The writer who lost the way
For the writer who’s still showing up to the page and can’t feel anything anymore.
She sent me a manuscript last fall that was basically flawless.
I mean that thing was pristine. Clean prose, consistent point of view, well-paced scenes that moved the reader along. It was the kind of writing that would get high marks in any creative writing class. The kind of manuscript an agent would call “polished.”
I read it twice. And both times, I set it down feeling nothing.
I wasn’t confused. I wasn’t frustrated. I wasn’t even bored, exactly. Just… empty. Like I’d walked through a beautifully decorated home and everything was covered in plastic. Like sofas used to be back in the day depending on whose house it was.
When I wrote the editorial letter, I struggled with how to say what I needed to say. Because the writing wasn’t bad. There wasn’t anything to circle in red, per se. There wasn’t a craft failure to diagnose and offer solutions and/or suggestions for. The structure was solid. The sentences sang. Every element was present and accounted for.
But the writer wasn’t in it.
I’ve been an editor for years now, and the pattern I see most often isn’t bad writing. What I see is hollow writing. Writing that performs competence while the writer stands at a distance from their own pages.
Sidebar: Writers don’t hire editors because they write poorly. They hire editors because they write carefully. Too carefully. They want someone to call them back into the work they’ve been circling.
Hollow writing looks different than you might think.
It’s not the first draft that reads like a mess. That’s usually a writer who’s still inside the work, still discovering what they’re saying. The mess is honest and true. The mess has heat.
The hollow manuscript is the opposite. It’s the fifth or sixth draft. Or even the tenth draft in some cases. It’s been critiqued and beta-read and revised until every rough edge is gone. And somewhere in that process, somewhere between the raw truth and the final version, the writer left the room.
They can’t tell you when it happened. Half the time, they don’t even know it happened. They just know that the manuscript they sent me took months to finish and they can’t feel it anymore. They tell themselves that it’s just part of the process of revision. That distance is professionalism. That the absence of feeling means the work is finally ready.
Beloved writer, it’s not ready. It’s abandoned.
Not the way you abandon a project in a drawer. never to see the light of day. This is worse. This is a writer who kept showing up to the page consistently, kept doing the work, kept hitting their word counts and deadlines, and still lost the thread of why they were writing the book in the first place.
Stay with me cuz I’m not talking about writer’s block.
Writer’s block is when you can’t get to the page. When you can’t get the words to flow. That’s its own wound and it has its own medicine. But the writer who lost the way? They’re at the page every day or every week. They’re producing. They might even be publishing online. From the outside, they looks like they’re doing everything right.
The hollowness isn’t visible to anyone but them.
And sometimes… not even to them. Sometimes the only evidence is a low hum of dissatisfaction they can’t articulate. A feeling after they hit publish or type “the end” that should be relief but instead feels like indifference. The quiet knowledge that they used to feel something when they wrote. An aliveness, a heat, a sense that the words were pulling them somewhere they hadn’t been. And that feeling is gone now, but they can’t tell you when it left.
Some will call it burnout. Others will call it a creative rut. Some will buy a new planner or try a different writing schedule or sign up for another course on craft.
None of it will work cuz the problem isn’t any of those things.
The problem is that somewhere along the way, through all that revision and critique, they stopped writing toward something that mattered and started writing toward something that performed.
Here’s what I mean.
There’s a version of writing that moves. And there’s a version of writing that performs movement.
They look almost identical on the page. The sentences are strong in both. The structure holds in both. You could put them side by side and a casual reader might not know the difference.
But the writer knows. And as an editor who views writing differently, I know.
Writing that moves comes from a place inside the work. The writer is there, in the room, in the wound, in the body of the sentence. They’re writing toward a question they don’t fully have the answer to yet, and that not-knowing is what gives the prose its heat. The reader feels it. They probably can’t name it, but they feel it. Something in the writing is alive. Words carry energy, and it calls to them.
