You Don't Have to Monetize Your Trauma

You Can Write About Anything You Want

Hi Friends,

I don’t know if you know this, but you don’t have to monetize your trauma. You don’t have to write essays about your life experiences for websites for $250 a pop and you don’t have to put those same, or different, facets of your life on display in memoir or a novel. In a book you spend years writing. That you then have to spend months working to get people to buy. This is not required of.

If you want to write a book, it doesn’t have to be about the worst day of your life. It doesn’t have to be about the scab you pick once a year, on that day, how it came to be and how it’s healing, or not. You don’t have to give your characters the thing that happened to you, so they can pantomime what you wish you’d said or done, or what the other person said or didn’t do. You don’t have to modernize it because we all have phones now, or figure out how to write a historical novel because the 80s and 90s are historical now. You don’t have write an author’s note that says If you’re dealing with this, you are not alone. You are not alone, either.