Not Everything I Write Is Meant to Be Published

I have been writing a lot lately, but probably not in the way people imagine when I tell them that I write.

I haven’t been working much on fiction. In fact, I haven’t felt particularly motivated to return to my fictional stories for some time. The characters are still there. The stories haven’t disappeared. I simply haven’t felt the pull to enter those worlds again.

Instead, most of my writing lately has been reflective.

Deeply reflective.

I’ve been writing about memories, experiences, relationships, questions, things I understand now that I didn’t understand years ago, and probably a few things I’m still trying to understand.

Some of it may eventually find its way into something I publish.

Most of it probably won’t.

And I’m beginning to realize that I’m okay with that.

Writing Without an Audience

There is an interesting shift that happens when you stop asking, Would someone want to read this?

You start asking different questions.

What am I actually trying to say?

Why do I remember this?

Why does this still matter to me?

What do I understand differently now?

There is freedom in writing something that doesn’t have to become a blog post, a memoir, a novel, or anything else.

Sometimes the page can simply be the place where a thought gets to exist.

For someone who loves writing, that may sound obvious. But we live in a time when we’re constantly encouraged to turn the things we create into something—content, a product, a brand, a finished project.

I’m learning that some words don’t need an audience.

Sometimes writing is simply a conversation with yourself.

Returning to Old Books

Interestingly, while my desire to write fiction has been quiet, my desire to read hasn’t disappeared.

I’ve found myself returning to books I’ve read before.

Right now, I’m rereading two very different works: Albert Camus’s The Stranger and the Book of Enoch.

Putting those two titles next to each other makes me smile a little because they couldn’t appear more different.

One is a twentieth-century novel often associated with questions of absurdity, alienation, meaning, and the human condition.

The other is an ancient religious text filled with visions, angels, judgment, heavenly realms, and questions about humanity’s relationship with the divine.

And somehow, I find both fascinating.

Maybe that isn’t as strange a pairing as it initially seems.

Both make me stop.

Both make me question things.

Both make me think about what it means to be human and how people throughout history have tried to understand existence, morality, death, judgment, and our place in a world that doesn’t always make sense.

I don’t necessarily read because I expect a book to give me answers.

Sometimes I read because I appreciate a book that gives me better questions.

The Book Changes Because the Reader Does

There is another reason I’ve come to appreciate rereading.

The words on the page haven’t changed.

I have.

A book I read at twenty may not feel like the same book when I read it in my forties. Experiences accumulate. Beliefs evolve. Certainties become questions, and sometimes questions eventually become a different kind of certainty.

Things I once skimmed over suddenly stop me.

Ideas I accepted without much thought now make me pause.

And passages I once thought I understood can take on an entirely different meaning.

Maybe that is one of the beautiful things about books.

We don’t simply read them.

We bring ourselves to them.

Our history. Our questions. Our grief. Our curiosity. Our beliefs. Our doubts. Our experiences.

And every time we return, we bring a slightly different version of ourselves.

Maybe This Is My Writing Season

For now, I don’t know when I’ll return to writing fiction.

I’m trying not to force it.

The stories will be there when I’m ready for them.

Right now, I seem to be in a season of looking inward, putting experiences into words, revisiting ideas, and reading things that make me think.

Maybe none of those private pages will ever become a book.

Maybe some of them will.

I don’t think I need to decide that yet.

For now, it is enough to write because I need to write and to read because I am still curious.

And perhaps that’s what I’ve been rediscovering lately:

Not everything we write needs to be published.

Not every book we read needs to give us answers.

And sometimes we return to an old book not because the story has changed—

but because we have.