Meta, Mirror, Megaphone — Writing About Writing About Writing, Again
Paris, Jul 17, 2025
Austin Kleon posted on Notes that one of the most boring things you can do on a platform is use it to talk about the platform, which is funny, because what is using the platform to talk about using the platform to talk about the platform? Too convoluted to find an adjective for, I guess. But I get it. It’s either that. Or writing about writing. Or growing your audience by explaining how to grow an audience. A lot of meta commentary on everything. Which is fine. At least the writing about writing part. Reminds me of the blogging heydays of the early 2000s.
So time to revisit my own Why I Write—writing about writing. Which means I have to revisit Joan Didion, because like for so many before and after me, her writing opened worlds to me when I was much, much younger. Someone else—not Austin Kleon—revisited her not that long ago too and pointed out her unchecked white privilege. So I’m torn. A bit apprehensive. Unchecked white privilege, male or female, is everywhere, and while it’s of course important to keep in mind and look for, it’s not the only lens one needs to look through. It also doesn’t dismiss or—what’s the word I’m looking for—cancel everything she thought, wrote, put out into the world, and the space she thereby created for other people to do the same.
Revisiting old favourites has its risks.
But Why I Write? Still worth reading.
I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.
That’s the sentence that always resonated with me the most.
I need to write for an audience though—non-existent for all I know or care, imaginary, a potential someone on the other end—for it to work. I don’t know why and it doesn’t matter, but writing for someone and sending my words out into the world (void?), unlike writing the same things down for myself, makes all the difference.
I’ve been writing every morning for years. Keeps me on track more than sane. Does absolutely f*** all for my creativity, despite what The Artist’s Way claims. Will never read it again—the idea alone sends shivers down my spine—and it’s not the same as this, here. But I can’t force myself to write like this, here, when it’s just for myself. I’ve tried.
So it probably makes sense that the thing that resonated with me most upon rereading Joan Didion today was the very beginning:
In many ways, writing is the act of saying I, of imposing oneself upon other people, of saying listen to me, see it my way, change your mind. It’s an aggressive, even a hostile act. You can disguise its aggressiveness all you want with veils of subordinate clauses and qualifiers and tentative subjunctives, with ellipses and evasions—with the whole manner of intimating rather than claiming, of alluding rather than stating—but there’s no getting around the fact that setting words on paper is the tactic of a secret bully, an invasion, an imposition of the writer’s sensibility on the reader’s most private space.
How did this not register with me before? Especially since I was always aware of my need of an audience. I am a secret bully.
Maybe I had to get to an age where I started to care less, to give fewer fucks, to stop—or at least tone down—the people-pleasing and the don’t-cause-any-waves-smile-be-nice that women are socialized into. To not just realize this, but appreciate it.
Most everything else she goes on about? Not really all that interesting. At the moment. Because my relationship with this text will undoubtedly change again.
Writing, it turns out, is less about arriving at answers and more about creating places to return to. Joan Didion, blogs from 2003, the weird shape of my own thoughts—I come back not because I’m looking for something final, but because I want to see how I’ve changed. I want to press my finger to the glass and notice the new smudges, the fingerprints I don’t remember leaving. And maybe that’s what keeps the writing alive, even when it feels tired, even when it loops back on itself and becomes one more essay about essays, one more post about posts.
