we are all captivated by all your essays. This feels like an explanatory note — why Tamara writes so damn well? Because she does know how to write! Good writing is seen and felt right away. Chapeau!
Thank you, Clara, truly! I’m grinning and blushing in equal measure. But here’s the secret, if this essay feels like an explanation for why I write “so damn well”, it’s probably because it’s stitched together from all the times I almost didn’t. From the self-doubt, the false starts, the drafts that felt like furniture and not fire.
Good writing, as you say, is felt first. But the feeling doesn’t come from mastery, it comes from…. risk. From letting the words misbehave until they show you something real. That’s the only compass I trust: if it doesn’t shake me a little, it won’t move anyone else.
So thank you for feeling it! And thank you for saying “chapeau”, I’ll take that as a velvet crown passed around among rebels who still believe in sentences with teeth.
How formidable you are! All my admiration and love.
Spontaneity, arising out of the blue, out of ones breath, one's sweat, uncertainty, out of a daimonic depth in us we can only call mystery. The left brain serving the right, like McGilchrist's The Master and His Emissary. Staying true to the spark in our life like the nocturnal dream at the roots of the waking ego's world's, Persephone's Hadean dark side infusing her Jovian day with uncanny intelligences unobtainable any other way, and opening us up like offerings to the gods to work their magic in our masked play lives. To Be or Not to Be, ah, that is the question, yes?
Ah, yes, that is the question! And you’ve danced with it like someone who knows that asking it is the point, not answering it.
Your words move like myth, dream, invocation, the daimon breathing through syntax, reminding us that our lives are structured and enchanted. That there is a kind of knowing that doesn’t explain itself but erupts from sweat, breath, half-remembered symbols, and the shadows we politely avoid in daylight. McGilchrist’s model is exactly right here: the left brain must serve the right, not rule it. Logic is the emissary, but the dream is the sovereign.
I like your invocation of Persephone — half wildflower, half underworld — and how she carries both realms in her walk. Isn’t that what we are all doing? Holding the mask in one hand and the offering in the other, hoping the gods notice? Or perhaps they already have, and the noticing must now come from us?
Thank you for this poetic, protean reply. You speak like someone who knows the labyrinth, has made peace with its minotaur.
The gods have never left, we have and now we must do the work to recognize their influence in our everyday lives. Astrology is the best place to find their presence especially with one's natal chart. That fingerprint of their constellation in your life at birth is a window to your soul, and the god-factors shaping the contours of our journey through the stages of our storied existence are exemplified in that blueprint, being design-built daily into the edifice of ones life. Debra Silverman is an virtuoso contemporary for this kind of god-talk. Bottom line though is the IMAGINATION, the right brain's images, in our nocturnal REM cycles. You are right on, the dream is sovereign. That's where the real action is for each of us. Someone like Robert Moss as a mentor-guide to our imaginal right brain, through the the gate of dreams, with shamanic drumming as well to aid in our dream traveling, is the work most needed now to steer our humanity back from the brink of utter nihilism and virtual extinction from its tyrannical left brained dominance. Thank you for your response, it brought a tear of resonance that is most deeply felt! May the Mercurial Museguided Spider Grandmother keep weaving the web of words to catch the flying thoughts buzzing round one's head! A'ho.
Another shimmering, mythic reply, woven with the threads of stars, symbols, and ancestral knowing. I feel like you’ve just opened a trapdoor beneath the essay and let us fall into the real conversation: not about writing or craft or even art, but about remembrance, of what we are, what we’ve forgotten, and what still pulses in the dreamtime if we dare to listen.
Right, the gods never left. We turned down the volume, replaced myth with metrics, and traded symbols for syllabi. But they are still humming beneath the surfaces of our lives, nudging through metaphor, whispering in the architecture of our natal charts, slipping into our dreams disguised as archetypes, as animals, as that strange sentence that feels like it was written for you and no one else. Imagination isn’t decoration, it’s translation. It’s how the right brain re-members what the left forgot.
