Last night after dinner, my wife cut through six years of writing confusion with an offhand comment: "You know, your nonfiction is spectacular."

Her comment struck a nerve because I've felt at a crossroads with writing. Uncertain about where to go next. There's something about autumn that forces an accounting of time. The golden summer days slip away; the leaves turn brown and die. It's a time to assess where you need to put your focus, what you want to accomplish before winter comes howling home and the earth turns to another year.

It's also my birthday today. I turn 38. Birthdays always make me self-reflect. Force me to take stock of the previous year and set an intention for the following one. As I approach forty, something about this accounting feels more urgent. Like the time window to make significant changes is closing.

Why did my wife's comment hit a nerve? It's because I didn't think of myself as primarily a "nonfiction writer." I thought of myself as a fiction writer who happened to write nonfiction. It hit a nerve because I've been thinking a lot about how to focus my writing in the next few years. Do I focus on Paragraph or Substack? Do I go all-in on writing fiction or essays? Or balance the two? Or blend the two? Should I try to monetize my work? What's the best way to do that? On and on.

I'm also feeling this way because my second child was born in May. The birth of a child also makes you question everything. Who you are, who you want to be. Add sleep deprivation, stress, time constraints. It's hard to get my bearings. I have little time to think and even less to write.

This confusion may resolve in time. My son will start sleeping through the night. He'll move into his own room. Our oldest will start kindergarten. The exhaustion of parenting littles will begin to lift. I'll have more time again. Time to write.

But what if there's something here? What if my wife spoke words I've been ignoring for years? An inner voice that has been trying to tell me where my real power lies. "You know, your nonfiction is spectacular." It was enough to jolt me out of my complacency.

I've been writing consistently for the past ten years, the last six of which have been "in public." But in these last six years, my writing has been scattered. Scattered across different platforms, across different forms. It seems like I can never quite get traction, can never get things going. At least, that's what I've been telling myself. But maybe I was self-sabotaging. Abandoning work as soon as it got good because I didn't want to face what it was telling me about myself. Perhaps I have an idea of writing, a self-image that I need to shed. Success was coming from nonfiction writing, but I had this idea of myself as a fiction writer. I was ignoring everything good about my essays. The readership. The interest. Those conversations that my words would spark. Even the monetary possibilities.

This morning, I drew a Tarot spread for some guidance. The first card: the four of cups.

I can think of no better representative image of myself over the last six years. Ignoring what was being offered to me, fixated on something else. I kept trying to write fiction while ignoring the gifts my nonfiction was already bringing. Because when I take a step back and look at my writing over the last six years, a pattern begins to emerge, a pattern that until recently, I had been blind to.

In 2018, I started writing poems, and in late 2019, I started posting them to Instagram. In one year, I grew my following to over 1,000. I played the social media game, and I played it hard. I set aside time every day to read the work of other poets on the platform. I liked, commented, and shared strategically. While I enjoyed the work I read, if I'm being honest, I was mostly doing it so that I would get likes, comments, and follows back. But it was hard work, and after the first year, my growth stalled. I stopped playing the social media game, and my stats suffered for it. Then Instagram added Reels, and my engagement fell off a cliff.

In 2022, I self-published a poetry chapbook (illustrated by my friend, Kristin Paulson). We made enough selling to friends and family to make back the printing costs, but little beyond that. What was most surprising was that, as far as I can tell, not a single Instagram follower purchased the book. Only my IRL friends and relatives bought it. It felt like a failure. I felt like a failure. I gave up Instagram, let my profile grow cold. I stopped writing poems.

I still have a box of the chapbooks sitting in my storage room. Last month, my basement flooded, and the box of books was damaged. I was weirdly apathetic about it, seeing the books warped by water, a book that had taken all that time and effort, physically destroyed. It didn't really bother me, though, because I had mentally abandoned the book years ago. It seemed fitting that its physical destruction would follow.

Back in 2020, I launched a Medium profile and wrote articles about writing and creativity. I put together a little lead magnet that I would add to the bottom of all my posts. In less than a year, I gained 500 email subscribers and over a thousand followers on Medium. What was striking about this growth, especially in comparison to Instagram, was that it felt relatively effortless. Yes, it took a lot of effort to write the posts (and, during my Medium heyday, I was publishing 2-3 posts per week), but I didn't have to do much promotion outside of the actual writing to grow, and grow fast. The Medium platform and my lead magnet did most of the work for me. That, plus I was writing essays that people wanted to read. Most of you reading this right now originally found me and my work on Medium. I have never before or since tapped into such a powerful growth engine as the 10 months I wrote on Medium in 2020.

But by 2021, I had stopped. Almost cold turkey, I gave up on Medium, gave up on my email list. At the time, I told myself that it was because I was burned out—and there's some truth to that. I was writing a lot and chasing metrics, chasing money through the Medium Partner Program.

