There’s a specific kind of panic that sets in when you’re staring at a blank page and suddenly remember all the rules.
You know the ones. Open with a hook. Vary your sentence length. Show, don’t tell. Write tight. Be vulnerable, but not too vulnerable. Make it relatable. Make it universal. Make it personal. Delete every adverb. Kill your darlings. For God’s sake, don’t bury the lede.
And here’s the thing—none of that advice is wrong, exactly. It’s just that following it perfectly tends to produce writing that sounds like it was assembled from a kit. Technically competent. Strategically vulnerable. Optimised for engagement. The literary equivalent of a beige rental flat: inoffensive, functional, and utterly forgettable.
We’re living through this genuinely bizarre moment where writing advice has never been more accessible, AI can generate perfectly serviceable prose on demand, and yet the writing that actually cuts through—the stuff that makes you stop scrolling, screenshot a paragraph, send it to someone you trust—almost never follows the bloody rules.
Which makes me wonder: what if we’ve been asking ourselves the wrong question this entire time?
The Tyranny of Correct
Let me tell you about a newsletter I read last month. I can’t remember who wrote it. I can’t remember what it was about. But I remember thinking, this is very good, in the same way you might compliment someone’s sensible jumper. It had a strong opening. Clear structure. A personal anecdote that illustrated the broader point. A call-to-action that didn’t feel too pushy. It was textbook.
It was also completely unmemorable.
Compare that to the email a friend sent me around the same time—not even meant to be “writing” in the capital-W sense, just her trying to explain why she’d been quiet lately. Three rambling paragraphs that contradicted themselves. No neat resolution. Grammatically questionable in places. And I’ve thought about it roughly once a week ever since.
That’s the problem with optimising for correctness. You can follow every rule, tick every box, deploy vulnerability at precisely the right moment in paragraph three—and still produce something that sounds like it could’ve been written by anyone. Or, increasingly, by no one at all.
Because here’s what the algorithms and the advice columns won’t tell you: the more “correct” your writing becomes, the more it starts to sound like everyone else.
And in a world where AI can generate grammatically flawless, structurally sound prose that adheres to every best practice known to content marketing, sounding like everyone else is a death sentence.
What We Talk About When We Talk About Voice
There’s this thing that happens when you read enough writing advice. You start to believe that “voice” is something you develop—a skill you acquire through practice and refinement, like learning to poach an egg properly.
But I don’t think that’s right.
I think voice is actually what’s left over when you stop trying so hard to sound like a writer. It’s the weird tics and tangents and contradictions that survive your endless rounds of editing. It’s the bit of yourself that refuses to be optimised away.
The writers I return to again and again—the ones whose work feels necessary rather than merely competent—all have this quality of thinking out loud on the page. They contradict themselves. They take detours. They get distracted by a thought that’s only tangentially related to their point. They sound like themselves, in all their messy, unresolved humanity, rather than like The Platonic Ideal of a Writer.
Annie Dillard does this. So does Clive James. And David Foster Wallace, for all his footnotes and self-consciousness. Even Hemingway, the patron saint of ruthless editing, sounds unmistakably like Hemingway—which is to say, like himself, not like an algorithm trained on the principles of tight prose.
None of them are perfect. They’re just specific.
The Problem With Performing Certainty
Here’s something I’ve noticed lately: the most formulaic writing online isn’t coming from bad writers. It’s coming from good writers who’ve been convinced that their job is to perform certainty.
You see it everywhere. Blog posts that promise “5 Proven Strategies” when the author’s clearly still figuring it out themselves. Newsletters that package messy, complicated truths into neat little insights with bow ties on top. Essays that pretend to have answers when really they’re just sitting with questions.
And look, I get it. We’ve been trained to believe that people don’t want to read about our uncertainty. They want solutions. Clarity. Actionable takeaways they can implement by Monday morning.
But what if that’s backwards?