Debra Silverman, yes. Robert Moss, absolutely. And your invocation of the dream as sovereign, that’s the drumbeat I want more of in our culture. Dreams as maps. Dreams as messages. Not psychology’s leftovers, but the frontline dispatches from what the gods still dare to show us. And what a phrase… “god-factors shaping the contours of our journey”, that’s poetic cosmology at its finest.
And then this line: “May the Mercurial Museguided Spider Grandmother keep weaving the web of words to catch the flying thoughts buzzing round one’s head!”… ohhh I feel that in my bones. In my fingers. That’s the prayer I’ll whisper before writing from now on.
Thank you for this reverent, radiant reply. The gods are grinning.
Monday is the Moon, Tuesday is Mars, Wednesday is Mercury, Thursday is Jupiter, Friday is Venus, Saturn-day and Sun-day. Each day is a god-day. And remembrance, Moss goes into by evoking the original form of it, "anamnesis: remembering the knowledge that belonged to us, on the level of soul and spirit, before we came to this world." And yes the need is for an hermeneutics which opens the portal for an experiential approach to the reality of meaning cohering in the imaginal and not get lost in left brained semiotics that can only point. Also my thought is there could be three 10 day weeks per month to account for all our planetary influences, as the 7 day weeks are from an era before telescopes could see past Saturn. That would put things back in a right brained order tout de suite and balance our account with the forgotten Uranus, Neptune and Pluto. Then surely the gods would RSVP to humanity's plea for continuity! And bless you and your constancy in attending with such perspicacity your commenters, like an ace tennis player raising the level of gamesmanship of ones opponent to the highest skill set at ones disposal! Game, set, match.
Ah, Tamara!
:
Iain McGilchrist’s theories
Spring to mind:
The tension between
The right brain and the left.
How might they play-out
In creative writing courses?
:
The right hemisphere:
Metaphorical thinker,
Holistic perceiver:
Fulfilling the writer’s need to
Capture the complexity
Of human experience.
:
The left brain:
Over-plotting;
Excessive Analysis;
Rigid adherence to the rules.
Often practiced by the class leader
(Not realising it’s left over right).
:
The right brain yearns for
Exercises in observation,
Sensory detail, and
Intuitive response.
Not happy under the domination
Of left-brained mind-traps.
:
(The only creative writing class
I ever joined had an organiser Who was a Librarian:
Very left-brained.
“Alles ist in Ordnung”
I didn’t last long there!)
:
The Muse leaves space for the right brain to thrive.
She helps to integrate both modes:
Nurturing the left’s precision in service
To support the right’s wisdom -
About what truly matters to be human.
:
You and your Muse,
Guide us every night
In this magical place.
Picking a topic
Upon which we all ponder
And converse to midnight and beyond!
:
A truly magical experience
:
Thank you both! So much!
:
Lorne
Thank you, Lorne! And McGilchrist’s hemispheric dance is the perfect frame for what so often goes unspoken in writing spaces, that what we call “craft” has, in many classrooms, become a coup d’état by the left hemisphere. Plot points, word counts, pacing metrics… order reigns. But where is awe? Where is the shimmering ambiguity that only the right brain knows how to name without explaining?
I love how you phrased it: “the Muse leaves space for the right brain to thrive”. Yes. She’s not a scheduler or a taskmaster, she’s a trespasser, a seductress, a keeper of chaos who visits when rules are sleeping and certainty is dimmed. And when both hemispheres are allowed to converse rather than compete? That’s when the page sings in a frequency that feels both precise and wild.
May we all keep resisting “Alles ist in Ordnung” when it sterilises what aches to live unlabelled. May we honour the mess, the mystery, the metaphor that arrives without credentials. And may we keep this midnight salon alive, weaving together thought and intuition, grammar and gasp.
With gratitude, me and the Muse, both.
Hemispheric Dancing
At a distance!
How awesome is that!
Imagine! :)
Fuuuuuuuuuck this is good.
Only the second article I've read of yours. And the second to make me FEEL more alive and seen and whole. Healed, even.
