On a snowy Sunday morning in February 1808, the poet William Wordsworth was walking along Fleet Street in London. He’d just been to visit his friend, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, in his lodgings on the Strand. Coleridge was at a low ebb: stuck in an unhappy marriage, weighed down by perennial financial difficulties, mentally blocked from writing, in poor health and addicted to opium. The visit had a lowering effect on Wordsworth’s own spirits. Walking along Fleet Street, eyes downcast, “ear sleeping”, feet moving automatically, he was absorbed in sombre thoughts.

But then something made him look up. A vision lay before him: Fleet Street blanketed with snow, “silent, empty, pure white”, and, at the end of it, the “huge and majestic form” of Saint Paul’s Cathedral. It was a spellbinding moment: the great thoroughfare temporarily devoid of carts and carriages, the cathedral looming blurrily out of the still-falling snowflakes – a real-life snow globe. “I cannot say how much I was affected at this unthought-of sight,” Wordsworth told his friend and patron, Sir George Beaumont, in a letter he wrote a few days later. “What a blessing I feel there is in habits of exalted imagination.” The great London silence was another piece in his accumulating pile of evidence that intuiting something beyond yourself is the route to becoming morally magnificent.

Silence has inspired, daunted, comforted and terrified writers throughout the long course of English literature. One of the earliest English poems, The Wanderer, composed in the language of the Anglo-Saxons, communicates the sheer strangeness of silence via an alien grey seascape in which the protagonist is utterly alone. This silence is composed not of complete noiselessness, for the hail beats on the waves and a seabird occasionally mews, but of an intense and total absence of human voices.

This is way more satisfying than a book-tour excerpt. Also, it features Barton Springs. Essentially, the thesis is "write what you know" -- but it certainly helps to have led an interesting life ahead of doing so.

I often write the first paragraph of a story in a notebook, add to it every so often or leave it there to see if something might emerge from it. In 2008, in San Francisco, I went with three friends on a hike near Muir Woods overlooking the Pacific Ocean. At the summit, there was a kind of lodge where you could get a bed for the night and use the kitchen to make your own dinner. The view was spectacular.

As we climbed, I began to imagine a character, an Irish guy who had made up his mind to go home. This was his last big outing in the landscape. He had been working as a plumber. Dotted in the Bay Area were houses where he had repaired pipes and installed new sinks and toilets and washing machines. This was his legacy in America. He was someone who could be depended on in an emergency. But he was illegal and he was going home.

Over the next few years, the story became more solid. If my character left America, he knew that he would never be allowed back. He had a daughter from a marriage that had ended. He was crazy about her. If he left, he would lose the connection with her. I imagined him having one last day out with his daughter in that beautiful place. I wrote some more of the story and then I left it aside.

Sixteen years later, the story came back into my mind. It occurred to me that the election of Donald Trump for the second term and the prospect of him taking it out on illegal immigrants would be the actual spur to make my character really decide that he had to go home. He would leave on Monday 20 January 2025, the precise date of Trump’s inauguration. The hike with his daughter, almost a teenager, would take place on Saturday 18 January.

I'm curious because I want to expand my reading into new works and new voices, but in an essay format.

Jennifer Lee, a 24-year-old pastry chef from Connecticut, has read hundreds of books. She’s partial to romance novels with burning enemies-to-lovers arcs, especially those that lean on fantasy tropes: magical colleges, regal dragons, and slender, shirtless half-elves coiled in knotty muscle. She isn’t above the occasional steamy sex scene. She enjoys the work of Sarah J. Maas and her vast bibliography of kink-friendly fairies, just as she likes the Hunger Games–tinged entanglements of Lauren Roberts’ Powerless trilogy. But one thing Lee emphatically does not like is any book written from the perspective of a third-person narrator. I know this because on her TikTok page, where Lee posts about her literary proclivities to 15,000 followers, she has uploaded a video in which she scrunches up her face in disgust at the prospect of venturing away from her preferred syntactical architecture—the safe, ensconcing I’s and me’s of the first-person perspective. A single sentence is emblazoned across the bottom of the frame. It reads, plain and simple, “I HATE third person POV books.”

“It’s just off-putting to me. I feel like books are easier to understand when they’re written in first person,” said Lee, when I reached out to her for an interview. “Sometimes when I’m seeking out a new book, I want it to be as dumbed down as possible. These fantasy books often have all of this world-building. Sometimes I’m not in the mood to think. I just want to get lost in a story.”

