How to Keep Writing When the World Wants You to Quit

A survival guide for the exhausted, the aging, the underpaid, the algorithm-ignored.

Photo by Elsa Tonkinwise on Unsplash

Yesterday, I stumbled on an old interview with Sylvia Plath from 1958. She throws her head back and laughs — big, bombastic — as the interviewer asks how her poetry affects people. Very few people read my poems anyway, she says. So I have no idea how they affect other people.

Plath isn’t concerned with fanfare or confetti. What matters to her is craft and construction. Her poems need to be visual, lyrical. A mouthful of sound you can see and feel as it’s being read aloud. She talks about the surgical precision of choosing one word, then another. Each placement deliberate. A scalpel’s incision.

Meanwhile, I’m scrolling through a blog post promising cash-money riches if only I’d follow these simple steps. It’s so easy, the salesman pitches, $299 writing class in tow. I check the writer’s profile. Every piece is about money. How much they’ve made, how much you can make. Screenshot after screenshot of triumph. The reads and clicks soar skyward.

You can go viral like me, they insist.
If only. If only. If only.

That “if only” rings like a sermon. Wu-Tang’s “Triumph” booms — lyrically perform armed robbery — while I glance at my second book — read by possibly a sum total of five people — and short fiction and essays that mean the most to me, largely unread. Ignored.

Our world isn’t made for slow, strange art, it demands the gleaming new and now in candied sweets size — but I keep writing anyway. And we’ll talk about why you should too.

Why the World Wants You to Quit

You juggle two jobs, kids, and an elderly parent at home. Your fridge is anemic, barren save for a bag of potatoes and a stick of butter because the grocery store has become a money-devouring pit. Strawberries are a luxury. You cleave to Amazon on the level of drug dependence. Bills tumble in — car and health insurance (if you’re lucky), utilities, student loans — your every action is clocked and chargeable. At night, you fall asleep with your phone on your chest because the only way to sleep these days is mind-numbing TikTok anesthesia.

You’re exhausted. You’re a waking somnambulant. A person made into a machine whose only function is to produce. But the world demands more. More work hours to buy more things we don’t need so we can be just like the fantasy lives we escape to on social media and TV. Who has time to write? How frivolous you must be to take time out of your time to pen a poem, a story, a scene from a life when there’s no income guarantee?

Why waste your time living when you can be working? Welcome to the glory that is modern-day capitalism. The world wants you to quit writing because you could be earning.

Perhaps you’re thinking — I’ll make this money, I’ll squirrel it away, and I’ll write in my twilight years lest we forget those meager pensions that fail to sustain us so there we go, at 60, 70, 80 taking jobs at Trader Joe’s and Home Depot because our money saved doesn’t stretch as far and wide as it used to.

But let’s say you can steal a half-hour a night away from the doom-scrolling, the non-stop notifications. Perhaps you can sit in front of a blank page and tell the story only you were meant to tell. And so feverishly type out your heart so much so you think you might burst from the love of it and the next day on your phone you scroll through gleaming influencers, showered in effulgent light — are they glowing, literally? — and they tell you the only way for anyone to know your art, know you, is for you to be part of the social media motley crew.

You don’t even like Facetime much less Facebook. And TikTok feels like a drunken frat house or a judge, jury, and executioner for the truly terrible who whore themselves out for views and all that creator program money. You’ve already made the leap to be vulnerable on the page and now you have to hock your words, yourself, for the world to judge and see? An attention economy that favors the the shiny new, young, thing. Publishers who care more about your platform that your prose. Let’s see those Substack numbers. How healthy are his socials? Does she have a face for Instagram?

They want you to cower and quit. They want you to recede back to the daily grind. But you write anyway — not for the likes, not for the algorithms, but because your story still insists on being told.

The Reality of Being a Writer Right Now

If you want to be a writer today, you have to be a shapeshifter. You have to bob and weave between salesperson and storyteller with ease. You need to be fluent in follower counts and algorithms, light boxes and tripods. You’re the content creator, the editor, the filmmaker, the human connection. Even if you take the newsletter route, it’s still a game of consistency, of showing up week after week with new work — on top of the work you’re actually trying to write.

You’re in the comments. You’re in the replies. You’re part of the reciprocity machine, liking and hearting and clapping to show that you care — even when you barely have time to breathe, let alone read someone else’s 800-word essay.

Sometimes it hits you: you’re spending more time selling your writing than writing it. And it’s true.