Unforgettable, Tamara. Gotta upgrade to paid post haste and send this to the handful of brilliant people I know will get it. Thanks, Queen.
Thank you, Grace! That’s the kind of comment that makes every unruly, pulse-risking sentence worth it. If something I wrote made you feel more alive and whole, then I’m doing the only kind of writing I ever wanted to do. Not just clever. Not just crafted. But charged!!!
And you just reminded me why we don’t write for algorithms or gatekeepers, we write for that small tribe of brilliant, mad-feeling people who get it. Who read a sentence and feel something rearrange inside them.
So thank you, truly! For reading, for feeling, for saying “fuck” like it’s a blessing. Queen sees Queen.
Flannery O'Connor's "Revelation" is one of the most haunting stories that punches me each time. And who can forget the Misfit. Kurt Vonnegut fits in this regard for me, too. They did not write like students but like lovers with their own quirky imagination. I think this early phrase in your piece nails so much - "Our age perfects performance while mistrusting presence." AI will play another role going forward. I would rather rely on a circle of people who with honesty respond to what I write. Thanks for pushing beyond the safety.
O’Connor and Vonnegut both wrote like people possessed by their own visions, not participants in a well-behaved literary seminar. There’s that glorious unpredictability to their work, a spiritual and stylistic recklessness, that makes their sentences live. They weaponised the edges, with no intention of smoothing them.
“Revelation” wounds differently every time, I agree. It’s more than a story, it’s a divine slap. And the Misfit? He’s a character who refuses to be archived or domesticated. He doesn’t sit politely in the syllabus, he lingers in your moral nervous system.
As for AI….. don’t even get me started…. it’s a powerful tool, but it’s not a compass, it can’t feel for us. The algorithm knows structure; it does not ache. That’s why your instinct to return to a circle of humans, with pulses and imperfections and honest reactions is everything. That’s the real workshop. Not consensus, but communion.
Thank you, Hans, for seeing where my essay was trying to go, and for carrying it even further.
What an X-ray plate of the “creative writing business” you have shot! And yet, it’s a bit like the flu you have to pass it to get the antibodies. Eons ago, in San Francisco I attended one of those workshops. My teacher was quite tolerant with the dark haired kid with the tentative English, but still destroyed the poem I submitted. He crossed every pretty flourish I was so proud off and wrote KYD in big capital letters, in the bottom of the page. When I asked for the meaning of it his answer was: Kill Your Darlings.
Ahhh see…. KYD, the eternal initiation rite of every writer who’s ever dared to show up with something tender and overgrown. What a vivid memory you’ve shared. And yes, it is like the flu, isn’t it? You go in thinking you are there to learn how to write, and end up shedding layers of self-delusion, affectation, and ornamental defence mechanisms until what remains is leaner, truer, a little bruised, but undeniably yours.
Thar early wound seems strange but sacred at the same time — your dark-haired younger self, tentative English in hand, getting sliced open by critique and still coming back. That’s the real test. Not talent, not vocabulary, but persistence through deflation.
And now, you tell that story with elegance and irony, which tells me you survived the flu, and you kept the antibodies. And the poetry!
With your impeccable grammar and syntax is not easy dares to write, my
impostor syndrome is very aware of that.
Ohhh, I feel this deeply. But let me tell you a secret: impeccable grammar is just foreplay. The real magic happens when you let the sentences misbehave a little, when you write the thing that wants to be written, not the one that would earn a gold star in class. Impostor syndrome thrives on comparison, but what shuts it up fastest is desire. Write what burns, not what behaves. Grammar can always be tidied later. Voice? That’s the real danger… and the real gift, Juan Carlos!
Thanks Tamara very generous words, the reason that motivated me to follow you was when I read your essay about HUNGRY FOR MORE that really hit me! and to tell you the truth every time I read you I feel like there is an Olivetti inside me, I can hear the sounds, I just want to express myself I want to write like you, Wittgenstein says something about private language and public language and when you write I can understand what he means, but unfortunately I have a huge bureaucracy represented in my super ego that it has an impeccable grammar to make me understand that I can’t do it, so I think I need a little bit of healthy narcissism to overcome that .