Writing that performs comes from a place behind the work. The writer has already decided what they’re saying. They’re managing the reader’s experience instead of sharing their own. The sentences are grammatically excellent but emotionally flat. The conclusions are arrived at before the essay or novel or whatever they’re writing begins. There’s no discovery happening because the writer already knows where they’re going, and that certainty is what makes the whole thing feel dead on the page.
I’ve done this myself. Written entire pieces that were well-constructed and completely hollow. Published them, even. Got the likes and the shares and the comments that said “this is so good,” and knew in my body that I hadn’t said the thing I sat down to say.
That’s the performance wound doing its work. It’s not visible in the craft execution. It’s visible in the why.
The writer who sent me that manuscript wasn’t a beginner or an emerging writer as some of y’all would say. She’d been writing seriously for over a decade. Had the credentials, had the writing practice, had the discipline that most writing teachers would hold up as the gold standard.
And she was miserable because the writing had stopped meaning something.
When I asked her, very gently in the way you ask something you’re not sure the other person is ready to hear, when she’d last written something that scared her, she went quiet. Not thinking-quiet like she was trying to remember an actual date in journal or something like that. The kind of quiet that means the question hit her somewhere she wasn’t expecting.
She said she couldn’t remember.
And then she said something that broke my heart a little:
I think I’ve been writing for an audience I don’t even want anymore.
And just like that, she identified the wound.
This isn’t a problem that any productivity system or writing course or editorial feedback can solve. The question underneath every sentence she’d written for years wasn’t “is this good enough?” It was “who am I writing this for, and when did I stop writing it for me?”
As I’m writing this, I’m thinking about the full moon we had on April 1. Libra energy: the sign of balance, of reciprocity, of relationships. And it makes me think about how the relationship between a writer and their audience is one of the least examined relationships in a creative life.
We talk about finding your audience. Growing your audience. Serving your audience. Writing for your audience.
But we never ask: is this relationship costing you something?
Is the version of yourself that shows up on the page the version that’s true? Or is it the version that gets the most traction? Are you writing toward the readers who need your real voice? Or toward the ones who reward you for performing a voice that’s easier for them to consume?
Because there’s a difference. And the writer who lost the way can feel it even if they can’t name it.
The hollowness isn’t about the audience being wrong. It’s about the writer abandoning themselves to keep the audience comfortable.
So what does the road back look like?
There’s no four-step action plan.
What I will say is this: every writer I’ve worked with who found their way back did one specific thing. They stopped asking “is this good?” and started asking “is this true?”
I don’t mean true in the factual sense. I’m talking about true in the body sense. True in the way that makes your stomach tighten when you write it because you know it costs something to say it plainly. True in the way that makes you want to revise it into something softer and more palatable before anyone sees it and has something to say about it.
The road back is toward the writing that scares you.
It’s the paragraph you delete before anyone reads it. The sentence you hedge with “it felt like” or “in some ways” because saying it directly feels like too much. The piece you’ve been circling for months that you keep telling yourself isn’t ready yet, when what you mean is you’re not ready to be that visible.
That’s where your writing is. The real writing. The writing that moves.
It’s been waiting for you to stop performing and come back to the room.
Lemme ask you something directly:
When did writing stop feeling like yours?
When did it stop belonging to you? The real you. The one who writes because something inside them wants and needs to be said, not because something outside them needs to be produced?
Can you even remember?
And if you can, if there’s a moment, a season, a manuscript, a rejection, a revision that took the heat out of your voice, what would it look like to go back to the page before that happened?
That question might sit with you for a while. Let it.
with love from the waters,
High Priestess Lakeisha
This essay was written as a door. If you felt something shift while reading, if the hollowness I described felt familiar in a way that caught you off guard… Write From the Wound is where that recognition becomes practice. It’s a self-paced course that helps you name what’s underneath your writing patterns and write from the other side of it.
Thank you for sharing this sentence from your client: "I think I’ve been writing for an audience I don’t even want anymore." It hit home so hard, a real gut punch of truth.