Why Your Private Thoughts Are Worth More Than You Think
Sometimes, the things we don't want to say are the things our audience needs to hear
There’s a lot you’re not saying in your newsletter.
And I get it. I do. It’s difficult to give away the personal stuff.
2015 was one of the most significant years of my life.
Multiple bereavements. Leaving a job I loved, only to enter one I somehow managed to put up with for a couple of years.
And the beginnings of what would become We’re Writing on the Internet, although I had no clue about that at the time.
I’m not telling you this for sympathy. It was a long time ago now, and I’ve built a genuinely happy life since. I’m telling you because of what happened to my writing afterwards, which is really what this newsletter is about.
Let’s look into it together.
Sometimes, We Must Struggle Before We Can Start
I’d always written.
Long before that year, and long before “content creator” was even a phrase anyone used. Hobby magazines, fanzines, forums, chat rooms, whatever the format of the decade happened to be.
Writing about the things I loved was just something I did, the way some people garden or play five-a-side.
But somewhere in the two or three years after 2015, writing became something else.
It became the place I went to work out what life had just tried to teach me. Not therapy, exactly. Just... a way of turning something enormous and unmanageable into something the size of a page.
Something I could actually hold.
And here’s the part that surprised me. When I eventually did share some of that, in dribs and drabs, over the years, people didn’t wince and look away the way I half expected them to.
They leaned in. They told me it helped. Some of them told me it helped more than almost anything else they’d read that year.
I didn’t set out to write something useful. I set out to write something true, purely for myself. The useful part turned up afterwards, uninvited.
And it took me a long time to realise this, but being useful is exactly what our writing needs to be.
New to writing about your hobbies and interests online?
Don’t look at a blank page alone.
Grab the free New Writer Bundle here for your starter prompts, tips, and the confidence to begin:
The Bit Nobody Tells New Writers
If you’re sitting on a hobby newsletter idea right now, I’d guess you’ve had a version of this thought already. Even if your own experience comes from a source far-removed from mine.
A small, private reflection about your hobby. Something that happened at a rehearsal, a match, a workshop, a walk. Not a “how-to.” Not a tip. Just a genuine, slightly wobbly thought that crossed your mind and that you’d never dream of putting in a newsletter.
And I’m going to guess the reason you’ve never written it down properly is some version of this:
Why would anyone else care what I think? Isn’t this just for me?
Here’s what I’ve learned, the slow way, over years of doing this: that question has the logic backwards.
The things that are “just for you” are very often the exact things your reader is secretly hoping somebody will finally say out loud. Not because your specific situation matches theirs. But because the honesty of it does.
You don’t need a tragedy to prove this to yourself, by the way.
It works exactly the same way for even the smallest things.
The nerves before a rehearsal you nearly skipped. The moment you almost didn’t post the photo. The small, ordinary doubt that visits most hobbyists on a slow week.
That’s the same raw material, just a gentler version of it.
So, What Do You Actually Do With It?
Nothing dramatic. That’s kind of the point.
You don’t need to publish your private thoughts today, or possibly ever. Capturing something honestly, just for yourself, and publishing it to the world are two completely different decisions. Made at completely different times.
And you’re allowed to make only the first one for as long as you like.
But you do need somewhere to put it the moment it happens. A note on your phone. A line in a notebook.
One honest sentence, unpolished, unexplained.
Because the version of you six months from now, staring at a blank page wondering what on earth this week’s newsletter issue is about, is going to be enormously grateful to the version of you today who simply wrote the thing down.
That’s really all today’s newsletter is.
Not a tip, not a framework. Just a small piece of proof, from someone a bit further down the road, that the thought you’ve been keeping to yourself might be worth rather more than you think.
🤗 Enjoy the weekend.
And, as always, the very best of luck with your writing.
The 1st Few Ink-Splats Are Always the Hardest
Before you go...
If you enjoyed today’s newsletter but still feel that familiar little knot of nerves about actually putting your own words out there, please don’t let it stop you.
I put together the New Writer Bundle specifically to help you take that very first step without the overwhelm.
It’s completely free, and it includes the exact prompts and tips I use to clear the fog.
PS
What’s the one thing that happened in your hobby or life this week that you thought you’d never write? Maybe think again? See what you can do with it?