What a stunning image, that Olivetti inside you, clicking to life every time something in my words resonates. That’s evidence, obviously, not flattery. Proof that the writer in you is already there, waiting, pacing, impatient for permission you don’t need.
Of course Wittgenstein was right. Language is never fully private, but when it’s true, it creates a kind of shared electricity. You read a sentence and feel like someone found the frequency of your mind before you even tuned in yourself. That’s what writing should do.
As for your bureaucratic superego with its impeccable grammar? Fire him. Or at least demote him to copyeditor. He can come in after the mess, not before. Because what you need first isn’t more correctness, it’s more permission. And yes, a dose of healthy narcissism (the kind that believes your voice is worth hearing) is survival.
Write like no one’s checking your punctuation. Because the soul doesn’t speak in MLA format. It howls, it whispers, it repeats itself, it forgets what it started, and that’s the kind of writing that lives.
So, open the drawer! Let the Olivetti speak!
"...where danger and longing overlap." Yessssss. This is my invitation. But/and I want to pepper you with questions about your writing training, your process, your habits, your writing group even, all to underatand and maybe glean some of the magic I read in every piece you share here...but I know that's simply a distraction, a procrastination, a way for me to not sit and bleed out my own urgent words. Ooof.
Oh, I felt that ooof.
And yes, that impulse to ask about process, to peer behind the curtain, to collect the “how” like talismans… it’s so human. But it’s also, as you said with such honesty, a beautiful form of avoidance. Because you already know: the answers won’t save you from the terrifying miracle of the blank page. Only writing will.
But here’s a bit of truth, since you asked: there is no secret. No pristine ritual. Just a lot of false starts, muttered curses, sudden electricity, and the occasional sentence that feels like it was waiting for me. I have no perfect routine, just a refusal to give up on the ache. The ache to say the thing that’s too much. The thing that trembles. The thing that costs something to write.
So don’t let curiosity become a cage. Let it burn long enough to break open the dam. Sit down. Bleed it out. Let it be unpolished, unready, and absolutely alive. I’ll be here cheering you on, one bloodied sentence at a time, Angie!
Love this! This is how I've been feeling. Like letting an imposter write for me. I almost let perfectionism write my first post. Thank you for articulating how I've been feeling.
I know that imposter well… mine wears glasses, edits in real time, and talks like some sort of coach with a God complex. Perfectionism always wants to ghostwrite the first draft. It promises safety, polish, a standing ovation… but delivers a story that doesn’t sweat, doesn’t ache, doesn’t breathe.
The real voice, the one that made you want to write in the first place, is not tidy. It’s unruly, obsessive, tender, contradictory. It wants to confess something dangerous, not impress someone distant. So let the imperfect post be your first revolt. Let the imposter sulk in the corner while you hit “publish” with trembling hands. That tremble? That’s the signal you’ve found the real pulse. And how I love that pulse!
I dropped my first novel, hid it in my archives. It'll probably never see the light of day. The imposter took over midway and it's not what I intended anymore. Too polished, too "mass market" too clean, too safe. Such a people pleaser.
But, it really does take a lot of courage to just write. The vulnerability of sharing something so raw, so honest. So... me. In this moment. On the internet. So permanent. When I'm changing.
Your post helps. I have it saved when I need a reminder. Thank you.
Ahhhh the first novel, both a birth and a betrayal. We all have one buried somewhere, dressed in our best intentions and smothered by the voices we let in too early. That novel of yours? It’s not a failure, it’s a fossil. Proof that you once risked becoming a writer, even before you knew what you truly needed to say.
And yes, writing raw honesty now, online, permanently, while you are still shifting, doubting, growing? Good! Brace! Magical! Because permanence is an illusion anyway. What matters is that you leave a trace of who you were when the truth first hit you.
And don’t let the imposter win just because they polished the apple and made it bland. Pick it back up one day, maybe not to publish, but to mine. There’s treasure in even your compromises. And if not? Then leave it as a monument to the version of you who still showed up to the page.