Even before you shop your work to an agent or publisher, you’ve already had to become a one-person publishing house. And yes, you’re still clocking into your 9-to-5.

You may live to write — but it’s okay to hate the hustle.

Why You Still Write (Yes, There’s a Glimmer of Hope)

Years ago, I wanted legions. I wanted packed bookstores and tens of thousands of followers. I felt worthy only when I was swathed in bodies, in fans. It took a decade to understand the gift of the one reader who consistently shows up. Who, despite their own burdens and hurts, takes time to read my work and wave a lone pom-pom in the not-quite dark.

I’m shy and awkward and never quite know what to say, but I light up when I see the same names. I read their work, even if they don’t know it.
Sometimes I print their comments — little hot pokers pressed against my back, urging me forward when I feel like I can’t even crawl.

The world tells you you’re not worthy unless you’re making money, going viral, appeasing the masses. I hear that whisper on days when the bills won’t stop flowing in and a single sentence feels impossible. But I write to survive, to exorcise, to make people feel less alone. I don’t write to be famous or rich. I write to be honest. I write to be free.

I’m writing my way through an old version of me, desperate to cling to the new version where nothing truly matters except for the words I write and the few people who show up to read them.

Years ago, I wrote about the epic failure of my second book. One person,

Gérard Mclean

, commented that he read it — and loved it.My whole day lifted. My heart soared.Because someone, anyone, took time out of their life to read something I wrote.That meant everything.

Maybe one reader becomes two, then three, and so on. But what matters first, and always, is the work. How much you love it. How much you need it. How much it saves you.

My New Version of Success

As someone with severe clinical depression and suicidal tendencies, my version of success is that I’m still alive. Every morning I wake and feel the floor beneath my feet, my hands on the couch, my eyes wide open. I nod. I’m still here. Amidst all the grief, sorrow, and mounting debt, I’m still here — fighting my way out of the dark.

That’s where I begin. Gratitude for the body that breathes. For the mind that makes. For the art that follows.

Success, now, means I wrote today. Maybe I found a first line. Maybe I stitched together an image that made me giddy. Maybe I composed a single sentence that sings.

Success is telling the truth. Which brings me to Kafka’s famous line: “I was ashamed of myself when I realized life is a costume party and I attended with my real face.” We all wear masks — some to help us survive, others that slowly diminish us. The smile we force at work. The agreeable nods. The filtered lives. Some masks keep us safe. Others suffocate.

I’m writing my way out of the mask I wore for years. A mask affixed so tightly I couldn’t tell where it ended and I began. Success, for me, is taking a scalpel to that mask. Chipping away until I reach the skin underneath. The real face. The honest one.

Sometimes honesty repels people. I’ve learned that. But I’ve also learned the weight of pretending is far heavier than the weight of truth. Put it down, the lie. Set it down. The only weight you need is a computer on your lap, a pen in your hand.

Success is no longer a crowd — it’s a quiet lens turned inward. It’s pride in living, in creating, in shedding the skin of who I was, and stepping fully into who I’m meant to be.

How to Keep Going

There are no arcane secrets, no mythical spells, no course you can buy that will tell you the obvious. What will keep you going are the boundaries you set for yourself and the guardrails you create around your work.

Before and every story, speak your why aloud. Why did you write this story? Why this story? Remind yourself why you love to write in the first place. Perhaps it was what you were born to do. Perhaps it saved you through a dark, tormented childhood. Perhaps it was a reprieve from a world intent on diminishing you. Speak your why. Write it down. Repeat it to yourself often.

And protect your work from the people who call it content because art and content are not synonymous. Protect your work from people who want to chop it up for parts, selling the most marketable parts and discarding the fire, the wires and sparks, the innards, the you.

People have asked me to dumb down my essays. Why the fifty-cent words? People have asked me to ditch the anti-depressants and practice happiness in my work like it’s a group workout or a suit I could wear. People call my essays “articles” when they are anything but. Don’t listen to the people who want to reduce your writing or label you — especially if you’re a young writer searching for your style and voice. If you’re seasoned, learn to tune out the noise that doesn’t make your work better.

Finally, the more obvious — create clean quiet. Turn off all the devices, albeit for a little while, and sit down with a book, an essay, a poem, a story — anything that will crack you open and remind you that you’re human and your heart still beats.

Your story matters. Say it aloud. Then write the next line.