To Lee, first-person point of view facilitates her needs, and she is far from the only person to feel this way. Studded across what is known as “BookTok”—the informal TikTok-based digital hub for the greater romance community—are innumerable riffs on the same conclusion. Dozens of book-focused content creators have posted videos of the smile dropping from their faces upon discovering that the novel they have just cracked open is written in the third person. The emotions expressed often amount to a feeling of betrayal, as if an author is snidely trolling them by purging their prose of copious first-person pronouns. (Some of the more dramatic TikToks with this complaint end with the offending fiction getting chucked into the garbage.) Elsewhere on BookTok, readers mourn their own self-diagnosed ineptitude; they’d like to savor the richness of third person, they say, but, for whatever reason, are unable to wrap their minds around the vantage point. “I feel like I don’t know how to read!” said one exasperated TikTokker, bemoaning the all-seeing narrator pervading two books she couldn’t quite grok. “I can’t do it. I tried. It does not work for me.”

Readers’ increasingly vocal partiality for first-person perspective over third person amounts to a profound shift in taste. Even while publishing is in dire straits elsewhere, the romance genre is in the midst of an unprecedented boom period. Sales in the genre have doubled since 2020, almost single-handedly rehabilitating an industry that had been ailing for decades. (Of America’s 10 best-selling books in 2024, six of them were romance.) But the readers buying those titles often demand that authors render them to their precise specifications: first person, with a fixed perspective, no omniscient lapses allowed. It’s a minor aesthetic preference, but it also might be transforming literary culture as a whole.

“I have had readers come up to me at book signings and say, to my face, ‘I won’t read this book of yours because it’s in third person,’ ” said K. Iwancio, a romance author who specializes in hunky baseball players. (Her best-performing book bears the joyfully gratuitous title Nailed at Home Plate.) Iwancio has written through the lens of a third-person narrator in the past, but after internalizing the realities of the market, she has rendered the most recent entries in her oeuvre in first person.

“I was like, Oh, I got to get with the times,” she said, laughing.

For decades, the quintessential romance novel was a gooey parlor drama with bursting corsets and lacy gowns written entirely in third-person omniscient. Within that framework, an author was liberated to accentuate the rippling deltoids of the novel’s rakish libertine, or to mire in the melodrama of a forbidden tryst, absent the limitations of personal subjectivity. Great sex requires a secret language shared by two or more souls; therefore, in fiction, the conventional thinking went, it’s most easily expressed by an all-knowing narrator.

It is hard to say when or why those norms changed, other than the fact that they most certainly have. Taylor Capizola, manager of the Los Angeles romance-centric bookstore The Ripped Bodice, told me that the ratio of first-person novels she stocks has “expanded greatly” in the four years she’s worked as a bookseller, to the point that they now dominate her shelves.

“It’s become the predominant perspective in the genre,” said Capizola. “We have readers come in and ask if we have entire sections dedicated to first person.” If fan fiction asserts the primacy of personal wish fulfillment, then you could argue that this new wave of romance novels serves—and reflects—the same purpose.

Capizola has her theories about why this is the case. Romance, as a category, is home to an infinite number of tropes, themes, and compulsions; it’s what these works are built on. There are novels featuring suave F1 drivers, forbidden private-school paramours, or swole, gentle minotaurs, and during this current renaissance—when more books of the genre are getting published than ever before—that has made the fantasies on display meticulously customizable. The guesswork of fiction has been removed from the process entirely. If a reader has determined that a story centering the illicit affair between a matriarchal baseball owner and her rugged bench coach will inflame their nervous system more than all other permutations, you best believe that there is at least one novel that fits the bill, and it’s easier than ever to find it thanks to unsubtle marketing, intracommunity recommendations, and search results that highlight those desired keywords.

“You have a breadth of all these characters, and you can kind of take your pick and go live in their world,” said Capizola. Romance consumers, she continued, “know exactly what they want to read, and they’ll stop at nothing to find the perfect book.”

Of course, that doesn’t fully explain why many romance readers prefer to experience those sagas exclusively in first person, from the gray matter of a seduced protagonist. But Capizola is quick to mention that a number of the most successful authors in romance got their start in fan fiction—as in the vast morass of derivative work spun off from established franchises and self-published and disseminated across the internet via platforms like Archive of Our Own, the promised land of fan fic. (Case in point: Before Ali Hazelwood sold 750,000 copies of her 2021 STEM-themed megahit rom-com The Love Hypothesis, she dreamed up steamy liaisons between Kylo Ren and Rey Skywalker on AO3, as Archive of Our Own is called in shorthand.)

