Searching for the key?

Let's face it, most of us writers are fumbling with the lock...

Mar 06, 2025

If you’re a writer there is, I suspect, something appealing in the notion of ‘unlocking’: unlocking your talent; unlocking that great idea; discovering the tricksy little secret — in terms of subject matter, form or style — which will propel your work (and you) to the next level…

And whether we recognise it or not, the pressure on us to release that lock can be incessant. We’re bombarded by posts that tell us to do this or try that (guilty as charged!); we subscribe to the Substack accounts of those who have already ‘made it’ — and who, if we’re honest, we may not always regard as ‘better’ writers than ourselves. We may bemoan our bad luck (or others’ good) and all the while we’re still fumbling to try and find the key that will unlock ‘the gold’.

“Not at all!” you protest. After all, you write for the love of the craft, for all those intangible, emotional rewards writing gives you. And that may be largely true — but didn’t you just fail to be recognised in the National Poetry Competition for the twelfth year running, even though you said you’d never enter it again? And what about the recent boilerplate email rejection from the latest handful of agents who’ve turned down the opportunity to represent you and your novel?

But these needn’t be negative experiences. There’s nothing wrong with the key fumbling or the rejections — provided we recognise them for what they are.

Understanding why we do what we do is critical to enjoying a balanced and fulfilling writing life. What if you claim you don’t care what others think — but then constantly submit to competitions and/or agents to seek validation? There will be a fault-line dividing your stated motivations and your actions, and fault-lines are not healthy.

I have always believed that to have a healthy writing life you need to understand why you are writing, and then mould your writing life accordingly. There are a myriad of possibilities as to why you write. Here are a few:

Because it passes the time
Because it’s your job
Because you can’t help it
Because writing helps you make sense of the world
Because it’s therapeutic
Because you want to be published
Because you want to make money
Because you want to be famous
Because you want to leave a legacy

For some of these — at least three of the last four — the merry-go-round of competition failures and agent rejections is an essential component of the journey, and as such it is easier (though not necessarily ‘easy’) to embrace and accept them. But if your writing is an entirely private and personal endeavour, then public rejection could be very damaging indeed; your annual ritual of entering the NPC may prove negative and undermining.

One of the reasons we may struggle to find the key to free the padlock is because we’ve never actually stopped to consider which padlock we should be trying to unlock — i.e. legacy, fame, money, self-awareness etc. — and without doing so, how can you possibly know what the appropriate key might look like?

So take a step back, consider the ‘why’ of your writing and what the metaphorical padlock looks like; after that, surely you’re more likely to settle on the key you actually need…