I used to be a writer, and the best thing about it was that there was no expectation; I wrote, and no one expected anything. It was private work—messy drafts, late-night notes, parcels of thought I could toss out or keep without explanation. That freedom is the engine of getting better: you try things that look stupid on the page, you fail fast, and you learn what’s worth rescuing. There’s a calm in knowing nobody’s billing you for your honest mistakes.
Once it was proven that I could write, there was a paradigm shift. After becoming a successful author and ghostwriter, the job kept the solitude but traded the quiet for a ledger of obligations. People—editors, clients, readers, family—started bringing their own maps to the table, each one convinced it was the best route. My inbox became a petition box. Suddenly, I’m not only creating work; I’m shepherding expectations. That’s the rub: being an author is still a solitary vocation, but everyone wants to steer your career to meet their expectations—not yours. Contracts, deadlines, social-media post schedules, promotion events, and well-meaning advice pile up and thin the time you have to do the thing that matters most: the private work where you risk being bad so you can one day be good.
What I tell writers now is to protect a corner of no-expectation time. Call it a practice run, a notebook hour, a wilderness route you reserve for yourself. Keep one piece of paper tucked away that knows only you. The rest—clients, launches, awards—are tools and obligations; useful, but they’re not the quiet that teaches skill. If you can hold on to that small, expectation-free patch of paper, you keep the part that made you a writer in the first place.
Hemingway famously wrote, “All you have to do is write one true sentence. Write the truest sentence that you know”. I agree; write that one true sentence for yourself; it’s your true north star.