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It's an awful feeling to write something that you feel is really important... and to feel that you're being published by people who really don't get it and/or don't really care.

For me, it's actually really hard to write about my real experience. Like to do a Taylor Swift. You know what I mean? It's so brave to actually write about things that happened and things you wanna get off your chest, but I'm not really there yet.

Writing is sort of putting a puzzle together halfway. Then, performing it has always been the completion of it. Once that happens, I'm feeling verbally communal with other people. It's out there and I feel so much better about it.

I seem to have a natural tendency to want to share my own observations and feelings with other people, and writing seems to be the way I'm best equipped to do that.

Writing does produce a very unique satisfaction. There are times when I'm writing that it's frustrating or appalling or difficult, but when it goes well, it goes really well, and there is a feeling of rightness, like I'm doing the thing I was meant to do, almost in a mystical way, like I'm at an appropriate angle to the world.

The more you're writing absolutely honestly, and absolutely bare of intention - even if it feels absolutely personal and small because it's at your own scale - other people relate to it much more.

It's way easier to write for other people. Yourself isn't in it. When you write for yourself, you overthink, and you become paranoid. When you write for others, it isn't about you.

When you write, no matter what, it ends up personal.

The act of writing is a way of tricking yourself into revealing something that you would never consciously put into the world. Sometimes I'm shocked by the deeply personal things I've put into books without realizing it.

I never sit down to write anything personal unless I know the subject is going to go beyond my own experience and address something larger and more universal.