For the Page, Not the People.

How to start a Document for 1.

My Substack. My thirst trap. My summer in Lisbon.

Look.

Some stories are for the page, not for the people.

Meaning, not everything we write needs to be seen. As in, you sit down and write with the absolute intention that this document is secret and sealed for you and by you. It’s not that we produce and it goes nowhere accidentally, as so much of the work does, and that’s normal, so don’t panic. You should produce enough to leave behind if you can. There is nothing wrong with the work that "doesn’t make it anywhere" because it’s the foundation for the work that does. This is Document 1.

Anyway. This work I’m talking about, the page not people work, is made with the intention of going nowhere. There is so much freedom in that.

I don’t use writing as therapy when I publish or sell. It’s not how I work and I learned that years of putting the wrong kinds of emotions into the flow of the job. Hard to explain. But I learned to use two brains for work. There is crossover, yeah, and it’s always voice and tone. You can’t mimic personality, and as someone who works with and in AI, that’s the one thing the machines can’t duplicate: nuance.

The person I let myself be when I write on purpose for no one is a voice that I don’t share out loud. It’s still me, but the parts that need to be seen by only me to exist. We have this inside of us.

That decision, to have a secret writer self, evolved on its own and wasn’t really a decision at all. More like a natural selection of behaviour that felt easy to do: keep secrets with myself. A secret document that runs on for pages and hundreds of thousands of words over several years, like collecting rubber bands for a rubber band ball carefully and slowly, like a pet.

If you’re stuck on starting to write, I strongly encourage you to keep a blank page for yourself on your computer this way. Start with you as your test audience. Does your story keep your interest? Don’t think about how you sound. Just write what you hear in your head. Be the microphone for the echo of your thoughts. Absorb, write, read it back. Walk away and do it again at the same time tomorrow, and that’s how you start a Document for 1.