Fan fiction has always been underpinned by the fantasia of exploring a beloved fictional universe on one’s own terms, and unsurprisingly, a good amount of the work is written in first person, particularly within the subgenre known as self-insert, in which authors imagine themselves—or a thinly veiled surrogate—into the source material so they too may join the House of Gryffindor or glitter in the sunlight with Edward Cullen. These days in particular, a lot of DNA is shared between these two modes of publishing—traditional and fan-made—with the barriers that once divided them blurring to the point of becoming effectively indistinguishable, as publishing houses scoop up beloved fics, slap a new coat of “We changed all the copyrightable identifiers; you can’t sue us” paint on them, and sell the remixed results for $20.99 apiece. If fan fiction asserts the primacy of personal wish fulfillment, then you could argue that this new wave of romance novels serves—and reflects—the same purpose.

“Fan fiction was a catalyst for what’s happening in the literary industry,” said Iwancio. “Authors used what they learned in fan fiction in their romance novels. People who may have never read a fan fic before might still be like, Oh, gosh, I really love this.”

Lee, the TikTokker, put it this way: “When I read first person, I’m almost like, That’s me. That’s me in the book.”

Here is where I must admit that throughout my years as a reader, I have never given much thought to authorial perspective. I have read first person, I have read third person, and the differences between the two vantage points are basically immaterial to me. I’ve never walked into a bookstore in search of a novel that fits a checklist of defined attributes or aesthetic flourishes. Those are creative decisions I prefer to let the author make, which may set me apart from the typical romance enthusiast. That’s basically fine with me. I think people should be allowed to read what they want to read, and they retain the right to besmirch what they don’t on TikTok or elsewhere. But there are at least some voices in the romance community who believe that this growing compulsion—to dictate the punctilious traits a novel must possess, down to the basic language schematics—is eroding what makes the genre special.

Jennifer Prokop, co-host of the scholarly romance-centric podcast Fated Mates, told me a story to make this point. The most popular romance novel on the market right now is Rachel Reid’s Heated Rivalry, which was recently adapted into a series that went gangbusters after HBO Max acquired streaming rights. Heated Rivalry follows two professional hockey players navigating their smoldering queer love affair, as well as the macho norms in the realm of professional sports. Heated Rivalry is also the rare romance novel to be written in third person, and Prokop believes that the presence of a narrator enriches the text. “It allows us to get a distance from the characters, and that builds empathy,” she said. “I’m a married white woman. Watching someone deal with homophobia, seeing the effect that it has, helps me understand the impact it has on him.” What do romance novels ultimately want—and aspire—to be?

Prokop maintains that while those complex themes can be explored in first person, off-loading narrative tension into an internal monologue has a way of flattening a romance narrative, hemming in the scope. “It limits the kind of stories you can tell,” she continued. “It’s a lot harder to keep a secret from a reader.” Prokop is especially weary of the clear-eyed mindfulness possessed by the wayward lovers that tends to populate first-person novels—how their acuities remain crystalline and sharp, as if touched by the divine, across the pages, in a way that requires almost too much suspension of disbelief, even for a genre that traffics in that suspension.

“All of the characters are nice. There’s a trope called the ‘Cinnamon Roll hero,’ and he’s just a good guy who wants the protagonist,” said Prokop. “The best first person has a strong narrative voice. The character is super distinctive. But if the books all sound the same—which a lot of them do—then that’s not great for the genre.”

Ultimately, this circles back to the question at the heart of the first-person debate: What do romance novels ultimately want—and aspire—to be? Toward the end of our conversation, Lee told me that she read an eyepopping 50 books in 2024. That averages out to about a book a week, and it completely lapped what I had accomplished in the same time frame. I think that’s because we approach reading for different reasons. My friends and I are what is known as a “Difficult Book Club.” We conquered The Brothers Karamazov last summer, and I’m currently adrift in The Recognitions, a 1,000-page tome by postmodern legend William Gaddis that requires a Ph.D.-level appreciation of Flemish painting to fully unlock its nuances. When I sit down with such books, the experience is usually mustardy, adversarial, and homework-like, driven by some deep, subliminal conviction that enlightenment is the prime directive of fiction.

Lee, naturally, has the complete opposite approach. “I’m not reading difficult literature. It’s just not my relationship to reading,” she said. “Would I love to be an intellectual? Sure. But do I feel enticed to take on books like that? No, not really. I read to escape, not to learn.”

