By Sean Collard •

There’s a risk in learning how to write well: the danger of forgetting why you started. I worry that someday I’ll become so polished, so precise, that I’ll lose the very thing that made my writing matter in the first place—my belief that stories can mean something. That writing can be more than cleverness. That it can be a form of survival, or communion, or even hope. That in the rush to entertain, to impress, to prove myself, I might lose the ability to write the kind of work that makes someone feel seen—or less alone in the dark.

Because the truth is, it’s easier to hide behind style. It’s safer to be clever than it is to be vulnerable. You can polish a paragraph until it gleams. But shine won’t save you from the hollowness underneath. The deeper the wound I write from, the more tempting it is to retreat into craft, into metaphor, into a dozen layers of safe detachment that shield me from the rawness underneath. But I didn’t start writing because I wanted to impress anyone. I started writing because something inside me was screaming to be let out. Because I needed a place to put the pain.

I started writing to survive the nights.

But somewhere along the way, you realize you’re not just writing for yourself anymore. There’s an audience now—real or imagined—and with that comes pressure. To entertain. To impress. To package your grief in a way that’s palatable. You start to ask yourself, “Will this land? Will they get it? Will this resonate?” And slowly, if you’re not careful, those questions start to drown out the ones that matter. Not, “Is this true?” but “Is this shareable?” Not, “Is this honest?” but “Is this good craft?”

And that’s the danger, isn’t it? That you’ll start sanding down the edges where the truth lives. That you’ll start writing for approval instead of connection. You’ll become so focused on shaping the work into something elegant that you’ll forget why the messiness mattered.

But art—not just “good” art but any art—has only one purpose: to evoke connection. When you sandblast your work into acceptability, when you polish it until it gleams but grind away all the grit that made it real, you’re not making art anymore. You’re making product. Output. Content. And product doesn’t bleed. Output doesn’t ache. Content doesn’t look someone in the eye and say, “Me, too.”

We live in an age of profound, performative irony. It’s not just a style—it’s a defense mechanism. A cultural shield. A generational coping strategy so deeply ingrained it’s practically reflex. And irony can be powerful—Dorothy Parker taught me that. But Parker wielded irony like a scalpel, not a shield. Her wit was armor, yes, but it never fully masked the ache beneath it. Her pain was always just under the surface, flickering like the reflection of a distant fire. And it was that fire—the flicker of vulnerability—that made her work unforgettable. Irony, when used right, reveals; when used poorly, it obscures. Parker never let it obscure. Her irony cut—herself as often as anyone else. That flicker of vulnerability, pulling you into her work, echoes my own.

So yes, I worry. I worry that I’ll lose my earnestness—that I’ll become too polished, too practiced, too clever. That I’ll forget why I started. But maybe that fear is a compass. Maybe it’s pointing to the thing that matters most. Because what I want—what I’ve always wanted—isn’t to impress. It’s to be understood. To make someone feel what I felt. To write something that reaches across the dark and says, You’re not alone.

And if that means being a little less refined, a little more exposed—then that’s a risk I’m willing to take. Because the connection is worth it. It always was.

xxx

The first thing I ever wrote that mattered to me was the early draft of an essay called “Six Blocks from the Federal Reserve,” though at the time I had simply called it “Crack Alley.” It was short, raw, and jagged—full of emotion, profanity, and ragged edges. It had power, but it was rough. It depended more on shock value than on structure or skill.

I left it alone for years.

Then, one day, I pulled it back out. I reread it. And something in me said, “I can do better now.” Not because I didn’t still believe in its voice or its urgency—but because I had tools now. I knew how to build a stronger frame for that urgency to stand on. So, I began to edit.

I restructured it. Expanded it. Refined its rhythm. I brought in outside readers, took feedback seriously. But one of the hardest decisions I faced was what to do with the profanity. It was part of the original voice—part of how I’d captured the rage and rawness of the experience. But I knew that literary journals often view profanity as a hurdle, and I had to decide: keep it as is and limit its chances of publication, or find another way to preserve the intensity.

I found my pathway back to raw, honest vulnerability by grounding the text in physically visceral, vividly rendered scenes—moments you could touch, smell, shiver through. I leaned into texture and tension, into the tactile reality of my memories: the cracked yellow tile of the shelter showers, the stinging cold of the night air, the thin mattress pressing against my back. I let those details do the emotional work the profanity had once carried. The result was something more powerful, not less—because now the reader wasn’t just hearing my pain, they were in it. They were living it with me.

And that’s when I understood: the rawness I was reaching for didn’t have to come from shock. It didn’t have to rely on transgression or taboo. The power of the piece came from its honesty, not its volume. From the way it built toward a crescendo of emotion and then collapsed into silence, unresolved—because that’s how those memories live in me. Not neatly wrapped up with catharsis and clarity, but jagged, open-ended.

The absence of resolution became its own kind of truth. And that, more than any curse word, is what made it land.

Because no matter what the market says, or the culture says, or the cool, ironic crowd of literary voices says—the work should matter. It should reach for something. And if it doesn’t, then why do it at all?

There’s a moment that comes when you write something hard. Something true. You get it down. You read it back. And for a moment, it feels like it’s burning in your hands. And then you wonder: Is this too much? Will this scare people off? Will this be off-putting? Is it too raw? Too personal? Too angry? Too broken?

That accusation—that you’re “too much”—is the real kick in the chest. It sits with you. It whispers at you when you write from your gut. And the temptation becomes real: cut it down. Smooth it over. Make it nice.

But if I’ve learned anything from writing this kind of work, it’s this: When you tell the truth—even the messy, ugly, painful truth—someone out there will need it. Someone will write to you to say, “This helped me. I’ve never seen it put into words before. This made me feel less alone.”

And that is the moment you remember why you started.

That’s the moment the risk feels worth it.

Maybe the point isn’t to avoid the pain. Maybe it’s to share it. Because that’s how it stops being just mine.

That’s what I’ve come to understand, through the essays, through the fear, through the remembering and forgetting and remembering again. I dig up the pain, and yes—it hurts. It burns like fire, like memory etched in nerve endings. But once it’s on the page, it changes. Because when someone else reads it, when they recognize something in it, even a flicker, it stops being mine alone. It becomes ours.

And in that shared burden, we find something like understanding. Maybe even healing. Not the tidy kind. Not resolution or redemption or narrative closure. But the kind that comes from knowing someone else sees it, too. Felt it, too. Survived it, too.

That’s why I write. Not to impress you. Not to entertain. Not even to be heard, not really. I write because I want to hold out a piece of what I’ve carried and say, “Here. This was heavy. If it looks like something you’ve held too, maybe we can set it down together, just for a while.”

And if I can do that—if even one person reads my work and feels less alone in the dark—then it was worth it. Every scar, every edit, every risk.

That’s the point.

That was always the point.

 

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SEAN COLLARD is a writer based in Missouri whose work explores trauma, memory, and the moral complexity of survival. A high school dropout and self-taught essayist, he writes deeply personal nonfiction that interrogates pain and foregrounds vulnerability. His work asks what it means to endure, and what remains after. This is his first publication. Find him on Facebook @sean.collard.98.

 

Featured Image by Earl Wilcox, courtesy of Unsplash.