Must you write?

There's a passage by Rainer Maria Rilke I keep returning to, from Letters to a Young Poet.

A young man had written to him asking whether his poems were any good. Whether he should keep going. Whether he had what it took.

And Rilke wrote back something that still undoes me when I read it.

He told the young poet to stop asking the world for permission. To go inside himself, into the quietest hour of his night, and ask: must I write? If the answer rises up from the deepest part of him as a yes — if his life would be poorer without the writing in it — then build his life around that yes. Not around being recognised. Not around being good yet. Around the must.

I've been thinking about that all week.

Because I'll be honest with you — I don't always show up to the page. I want to be the writer who does. I'm not him yet. There are days I sit down and the page wins, and there are weeks I disappear from my own work and pretend I'm just busy.

So I'm not going to write you a letter today about discipline I haven't earned the right to preach. I'm not going to tell you to write every day, or to silence the doubt, or any of the lines we've all read a thousand times.

What I want to say is smaller and, I think, truer.

The reason this newsletter exists — the reason you are here, reading this — is that somewhere along the way, the must found you. Maybe you were eleven. Maybe you were forty. Maybe it was a poem that broke something open in you, or a sentence you wrote in a notebook that you've never shown anyone. But it found you. And it hasn't left.

That is not a small thing. That is the rarest thing.

The world is full of people who don't know what calls them. You do. You may be quiet about it. You may be inconsistent with it. You may, like me, have weeks where you avoid the page like it owes you money. But you know.

And if you know, the work isn't over. The work is just slow. It's allowed to be slow. It's allowed to be ugly. It's allowed to look, from the outside, like nothing at all is happening — while underneath, something is.

The poem you're not yet ready to write is still yours. The novel you keep abandoning is still yours. The voice you haven't fully found is forming, even on the days you don't pick up the pen.

Rilke also wrote, in that same book, that we should be patient toward all that is unsolved in our hearts. That we should try to love the questions themselves. That we should live the questions now, and perhaps, gradually, without noticing it, live our way into the answer one distant day.

I think the questions you're living right now — am I a real writer? is this any good? will it ever amount to anything? — those are not the questions you have to answer this week.

You just have to keep living them.

That's all.

Be patient with yourself. Be patient with the work. Come back to the page when you can. When you can't, forgive yourself faster than the world will.

The must is not going anywhere.

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A few quick notes before I go:

To everyone who filled out the survey — thank you. Truly. I read every response, more than once, and the picture you painted was clearer than I expected. You told me what you wanted from this letter and what you didn't. I'm building from that.

Two things changing as of today:

This newsletter is now twice a week — Mondays and Fridays. Mondays will be slower, like this one — something to sit with. Fridays will be tighter — closer to the craft, the work, the page itself and publishing opportunities.

The podcast. I've spent the last few weeks reaching out to writers I deeply admire, and several of them said yes. Dates are booked. The conversations haven't happened yet — but they're coming, and I'm genuinely nervous about a few of them in the best way. I'll share names as the recordings get closer.

That's all from me.

Be gentle with yourself this week.

See you Monday.

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