I found Lee’s candor to be strangely noble. I thought about the decades of withering angst about declining literacy rates—the ominous reports that college students can’t make it through a pamphlet, much less a paperback, due to the mind-boiling assault of the algorithms ruling social media. How, then, are we supposed to wring our hands over the fact that in 2026 some people are reading more than they had in the past—even if what they’re reading tends to conform to their preferred constellation of tropes, contrivances, and, yes, perspectives? After all, consuming these books changed Lee’s life. She never read much in school. She assumed that books were for brainier people, beholden to an academic milieu that had permanently sidelined her. Well, now she loves to read. Who am I to tell her that she uncovered that love improperly?

And for what it’s worth, Lee actually has started to dabble in third-person books. She was convinced by Sarah J. Maas and her high-fantasy series Throne of Glass, which—unlike her more popular romances, such as A Court of Thorns and Roses—is written in third person. Lee purchased the first Throne of Glass book without knowing about this different perspective and, upon making the horrible discovery, condemned it to her shelf for months. Eventually, though, she decided to give it a shot. She worked her way through the prose in fits and starts, grappling with the unfamiliar narrative omniscience until, finally, something clicked. “I got over it,” said Lee. “There was an initial shock that it wasn’t in first person, but eventually your brain adjusts.”

At long last, thanks to the gateway books that paved the way, the full vibrancy of literature has cracked open for her. She can read anything now. Ulysses, Middlemarch, The Power Broker—it’s all on the table. Or, as is her prerogative, Lee may very well stick to what she knows best: cute boys and cute girls falling in love over and over again, through God’s eyes or her own.

Hello! This is my first writing related post in Lemmy, and I decided to practice writing with a fun challenge to myself and others. I wrote a scene or part of a scene, and if you want it to continue my scene or someone else's continuation, write in the replies!

If you don't know what to aim for in writing your own continuation, that's fine. Just try to keep the character voices and emotional evolution consistent. Challenge yourself to, not just tape on more prose, but make an organic continuation!

TL;DR: Jonas, feeling lonely, awkwardly asks his sister Julia for dating advice, while they're both sitting at a lake, watching the sunset. She playfully jabs at his request for "tricks", before expanding his notion of what it truly takes to find love.

I'm super curious to see where this goes! Try your hand at a continuation!

​

​

Jonas, sitting at the edge of the waterfront, takes in a deep breath, next to Julia, who is casually distracted sketching in her sketchbook. The reddish glow of sunlight refracting and bouncing on the water filters into their eyes; their muscles seem to almost melt as it does. Each line of the sketch feels easier than the last, from relaxation.

Soon, though, something seems to tug on Jonas's cool from within his mind, right now. His tail wriggles more stiffly than before. He hesitates coyly for a moment, before gathering some courage and finally parting his lips.

— Hey, sis... — He gulps, as if trying to hold back vomited words. — You should teach me some tricks or something, so I can, uhm, find a nice partner too, just like you did, or something!

His voice, smitten with a sandy lack of self-confidence, pierces through the waterfront like an interruption in reality, a cry from an invasive species, something out of place compared to the washing up of the waves and the people and dogs walking behind the duo. The surprised glance she gives back is briefly followed by a loud chuckle of hers, somehow even more piercing. He takes in a deep breathe, feeling utterly embarrassed for even daring to let that question escape his intrusive thoughts to begin with, a feeling that clearly leaks to his face in redness.

A knowing grin spreads through Julia's face, as she locks eyes with Jonas. She closes her sketchbook suddenly, with a thud!, trapping her mechanical lead within it like a Venus flytrap would its supper.

— 'Tricks'? Jonas! You... you know tricks are for training dogs, right? — she pokes, in a playful voice.

— Well, it's just—

Julia covers his mouth with a finger across his lips, which doesn't really help him feel less coy.

— Shh! I get you. Look. It sucks to be lonely, I get that. You see...

She pauses for an almost uncomfortable moment. Jonas doesn't press on or ask anything; maybe he feels like he's way overbudget already, or his face does not fit any more redness in it.

— Finding love is a funny thing — she continues, in a suddenly much softer voice. She relaxes back upright, letting the excitement of amusement wash off like the bits of exposed sand near them under the tides. — It's weird, 'cause the more effort you put into it, the less you'll get in return. You can't really see it like a job. — She grins playfully, almost like a mischievous cat about to knowingly knock a cup of coffee off of its saucer. — Or, definitely not tricks! Unless you want a 'puppy-girlfriend'!

