I started writing because I couldn't talk to the other kids. When I began school, I had just emigrated from Ukraine and didn't know a word of English. So I talked to the page instead. First in Ukrainian, then in English, I filled dozens of journals with thoughts I couldn’t share with anyone else—even as I remained so quiet in the outside world that adults often asked, “Does she talk?”

 

It's not a coincidence that so many of us discover the impulse to write in moments of disconnection or loneliness. Our need for connection is why literature exists in the first place. Yes, the opening song of Contact, the kids' science show from the 80s, got it right:

 

Contact
It’s the answer,
It’s the reason
Why everything happens.

 

(The song. Once you hear this clip, it may never leave you.)

 

At first, we write to make contact with the quiet parts of ourselves. Then, if we stay with the craft long enough, something remarkable tends to happen: our writing practice pulls us outside ourselves and into the world—speeding us past all the small talk and directly into other people’s innermost lives. In my first career as a magazine writer, I talked. I talked with people from every walk of life: those with no money and those with more than they could ever spend, people at their happiest and people at their lowest. We talked all over the world—in an Indian desert, on a Colorado mountaintop, aboard an open boat in a thunderstorm on the Amazon River. Writing gave me an excuse to sit with people for hours (sometimes days) and hear how, exactly, they had navigated this life. I got to know many of them so intimately, I was heartbroken to leave them. 

 

That, to me, is the work of the writer: to come into real contact with the world—and then to transmit that contact to the page so readers can feel it too. That transmission from writer to reader is what Proust called "that fruitful miracle of a communication in the midst of solitude." 

 

We live in a culture that tells writers what we’re creating is “content”—a product even a non-human can deliver. But we know that what we’re actually here to create is bigger than that: it’s connection. Which is why, whenever I evaluate a piece of writing (yours or mine), these are the questions I come back to every time: How might you make your writing connect even more deeply with the world around you? And with your reader?

Fifteen years ago, I wrote a magazine story about the years my college friends and I lived off food we scavenged from dumpsters and, to this day, people still ask me where to find the best free cheese in central Pennsylvania.

 

The questioners seem to imagine I’m still that young woman fleeing a Weis dumpster on a squeaky bike, shirt full of avocados, as the cops pull up. That’s the thing about writing: it has the magical power to pause time.

 

But that magic comes with a risk for writers. While our readers (and editors and agents) may stay frozen in the spell of our past work, we can’t afford to. If we’re not paying attention, we might find ourselves writing what used to be true, staying loyal to a version of ourselves we’ve long outgrown, and wondering why our work suddenly feels flat.

 

This is one reason I love working with second-book authors. Book Two surfaces a particular tension: Can you let go of the writer you were in Book One in order to write from the truth of who you are now? You’ll face this question again and again across your writing life, so it’s worth learning how to meet it well now.

 

When I zoom out on any of my favorite writers’ careers, I see a consistent talent for reinvention. I’m thinking of Susan Cain, whose Bittersweet bravely shifts away from Quiet in both tone and theme. And of Quan Barry, who leaps from suburban satire to Mongolian desert mysticism between novels. In both cases, I can feel how the writer herself has changed between books. 

 

This is the real muscle every lasting writer must build: the ability to notice when you’ve changed—and let your writing change too. Even if your readers claim they want more of the same, they don’t really. Because they are constantly changing too, and so is the world around them. This is why, with every new project, the creative process rewards risk and expansion. 

 

Whenever I sit down to write, I like to ask myself one deceptively simple question, with the emphasis in exactly the right place: What am I writing now?

“I love that I have gathered so much expertise about how to do my job (writing books) that nothing about it really scares me anymore. I feel completely relaxed in my own mastery as a creator,” Elizabeth Gilbert said in an Oldster interview. I had to pause the first time I read that. Can you imagine feeling completely relaxed throughout the book writing process?

 

I can’t. But Gilbert reminds us that it might not always be this way. Even as we wrestle with doubts and drafts that fall short of our standards, we’re moving toward something. And no, it’s not necessarily stellar book sales or acclaim (publishing offers no guarantees, no matter how good the work is). What we’re moving toward is harder to name, but just as real: a sense of creative relaxation. A return to the quiet comfort we felt as we wrote as kids—but now backed by deep skill and understanding.

 

In other words: mastery.

 

And Gilbert is clear about how that mastery comes. The full quote: “I feel completely relaxed in my own mastery as a creator, which I earned through a lot of hard work and focus.”

 

That part about hard work is what many of us try to skip. But getting to a place of true creative ease like Gilbert’s takes years, often decades, of intentional stretching. And not working just to work, but committing to growth. Always asking: What edge can I push next?

 

Not everyone who looks at a creator like Gilbert feels a thrill at how she stays grounded while constantly evolving (switching genres, reinventing her voice, shaving her head!). Not everyone thinks, I want that kind of creative ease, and I’m willing to work for it. But I do. And if you do too, maybe you’re in the right place.