But the real reason I stopped was that I didn't want to be a writer who wrote about writing. I wanted to be a "serious" writer. I wanted to write literature. I had internalized a hierarchy of writing legitimacy, with Medium writers (and blog writers and online essay slingers) at the bottom and literary novelists at the top. It also felt fake, somehow, to write about writing when I had not been "successful" in a way that I now see was false. I was looking for some kind of blessing conferred by a literary tastemaker. I needed to place my work in a prestigious journal, publish a book, and make lots of money. I had this idea of what writing was supposed to look like, and writing on Medium didn't look like it.

So I quit Medium and decided to write a novel. Something ambitious. Something important. After one year and 100,000 words of meandering nonsense, I realized I had no idea how to write a novel. I scrapped my first draft and then a second one before deciding that I needed to plot my novel step-by-step, following the snowflake method. I wrote a one-sentence summary of my novel. Then, I wrote a synopsis of the novel. I fleshed out all the characters. I wrote a summary of each section, then one for each chapter. After about a month of work, I was finally ready to start the actual writing of my novel—

—but then my first child was born, and my life turned upside down.

It's something of a truism to say that having a child changes you permanently, but my wife and I were put through the fire after our son was born. We came out of that first year completely different people. The birth of my son changed me in ways I am still accounting for.

In those initial weeks of his life, when I was exhausted in a way that I didn't realize was possible, I read a little book called Becoming a Writer by Dorothea Brande. It was the right book at the right time, because it altered the way I thought about writing. Brande lays out a method for developing your writing ability, which I followed diligently and found, somewhat to my surprise, that it worked. It worked extremely well. I found writing easier, more natural, and more enjoyable.

I set myself a goal in that first year of my son's life: by the time he turned one, I would have written 50 short stories. Every week, without fail, I wrote the first draft of a new story. The goal was simply to produce work, to try to discover what kind of writer I could be. I didn't worry about editing my stories or even reading them back. I simply sat down and wrote a story, good or not.

And I succeeded. In the spring of 2023, I had written fifty short stories—almost all of which I would classify as weird horror. I was proud of the work I had accomplished, but it also didn't feel good enough. A question kept nagging at me that spring. What to do with all these stories?

In 2023, Substack was starting to gain some traction. The platform boasted 20 million total subscribers, 2 million of them paid. They had recently launched the Notes app. It seemed like the place where writers from across the web were congregating, abandoning in droves legacy media outlets and old school blogs. Why not post my stories to Substack, I thought. So I did. That summer, I put together a Substack, which I called The Unnerving. I shared the new publication with my followers on Instagram and to my email list (mostly old fans from Medium). To my disappointment, only a handful of followers from these platforms chose to subscribe. It was like the poetry chapbook all over again: most of the people who did subscribe were friends and family.

I started posting horror fiction to Substack every week. My first post generated some attention from my followers, but the second was published to mostly crickets. The third, crickets. The fourth, crickets. Worse, I wasn't gaining any subscribers. Though I posted thirteen stories in the fall of 2023 and shared them across my online network, my subscriber count barely grew.

I wondered if it was something with Substack. Fiction notoriously underperforms on the platform compared to nonfiction. The newsletter format is better suited to essays, especially frequent essays that comment on the dominant news story of the week. My Substack writing was everything a successful newsletter is not: fictional, weird and opaque, inconsistent, antagonistic to "community building." Of course, it wasn't successful. What was I expecting?

I was expecting to succeed despite going directly against the platform headwinds. I thought, naively, that I was somehow good enough to chart my own course on Substack. That my writing had a secret motor that could power my little sailboat-of-stories against the wind. No, it turns out that a platform is like a force of nature. It was powerful enough to capsize my poorly planned dreams.

What I resolved to try next was traditional publishing. Instead of "wasting" my stories on Substack, I would try to place them in magazines and online journals. I sent out my work 33 times in late 2024 and early 2025. But I was met with only one acceptance in an amateur horror journal. The rest: rejections. It felt like the same Substack crickets, but the silence was even louder. It felt like an indictment: nobody wants to read your stories.

In the fall of 2022, I joined Farcaster, a decentralized social media protocol built on Ethereum. I had little reason to be there aside from curiosity. I was intrigued by the ideas swirling at the time about alternative ways for artists and creatives to build audiences and get paid fairly for their work. I was feeling burnt out by the traditional writer pathways up to this point and was interested in exploring exciting new alternatives. Farcaster seemed like a promising experiment.

Although I'm significantly more jaded now about the lofty promises made in crypto communities about unlocking "creative value," I'm glad I've spent the last three years on Farcaster. Mostly because I met many interesting people, a few of whom became online friends.

One such friend, Danica Swanson, urged me to create a Paragraph newsletter after she read my post about the creator economy on Substack. She showed me how to set one up, and what emerged was the publication that you are currently reading, The Driftless. The first article was a repost from my Substack, which I called "Against the Creator Economy."

In the course of a year of writing on Paragraph, a few interesting things happened, things new to my writing career thus far:

• Multiple posts hit breakout velocity ("viral" is too strong a word) on both Farcaster and Paragraph, generating more views than I'd ever achieved since the Medium days

• But unlike writing on Medium, I could maintain momentum while posting sporadically (and I mean, sporadically; since the launch of this newsletter in early 2024, I've only posted 8 times; that's a rate of 0.4 articles per month or 0.1 articles per week).