— Yeah, yeah... — he shrugs off the joke. — Well, it just... It just looks a lot easier for you! Like, one day you run into Priscilla, you find out you like her, and then, something something magic steps, boom, you two like each other and are dating or something!

Jonas is no longer even looking in Julia's face. His gaze diverts into the glowing red horizon, which has slowly begun to settle into a civil twilight. Directed at the sea as if calling for a sea monster to his aid, he sighs in frustration. His body almost shudders in repressed energy. Feeling that, he finds a rounded rock on the bank, right next to the log on which they were watching the sunset over the Guaíba, and he begins to fidget with it between his fingers and pawpads, feeling its roundness. For a second, an impulsive thought crosses him to throw it across the lake and try to make it skip; but he scaredly pushes that thought away, switching to merely making biscuits on the rock instead.

She just watches him be himself for a moment, adjusting her vibrissa with a hand.

— That — she suddenly interjects. — You're doing the trick now. You're being yourself.

Before he knew it, she was joining a shoulder with his, as if to give him a little sustaint. But it didn't seem to soothe him very much.

— But I already do that every day! And where did that get me?

cross-posted from: https://lemmy.world/post/41774016

This is a writing challenge, sponsored by me.

First prize is 100€ award and a featured story in my publication.

Everyone can participate, you can log in to medium free account with your Google acc or any other email.

I encourage you to read the writing prompt and participate in this challenge.

Thank you for reading!

At this wonderful time of year, as we transition from our past hardship and look forward to all new hardships, I’d like to thank my supporters who have got me through many hard days, and acknowledge the holy books, without which life would have been even more difficult.

Announcing the #FediWriMo Journaling January event:

The event schedule is as follows:

🖋️ Dates: Jan 1st - Jan 31st, 2026.
🖋️ Daily writing prompts will be supplied, but are optional.
🖋️ The goal is to write a minimum of three pages a day.
🖋️ Writing daily is more important than meeting the goal.
🖋️ Posting excerpts is optional, but encouraged.

If you are interested in participating:

➤ Sign up on https://feddit.online/ and join the FediWriMo Community, or

➤ Join !NaNoWriMo2@feddit.online from any Lemmy, Mbin, or PieFed instance.

➤ Follow nanowrimo2@feddit.online from Mastodon, GotoSocial or other platforms for daily prompts and updates.

➤ Use the event hashtag: #FediJournJan

I hope you decide to join us this January! More information to come soon.

@writing Hi, I'd appreciate feedback on some stories I've written recently:

- "Between": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/between/

- "Abigail Sterling": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/abigail-sterling/

- "The Beautiful Prison": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/the-beautiful-prison/

- "La Petite Mort": https://thebeautifulprison.com/stories/la-petite-mort/

I openly disclose that they are AI-assisted in character creation, development, and in their writing, but they're emphatically not low-effort AI slop.

All have appropriate content warnings and estimated reading times.

Thanks for your time.

A dark, fantastical tale that is intended to unfold a paragraph, or thereabouts, at a time.

On Publish0x:

https://www.publish0x.com/storytelling-in-paragraph-proportions/fragment-118-xplpdlp?a=X7axkJW3ey

On Wattpad:

https://www.wattpad.com/1592023116-storytelling-in-paragraph-proportions-fragment-118

On Minkly:

https://www.minkly.io/series/chapters/1053

so lately I have been wondering what I would do while waiting for chapter releases of some of my favorite novels(and I swear to the amighty God this is really difficult) like: SS

So in the mean time i decided why not write my own novel and thats when I knew this sht demands talent. its not easy to read and reread your own crap while revising it hoping that maybe just maybe someone will find it good enough.

anyways enough of that, so the novel i started is called "The Crimson Eclipse"

its both on royalroad and webnovel, it's an isekai novel about a serial killer who gets reincarnated into the Kingdom of Aurelia there he is forced to join the law enforcement going on the side that he fought against the most.

it explore themes of morality and redemption.

personally i think i did an ok enough job since its my first, for anyone interested the links are:

royalroad: https://www.royalroad.com/fiction/138698/the-crimson-eclipse

webnovel: https://www.webnovel.com/book/the-crimson-eclipse_34395164100604905

Sorry for posting so much. Another character in my Kanami's Safe Haven story universe is a character from the Rosewater Kingdom on an island off England, Princess Chloe Rosewater. She is one of three potential love interests since there will be three endings, the other two being childhood friend Mike Roberts and Kanami Yamamoto, that ending being she overcomes or at least her abandonment issues become less severe and she is a good girlfriend to Y/N.

