On the Importance of Permission

There's something worth marking this month. The founding members of the Write Things Collective are closing out their first year — a full year of showing up, of putting words on the page, of doing the quiet, unglamorous work that writing actually requires. The change I've witnessed has been genuinely surprising. Not just more pages, but a different kind of writing. A deeper relationship with the work. These writers have moved from telling their stories to crafting them — and that shift doesn't happen by accident. It happens because they kept coming back.

And yet. Writing still gets hard.

The manuscript is further along. The craft is sharper. The instincts are better. And still — there are days where the next scene won't come. Where the energy drains before the session even starts. Where sitting down feels like the last thing you want to do. A year of consistent work doesn't make the difficult days disappear. It just means you've earned the right to know they're survivable.

That's what this issue is about.

A few weeks ago, in one of our group sessions, I asked the writers to pause. Not to talk about their manuscripts, not to troubleshoot a scene or workshop a chapter — just to sit with a simple question: why do you write?

What came back was immediate, and it was honest. They write because they have something to say. Because there are things they need to explore, questions they can't stop turning over, experiences that won't leave them alone until they find a shape on the page. Not one of them said they write to produce a word count. Not one said they write to finish a draft.

And yet — when writing gets hard, that's exactly the standard we hold ourselves to. Visible progress. Tangible output. A session that looks productive from the outside. When a writing session doesn't deliver that, it can feel like failure. Like something is wrong with us, or the project, or both.

It isn't. But it helps to name what's happening.

When the going gets tough, the instinct is to push harder at the work. To sit down, open the document, and will yourself through it. Sometimes that works. Often it doesn't — and the harder you push, the further away the writing feels.

Here's a different move: get away from the story, and come back to yourself.

Writing is, before anything else, a personal act. The reader eventually gets the benefit of it — but the work itself belongs to you first. And that means a writing session doesn't have to look like production. It doesn't have to generate pages or move the plot forward or solve the problem you've been stuck on. It can look like daydreaming. Like writing a scene that will never appear in your novel but tells you something about your character you didn't know. Like a poem, or a drawing, or simply sitting with the question of what you're actually trying to say.

This is what permission looks like in practice.

Some of the writers in our coaching call named it clearly. Permission to be wrong. Permission to make mistakes without treating them as evidence of failure. Permission to give forty percent on the days when forty percent is genuinely all there is. Permission to be brave, to trust the instincts that a year of work has quietly been building.

None of these are small things. They're the difference between a writer who keeps coming back and one who quietly steps away.

Writing sessions don't have to be productive to be worthwhile. They have to be honest. They have to be yours.

These aren't craft exercises. Set the manuscript aside. These are for you.

Why do you write?

Not why you think you should write. Not what you hope the writing will become. Why do you write — what does it give you, what does it help you hold, what would go unexpressed without it? Write for as long as it takes to hit something true. You'll know it when you get there.

What do you give yourself permission to do?

Write this one as a letter to yourself. Address it to the version of you who sits down on a hard day, opens the document, and feels nothing. What do you want that person to know? What are you allowed to do in a writing session, beyond producing pages? What would make the session worth having — and make you want to come back the next day?

Keep the letter somewhere you can find it.

Wishing you and your stories all the best,

Trevor

Founder, I Help You Write Things

P.S. Every writing journey begins somewhere. And it's a lot easier to do together than on our own. We're welcoming new writers to the Write Things Collective this month — keep an eye out for when the doors open.