What if the reason so much writing feels hollow isn’t because it lacks polish, but because it lacks honesty? What if readers can smell the performance of certainty the same way you can smell a telemarketer’s forced enthusiasm?
The writing that stays with me—that changes how I think about things—is almost never the stuff that has all the answers. It’s the stuff that’s brave enough to sit with the questions. To say “I don’t know” or “I’m still working this out” or “this probably contradicts what I said last month, but here’s what I’m thinking now.”
That’s not weakness. That’s just what being human on the page actually looks like.
The Real Work (And Why It’s Harder Than You Think)
So if the goal isn’t perfect writing, what is it?
I reckon it’s this: learning how to write more like yourself.
Which sounds simple—just be yourself!—until you actually try to do it. Because yourself is complicated. You’re contradictory. You’re sometimes boring and sometimes brilliant. You care about things that don’t quite fit into neat categories. You think in loops and tangents rather than in perfectly structured three-act narratives.
And there’s no template for that.
The work, then, isn’t learning how to deploy vulnerability at the optimal moment for engagement. It’s learning how to trust that your actual thoughts—messy and unfinished as they are—might be worth putting on the page. It’s learning how to follow a tangent because it interests you, not because it serves some predetermined structure. It’s learning how to sound like you’re talking to a friend, not performing for an audience.
This is harder than it sounds, by the way. Because it means writing sentences that don’t quite work. Publishing thoughts you’re not entirely certain about. Letting yourself be boring sometimes, or unclear, or unfashionably earnest about things that matter to you.
It means accepting that some people won’t get it. That your writing won’t be for everyone. That you’ll lose subscribers, or fail to hook readers in the first three sentences, or commit some cardinal sin against the best practices of content strategy.
But here’s the thing: when you optimise for everyone, you end up resonating with no one.
What Actually Makes Writing Memorable
I’ve been thinking about the writing I remember. Not the stuff I thought was well-done in an abstract sense, but the pieces that have genuinely stuck with me—that changed how I see something, or made me feel less alone, or just gave me that jolt of recognition where you think yes, exactly that.
None of it was perfect.
Most of it broke at least three rules I’d have insisted were non-negotiable. Some of it probably shouldn’t have worked at all on paper—too long, too weird, too willing to follow tangents into strange territory.
But all of it had this quality of specificity. Of someone showing you exactly how they see the world, in all its particular, idiosyncratic detail. Not trying to speak to some imagined mass audience, but trusting that if they got specific enough about their own experience, it would somehow become universal.
That’s the paradox, isn’t it? The more specifically yourself you are, the more likely you are to connect with other people. Because we don’t recognise ourselves in generic observations about the human condition. We recognise ourselves in the weird, specific details that we thought only we noticed.
So What Now?
I’m not suggesting you ignore every piece of writing advice you’ve ever received. Structure matters. Clarity matters. Knowing your audience matters.
But maybe—and hear me out—those things matter less than we’ve been told. Maybe they’re useful guidelines rather than inviolable laws. Maybe the real question isn’t “how do I write better?” but “how do I write more honestly, even when honesty is rambling or uncertain or doesn’t fit the format?”
Because here’s what I believe: in a world where technically competent writing is increasingly commodified and automated, the most valuable thing you can offer as a writer isn’t perfection. It’s yourself.
Your weird tangents. Your unresolved contradictions. Your willingness to work something out on the page rather than arriving with all the answers pre-packaged. The specific, irreducible way you see the world that no one else—human or artificial—could quite replicate.
That’s not always going to look like “good writing” in the conventional sense. It might not open with a hook. It might not vary sentence length appropriately. It might take too long to get to the point, or get there too quickly, or never quite arrive at a point at all.
But it might be the only kind of writing that actually matters.
The only kind worth doing.
The only kind that has a chance of cutting through the noise and making someone stop, just for a moment, and think oh, right, there’s an actual human on the other end of this.
And honestly? In 2025, that feels almost radical.
Until Next Time
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