I’m honoured that you saved my post. But here’s your reminder, distilled: write like you are alive, not like you are being watched. That’s what makes it matter.
Tom Jay writes this: "I learned the truth of the muse: that inspired language...originates not in personal cleverness but in the fertility of language itself...poems are not made, they're born and raised, like orphans left crying at your door. Language has a life of its own, and words...are not so much tools as organisms, evolved symbiots living in the breathed edge between our psyches and creation, between humans and the cosmos. Language is metaphoric. It bears our attention beyond ourselves towards the world. Rather than sharpening, oiling and polishing our terms we do better to respect our words as if they were plants and animals; attend their generosity and wisdom rather than manipulate their resource." So, by paying attention to the words coming through us while writing seems to automatically block out the notion of self-consciousness, being alive to the sea of language one is swimming in, through the terms that come to mind from a deeper intelligence inherent in our mother tongue. So don't dabble ones toes to see if its tepid or cold, jump right in and let the current carry us away! "Language is a fertile liquid."
This is exquisite, thank you for bringing Tom Jay’s wisdom to the circle. That passage pulses with the kind of reverence we too often forget to offer language, treating it like currency instead of what it is: a living current. His line, “poems are not made, they’re born and raised, like orphans left crying at your door”, gave me chills. That’s truth dressed in skin.
And yes, when we truly attend to the words coming through us, self-consciousness dissolves. Ego exits. What enters is something closer to communion. Not writing about the world, but with it. Language stops being a tool and starts behaving like weather: you don’t control it, you listen, feel, respond.
The invitation, then, isn’t to compose but to compost. To let words rot, bloom, tangle, feed each other. Not polish them into clarity but let them thrum with the dirt and mystery they came from.
Language is a fertile liquid. What a phrase. Let’s stop trying to bottle it. Let’s jump, headfirst, and drown beautifully!
Thank you for the reminder 💜
Radical, beautiful resonance to the nines! You rock the ground swell of this world of words Tamara, in these rejoinders! Another line or two from Tom Jay: "Kuma is from the Greek verb Kuein (to be pregnant). One fair name for the muse is Kuma, a swollen wave, a sprout...She announces herself in a whispered roar and breaks radiantly on our peculiar shores...Language is naturally erotic, a nearly forgotten form of love, the caress of shaped breath. Denied its connection, its Eros, we wither in the alienating self-reflection of jargons. I see language as the spoken record of myriad meetings between humans and the cosmos, two natures woven into wisdom, a fertile border, a skin with soul on either side, a semi-permeable membrane, a go-between, a Janus-headed Robin Hood, mercurial, tricky and true, inside out a glove that fits either hand...weird old words."
Splendid!
Can’t tell you how much I love this. Not that I’ve attended too many creative writing classes except for the casual university courses some ten years ago, but I’ve always felt that writing technique; be it in books, YouTube videos or advice from fellow writers, just puts a name – and a frame, for that matter – on all things writing that I have mostly acted out on intuitively.
I’ve written two and a half
manuscripts and a lot of poetry & think pieces for online magazines all in my native tongue (German) – and sadly, or maybe luckily? , the best pieces , the most magical and emotional ones, are the ones that had not been corrected and edited by a professional editor. I also feel like most of my older texts are way better than the current ones – because lately I have adopted a mindset of polishing, applying what Ive learned instead of just writing from intuitive flow.
So there’s one of my main take aways: intuitive creativity always wins. Because that’s where the magic lives.
Yes, yes, a thousand times yes. You’ve named something most writers feel but rarely say aloud, that the moment we start writing with our “learned” brain (measuring, polishing, proving) we often lose the wild, urgent pulse that made us pick up the pen in the first place.
And I like how you framed it: technique gives names and frames to things you already knew intuitively. That’s the paradox, right? It helps us understand what we do but it can also train us to second-guess what once came effortlessly. Suddenly, we are writing for approval, not from aliveness.