Being a princess and all who's next in line for the throne, she is a very kind, sweet, and loyal young woman who is not at all dishonest about her intentions or romantic feelings; she is exactly who she says she is when it comes to love and she is sweet from the start. However, she is hiding a side to her that doesn't affect how she treats others or her love interest, and that is her mental illness. She doesn't love Y/N so much she goes insane, but rather, she was mentally ill from the start as well and is hiding her depression and constant panic attacks. She hasn't left the house in over two years so Y/N only messages her online, and she is prone to maniacal laughter when she snaps though she is desperately trying not to snap. She values helping others, work, and her Kingdom over all things and is a bit of a workaholic who works from home.

I feel like she would be Hikikomori and Broken Bird. Maybe also Mask of Sanity.

I've set up a new NaNoWriMo2 Community for those that are interested in participating in the tradition: !nanowrimo2@feddit.online - https://feddit.online/c/nanowrimo2

There is no connection with the previous organization that founded / ran NaNoWriMo. This is an independent effort based on: https://nanowrimo2.com/

I've also set up a TrackBear leader board for those that are interested. Details are in the description of the new community.

I recently (finally) moved a bunch of my poems and short stories and other writings off of Google Docs and into a git repo of text files. Right now I'm editing them with VSCode or Zed, which I just found and like so far. Both are fine but not really geared toward writing not-code. What have y'all found that you like writing in?

I'm excited to start at midnight tonight, but not sure if there's an active fedi group for it.

Still in the early early stages. Can be a little slow going since I'm treating this like a training project to strengthen my Python skills. Typing mechanics are nailed down, basic UI is in place.

Next is to get the functionality working for new-page, save, export, etc... and the correction tape mode.

Hi everyone, just wanted to share – I've finished the Shavian cover for my novel, Blue Are the Hills. The full Shavian transliteration is complete, and it's almost ready for release (now I'm just doing battle with Scrivener to compile it properly). There are almost no modern novels in Shavian, so I'm looking forward to sharing mine. It's a literary sci-fi novel about identity, hope, and transhumanism. Only a couple of things left to do and it will be ready. This has been a very fun project!

What's Shavian? I'm glad you asked! It's an alphabet created by John Kingsley Read in response to a challenge by George Bernard Shaw, intended to make a lexicon specifically designed for English, in order to make reading and writing English easier.

Here's more info, including many resources (lexicon, guidelines, fonts): shavian.info.

It's fun if you're into linguistics or cryptography at all.

I want to go back to the absolute basics for a while; to see if there's something from my old pre-computer life that I have lost.

When I was a teenager in the early 90s, I wrote like crazy on a giant, loud, electric typewriter. It whirred. It clacked. It needed me to manually hit the carraige return just like the older manual typewriters that it had come from.

The old days. No backspace deletion, no italics. Bold meant backing up and typing over the same word twice for effect.

There are apps like focus writer, etc... But I'm looking for something more

There is an online app called typewritesomething.com, and it has the option of installing it. But when I do, it's sluggish and imperfect. So I was hoping someone knew of something just like that, but in a locally installed program (Linux would be ideal, but WINE allows me to run Windows programs just fine and dandy)

Blank Page. Typewriter sound. No deletion on backspace. When you backup and retype, it has the effect of typing over the previous text. Manual carraige return. Literally no other features.

Any ideas?

Lately, I’ve been thinking about how writing feels different now — not because words changed, but because the world did. Everywhere you look, there’s an algorithm whispering, “make it shorter, make it clickable, make it viral.”

But what about writing that breathes? Writing that doesn’t chase trends, but chases truth — the kind that lets you slow down, linger in a sentence, or wrestle with a thought that doesn’t have an easy conclusion.

When I write these days, I try to forget the audience for a while. No outlines, no “perfect hook,” no pressure to post. Just words forming their own rhythm — messy, maybe meaningless at first, but honest. I’ve been reading a few essays on CollegeEssay.org and articles on Forbes.com, and both reminded me that good writing still thrives on clarity and authenticity — whether it’s an academic piece or a thought shared with the world.

Maybe writing isn’t about being heard anymore — maybe it’s about learning to listen again: to language, to silence, to yourself.