Writing Without Permission

Writing Without Permission

Writing Without Permission

Over the past few days, I’ve read a couple of blog posts and emails that left me with an oddly familiar feeling. A sort of quiet dislocation, like I’d wandered into a conversation that everyone else seemed fluent in, one I was told I was meant to understand, but I just couldn’t make the same connections.

One was a reflective post by K.M. Weiland, looking back on her year of turning forty, buying her first home, and deliberately building her writing life. It was thoughtful, honest, and clearly meaningful to her.

The other was an email from Dave at Kindlepreneur, advising writers to research whether their book idea is actually “worth writing” before they commit to it.

Both pieces are sensible. And yet, reading them triggered a deep, visceral confusion in me. Not disagreement exactly, but a persistent “wait, what?” feeling.

Because turning forty didn’t feel monumental to me.
Because I don’t experience writing as something that needs permission.
And because the idea of asking the market whether a story is “worth writing” feels utterly foreign to how my brain and my heart work.

The milestone script I never received

A lot of people experience certain life milestones as momentous turning points. Twenty-one. Thirty. Forty. Buying a house. Leaving a legacy. Having a plan.

For me? Twenty-one was a big deal to other people. Thirty and forty felt… fine. Just numbers with better self-knowledge attached.

If I have a life plan, it’s a very simple one: to be happy. To live in a way where, if I metaphorically got hit by a bus tomorrow, I could say, honestly, yes, this was a life I was glad to be living.

That doesn’t mean I lack ambition or depth. It means I don’t experience meaning as something that only arrives via struggle, external validation, or future payoff.

So when I read reflections that frame adulthood as a series of sanctioned milestones, or writing as a carefully engineered career ladder, I sometimes feel like an alien peering in through the glass.

Not superior. Just… different.

“Is this book worth writing?”

That feeling sharpened considerably when I read the advice to research whether a book idea is worth writing before you write it.

To be clear, this advice makes perfect sense for certain kinds of writers. If you are writing primarily as a commercial enterprise, aiming to serve a known market with speed and precision, then yes: research is a rational first step.

But here’s the thing.

That question—is this book worth writing?—never appears in my creative process.

A book is worth writing if it sings to me.
If it won’t leave me alone.
If I feel that unmistakable pull of I have to see what happens!

Why else would I write it?

Writing is not easy. It takes time, emotional energy, persistence, and a willingness to sit with uncertainty. If the idea itself doesn’t carry me, if it doesn’t spark curiosity, delight, and obsession, then no amount of market validation will make the process feel alive.

Which is why the advice didn’t just feel unhelpful to me. It felt like advice meant for a different species of writer.

A small thought experiment (featuring Mary Shelley)

Whenever this conversation comes up, my brain immediately runs a historical thought experiment.

If Mary Shelley had researched whether Frankenstein was a good idea before writing it… would the market have said yes?

A teenage girl.
A genre mash-up of gothic horror, philosophy, and speculative science.
A monster who is articulate, tragic, and morally complex.
A bleak, unresolved ending.
No neat moral bow.

It doesn’t fit cleanly anywhere—even now.

By modern standards, Frankenstein is wildly cross-genre. By the standards of its time, it was downright strange.

And yet it exists because Shelley didn’t ask whether it was commercially sensible. She wrote it because the idea possessed her.

You could make the same argument for countless other works that crossed boundaries and confused categories:

None of these would have emerged from a checklist asking whether the market currently wanted this exact thing.

They were written because the authors followed the song.

The quiet pressure beneath the advice

What unsettles me about “should you write this?” advice isn’t the strategy itself. It’s the unspoken implication beneath it.

That joy needs justification.
That curiosity must earn its keep.
That if you could optimise, you should.

And that’s a dangerous idea for creatives.

Because many of us don’t write to be admired. We write to be alive. To explore. To understand. To play. To release a story that haunts our dreams.

When you start filtering those impulses through external approval, whether that’s market research, prestige, or imagined admiration, something essential gets diluted.

Living (and writing) for yourself

I’m increasingly convinced that a great deal of modern anxiety comes from living for an audience that doesn’t actually exist.

Writing for hypothetical readers.
Living for imagined approval.
Chasing a version of success that looks good from the outside but feels hollow from the inside.

For me, adulthood has been about the opposite move: letting go of those external scripts and listening more closely to what feels true.

I don’t want to claw my way into a different job just to prove something.
I don’t want to teach unless I genuinely feel called to do so.
I don’t want to read books I hate just to sound clever.
And I don’t want to write stories that don’t light me up simply because they might perform better.

I want to live and write in a way that feels honest.

So yes, research your market if that excites you. Build a career if that energises you. Plan your milestones if that gives you joy.

But if a story sings to you, if it haunts you and refuses to let go, that alone is reason enough to write it.

Live for yourself, not for admiration or approval.

The rest is just noise.



I’m Nicole, a fiction writer. I write genre-blending fantasy and science fiction novels about transformation, resilience, and choosing your own path. My books are here: Nicole MacDonald Author

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