It is hardly a new thought to observe that writing is a lonely affair, a conversation with oneself played out on the keyboard in the hope that others will eventually listen in. There are, however, different kinds of loneliness. Writing journalism, as I have extensively done—be it in the form of interviews, reviews, or reportage—is more in the way of writing to order, and, as such, requires less of the suspension of disbelief that writing fiction demands, less blind hope that there is an audience out there to receive what you have to offer.

In journalism, there is an assignment to be filled, an editor waiting impatiently on the other end to receive it, and your observing self is put in the service of something outside yourself—a book, a film, a celebrity, a public event, a war. Writing of this kind does not require an inner engagement with one’s imaginative capacities so much as an engagement with the ongoing world and an ability to comment articulately on that world, whether in a micro or macro fashion. There has always been this kind of writing—now commonly referred to as “long-form journalism”— and although there are fewer venues than there once were, it is still published by a handful of magazines and, at its best, has a certain heft, a spaciousness of reflection. 

With the advent of digital culture and social media, however, this sort of writing has mutated into quick takes—let’s call them punditry—and has been given a fresh impetus by the general speediness with which our culture consumes news. Opinions on everything from who wore what to the Tonys to President Donald Trump’s calling up of the National Guard proliferate on Substack and podcasts, Instagram, and Facebook. There is so much of this form of instant, untested, and reflexive response, by both lesser- and better-known writers, that you can spend half your day wading through it. 

How much of this polarised media babble adds to anyone’s understanding of current events is anyone’s guess. Certainly, these pieces are chock-full of ostensible facts, factoids, historical tidbits, and references to earlier perspectives on the situation under discussion.  Still,  they often—at least to my intractably Luddite way of thinking—seem like reductive sidebars, tossed off by people with big egos and a determination to be in the limelight, rather than an intricate part of what should be a larger, more complex exchange. I might add, just for the record, that they are mostly written by men. And I would also add that in times as culturally fragmented as ours, riven by identity politics and lacking a common sense of history or literature, chasing the limelight is something of a fool’s errand, best achieved by hiring an expensive publicist or time-consumingly building a platform on social media.

What I would like to focus on here is a distinct form of writing, namely, creative writing that draws its inspiration from personal experiences. This is writing that comes from inside out and is openly subjective, calling on external reality as it sees fit, but not subsumed by it. It is the prevailing impulse behind novels, memoirs, poetry, and personal essays, inviting us to share an individual story that might resonate with others.