And your instinct about your older, unedited pieces? That tracks. That early work, unconcerned with perfection, totally in love with the moment of expression is beautifully untamed. Sometimes editors prune the thorns that gave the flower its scent. And yes, there’s a place for refinement but the soul of the work always lives in that intuitive first surge.
Agreed, intuitive creativity always wins. It may not win awards. It may not please algorithms. But it moves people. And that’s the whole point, isn’t it?
Thank you for this, Kim! Keep trusting your unedited self. That’s where your voice roars.
Tamara, you’ve done it again. Reached into your being to extract words, images and feelings to ignite sparklers of recognition in our minds. Since everyone harbors “a quiet, seditious itch to write,” your pointed comments on writer’s classes (“That anxious desire to please the room”) became a mini-writer’s course more valuable than a two week conference in Tuscany. When you wrote “Write what embarrassed you,” I feel emboldened to continue a book of my life I started just after my wife died a year ago. I’m Michael, the 85 year old former priest, who studied art in a Hollywood college in 1968 run by Catholic nuns the year before I became a priest. During that summer I has affairs with three nuns and the first sentence of my book is “My first blowjob came from the lips of a Catholic nun.” Embarrassment has held me back from continuing, but I have much to say about struggling with male emotions while wearing a Roman collar. You’ve encouraged me as you have so many of your fond readers. Again, thank you.
Michael, I’m speechless — and then not speechless at all! That first sentence is the epitome of boldness, it’s an open wound dressed as a revelation. It’s the kind of line that kicks the door in and sits at the table with trembling hands and a truth no one dared to say before. That is witnessing.
And what you just shared? That’s the book I want to read. Not because it’s salacious, but because it’s honest. Because it speaks into the unbearable silence so many men, and especially those behind pulpits or uniforms, have been forced to carry. Your voice has lived a thousand lives, and now it’s time to let it tell them. All of them. Messy. Erotic. Devout. Conflicted. Human.
Embarrassment is the doorman to the cathedral of real writing. You’ve just walked in. And we, your readers, your witnesses, your circle, are here for every goddamn page.
Write it, Michael! Not for redemption. Not for applause. But because you still can. And that’s a kind of resurrection no doctrine ever prepared us for….
I would be the first to read you! I’m here!
P.S. now I feel the need to write an essay that starts with that sentence…. God, you inspired me!
Writing is like a person who puts an egg on a spoon, bites it with his mouth, and then climbs a ladder. His focus is on the egg for fear of falling, and he feels the rungs of the ladder with his feet. The egg is the idea, and the steps of climbing are the skill of composition. Any stumble in the steps makes the idea lose its integrity.
What a gorgeously strange and precise metaphor, I like it! The egg-in-the-mouth image captures that terrifying fragility of a fresh idea, still uncooked, still trembling. And yes, every sentence is a rung… too rushed, and you slip; too cautious, and you lose the rhythm. Writing becomes an act of full-body concentration — mouth, feet, mind, heart all in sync, all at risk.
But I’d add that sometimes the egg needs to crack. Sometimes the mess it makes when it shatters is the real art. The yolk on your shirt, the stumble halfway up, that’s where something raw and human spills out. Integrity isn’t always about preservation. Sometimes it’s about TRANSFORMATION.
So climb carefully, yes! But don’t be afraid to break the shell!
Who said that the egg does not break?
Out of a hundred eggs, only one makes it to the fryer.
True!
Oh, I actually fought back, writing in the black board a line of Gabriel Celaya and daring him to NYD it: "Poetery is as weapon loader with Future/Aiming at your Chest". Thanks as always, Tamara.
That is legendary. I can see the scene: the silent room, the chalk in your hand, the line burning onto the board like a manifesto. “Poetry is a weapon loaded with the future / Aiming at your chest.” Celaya would nod solemnly and light something on fire in your honour.
That’s the kind of defiance I live for. Not petulant, not petty, just truth, fearlessly delivered. You didn’t argue. You declared. You met dismissal with poetry-as-bullet, and dared them to flinch.
Thank you for that story, Juan José! It’s a reminder that writing isn’t always about being understood. Sometimes, it’s about leaving the kind of silence that echoes.