• Also, unlike the work I posted to Medium, I'm proud of the articles I've published here. They represent a deeper, more mature body of work, and it's incredibly validating to see that work gain traction

• I've made more money writing online than ever before

• I won my first writing contest, a first-place prize (worth 0.5 ETH) for my essay, Farcaster is a Car

• I've slowly built up my largest online following yet, at 574 subscribers

The second card that I drew in my Tarot spread this morning was the ten of pentacles.

The ten of pentacles is a card of legacy, lasting value, and material success. It speaks to work that has substance, builds something enduring, and (potentially) provides financial stability. When I saw the card appear, it felt like the universe nudging me towards nonfiction, towards essay writing. Towards work that shares knowledge, expertise, or practical wisdom. Something that provides clear value for readers.

I believe that creatives have a natural form in which they best express their inner thoughts and feelings. We have different terms for this concept, such as "finding your voice" or honing your "creative signature." A large part of increasing your output and attracting an audience for your work is in discovering what you create most naturally, and then focusing on that.

What I may be coming to realize is that my natural form might be the essay. Not the poem or the story, certainly not the novel—but the essay. Not only because my essays seem to generate the most attention (at least, online), but also because writing them feels somewhat easier. When I sit down to write a story, everything has to be perfect. I can only write at my desk and in the morning. I need to follow a precise routine (go for a walk, shower, meditate, write), and I cannot be interrupted in my work. I must write the entire story in one session, start to finish, front-to-back, and in order; I cannot go back and finish it later. I tend to face this writing responsibility with a grim determination that is otherwise contrary to my personality (which, at its best, is light and easy and fun).

But when I write essays, I can write them anywhere and at any time. At my desk or in bed. At the kitchen table, on the couch. On a plane, in the backseat of a car. I can write on my computer, on my phone. In the morning, the afternoon, the dead of night. There is no preamble, no elaborate preparation; when a thought strikes, I write it down. If it takes some time to elaborate on the thought or to explore it, an essay comes out. Interruptions are fine, welcome even. Often, they kick my mind into new directions, which prove salutary to what I'm working on. I write in chunks and out of order. Sometimes the conclusion comes out first. Often, I write from the middle and move in two directions simultaneously. I write for twenty minutes or for four hours. The act of writing is easy, light. Editing is even easier. When I come back to it after a few days of not writing, it's clear exactly what needs to change.

So here's my commitment for the rest of this year and into the next: why not make it easy? Why not write more essays and see where that takes me?

When I look back at the last six years of writing, I see a consistent sense of frustration with how things are progressing. But when I step back from that feeling, I see that I have been my own worst enemy. As soon as I gain any traction, I flee the field. I give it up and return to more comfortable, more familiar routines. It's because I've internalized that writing is hard, and if it doesn't feel hard, there must be something wrong. I've internalized that writing success is not possible, so even when success shows its hand, I look away. I've been choosing difficulty over my natural talent because suffering feels more legitimate than ease. My essays flow because they're my natural form, not despite it. Writing fiction became a form of self-punishment. Every rejection confirmed a comforting but self-wounding identity as a serious but struggling writer. Success with essays threatened that narrative, so I ran from it.

My core issue isn't about finding the right platform but about reclaiming the intimacy of sharing my voice. Fiction was a way to hide from that voice. To hear what I actually sound like. To see what I actually believe. That's more frightening than all the horror stories I've written.

The final card that I drew in my reading was The Star.

The Star represents hope, healing, and inspiration after trying times. It signifies finding inner guidance and (re)aligning with your natural self. I was losing faith in my creative vision. Questioning why I even bothered to write. I was chasing an idealized version of myself as a writer, and ignoring my more natural gifts. Ignoring what resonated more strongly with others.

I'm not going to run from my natural form anymore. Today is my 38th birthday. It feels like as good a time as any to refocus my efforts, to embrace writing essays. For guidance, for inspiration, I pulled from my shelf the collected works of Michel de Montaigne, where, in the introduction, I discovered a strange synchronicity. I learned that Montaigne picked up writing essays on his 38th birthday, after retiring from public life.

At the age of thirty-eight, on the last day of February, his birthday, Michel de Montaigne, long weary of the structure of the court of public employment, while still entire, retired to the bosom of the learned virgins.

The power of Montaigne's writing was that he could look at himself unflinchingly. He needed to discover himself, figure out what he really thought, and so he turned to a form, one invented for this purpose: the essay.

I commit to doing the same. My goal for the next twelve months is simple: write more essays. No more hedging, no more writing experiments, no more submitting fiction to publications in the hopeless chase for prestige. Instead, I will do what is easy, simple even. I will build momentum right here. More essays, more consistently, for the next year.

I look forward to sharing the next one with you.

The featured image for this piece is "There was perhaps a first vision attempted in the flower" by Odilon Redon (1883), the second plate in his lithograph series Les Origines. The title refers to an emerging symbolic or spiritual essence within the natural form of a flower. I believe everyone has a creative essence that struggles to emerge from their natural form, if they can only learn how to get out of their own way.