Write to Be Felt, Not Fancied

There was a time I wanted my writing to sparkle — every sentence polished like a diamond, every metaphor clever enough to make my English teacher rise from her chair in slow applause. I’d tinker with sentences for hours, swapping “walked” for “meandered” or “ambled,” then back again, trying to sound like A Serious Author™.

You know the type. The kind who drinks coffee with too much intensity and uses “juxtaposition” in casual conversation.

But somewhere between the endless editing and the overthinking, I realized something uncomfortable: I was writing to impress other writers, not to move readers.

It hit me one day when my best friend — not a writer, not even a big reader — read a scene from one of my drafts and said quietly, “That part made me cry.”

She didn’t care about my sentence rhythm. She didn’t notice the metaphor I’d sweated over for an hour. She felt something.

And that’s when I understood: readers don’t fall in love with your words. They fall in love with your truth.

We writers can get so tangled in literary approval that we forget the whole point of storytelling. Readers don’t want to applaud your cleverness; they want to recognize themselves. They want to be seen, soothed, startled, healed.

They want that moment when they’re reading in bed at 1 a.m. with a half-eaten cookie on the nightstand and think, “Yes. That’s me.”

And they couldn’t care less if your prose sounds like it belongs in a Paris Review essay.

I think of this often when I write my cozy mysteries — stories full of ghosts, Papillon dogs, and ordinary people facing extraordinary choices. I could chase the approval of critics. Or I could write for the woman sitting at her kitchen table, sipping tea after a long day, who just wants to lose herself in something hopeful and human.

That’s who I write for.

So now, when I catch myself trying to sound “smart,” I stop and ask, Would Blueberry the Papillon roll her eyes at this sentence? Usually, the answer is yes.

Writing that connects doesn’t come from ego. It comes from empathy.

So don’t write to be praised — write to be remembered. Write for the tired mom who needs a laugh. The broken man who needs a glimmer of hope. The dreamer who needs to be reminded that magic still exists.

Because in the end, readers don’t need perfect sentences. They need truth.

And truth doesn’t need permission.

Write for the human soul. That’s how stories last.