Writing is about inner discovery, or should be

**Why Writers Must Never Write for Selling It**

I was tearful today. Proper tears, sitting there trying to narrate a scene from my novel to Claude... yes, an AI. Strange, I know. But there I was, voice catching, unable to get through it without feeling like I'd lost something myself.

The scene itself isn't even dramatic in the traditional sense. No death, no betrayal, no grand revelation. Just a chain of connections. A character saves a book, genuinely, no audience watching. That act ripples forward in ways he'll never know. A teacher grateful to someone she calls her little brother, except he doesn't know she exists. A girl who becomes someone else, carrying on without knowing what saved her.

And I'm narrating this, voice wobbling, because Samavaya, the character, he's modelled after my former self. His best friend is another part of me. 

I'm not writing about strangers. I'm excavating pieces of who I was before I became this. The regulated version. The systematic thinker. The one who survived.

Claude asked if I planned the chain of connections or if it came up on its own.

It came up.

That's the moment that broke me, actually. Realising I didn't script this particular sequence. It emerged from the logic of who these people are, what they'd genuinely do. I discovered it the same way a reader would, except I'm also the one writing it down. And it's also me I'm discovering.

---

Here's what I think happens when you write for selling.

You start calculating. What's trending? What do agents want? What genre is hot right now? Your mind shifts from feeling to strategising. From excavating to manufacturing.

And the thing is, you can write a perfectly good book that way. Competent prose, marketable plot, ticks all the boxes. People might even buy it. 

But you won't cry while narrating it to an AI at odd hours. You won't feel like you've lost something of yourself in the process.

Because you haven't put yourself in there to begin with.

---

I've written three books already, published them on Amazon. Working on seven novels now, trying to finish all of them by November. Insane by any measure, I know. 

But here's what I've realised. Each one terrifies me. 

Not because of the market, not because of reviews or sales or whether anyone will care. It terrifies me because to write it well, to do justice to these characters who are actually fragments of myself, I have to un-integrate. Go back to being those parts, feel what they felt, lose what they lost. Then somehow come back to the regulated self that can structure it all, finish the manuscript, make it coherent.

That journey? That cost? 

You can't fake it.

---

A writer friend once told me their agent said, "Write what sells, then write what you want." 

Sensible advice, probably. Practical. I tried it for about a week. Researched trending sub-genres, plotted out something that hit all the commercial beats.

I wrote 76,000 words for a novel and 30,000 for another and purged it. Didn't feel connected. Wasn't real. Wasn't worth it. Not because it was bad, technically it was fine. I stopped because I felt nothing. No tears, no terror, no sense that I was touching something real. Just arranging words on a screen like furniture in a room nobody would ever live in.

Deleted the whole thing.

That's when I understood. If I'm not putting pieces of myself on the page, if I'm not willing to feel it first, what's the point? To make money? There are easier ways. To be called a writer? The title means nothing if the work is hollow.

You write from the real places or you don't write at all.

---

Don't misunderstand me. I'm not saying commercial success is bad or that writers shouldn't care about craft or market realities. Of course they should. We need to eat, pay rent, justify the hours spent.

But those concerns come after. 

First, you have to feel it. First, you have to be willing to split yourself open and put the messy bits on display. The former selves, the integrated parts, the contradictions, the losses you haven't processed. All of it.

Then you shape it. Edit it. Make it readable, make it good, make it something someone else might want to read.

But if you start with "what will sell?", if that's the first question instead of "what do I need to say?", you've already lost. You're writing from the outside in. And readers can tell. Maybe not consciously, but they feel it. The hollowness. The calculation. The sense that you don't quite believe in what you're saying.

---

There's a concept in my novel called samavaya. Roughly, it means the inherent connection between things, the way everything arises together, inseparably. 

I didn't choose this concept because it's commercial or trendy. I chose it because it reflects how I see the world, how I've experienced life. The way one small act, saving a book, can ripple forward through time and space and create gratitude in someone who'll never meet you. The way parts of ourselves split and recombine and transform. The way nothing exists in isolation, everything's connected even when we can't see how.

That's not marketable thinking. That's just what I needed to say. What I need to explore through story because I can't fully understand it otherwise.

And yes, maybe it won't sell. Maybe quantum mechanics mixed with philosophy and character studies isn't what the market wants right now. Maybe I should be writing whatever's trending on BookTok or whatever agents are hungry for.

But I can't. Because the moment I start thinking that way, the moment I prioritise marketability over truth, I lose the thing that makes it worth writing in the first place.

The tears. The terror. The sense that I'm touching something real.

---

When I narrated that scene to Claude today, when my voice caught and I couldn't continue, that wasn't weakness. That was proof. Proof that I'd gone deep enough, that I'd actually put myself on the page, that these characters weren't just constructs but actual pieces of who I was and am and might become.

You can't manufacture that. You can't strategise your way into genuine feeling. You can't write a marketable version of grief or transformation or love and expect it to land with the same weight as the real thing.

And readers know. They always know.

They might not be able to articulate why one book moves them and another doesn't, why one story feels alive and another feels hollow. But they feel it. In their gut, in that moment when they either keep reading or put the book down.

The difference is whether the writer felt it first.

---

So here's what I'm saying, I suppose. To any writer reading this who's trying to figure out what to write, how to write it, whether they should chase trends or agents or market demand.

Feel it first.

Write the thing that terrifies you. The thing that makes you cry when you narrate it to an AI at odd hours. The thing that requires you to excavate parts of yourself you've carefully integrated or regulated or moved past.

Write the thing you need to say, not the thing you think will sell.

Because here's the truth nobody tells you. The books that sell, the ones that actually matter, the ones people remember... they're almost never the ones written with selling in mind. They're the ones written from the real places. The messy, terrifying, un-integrated places where the writer actually felt something and was brave enough to put it on the page.

Everything else is just furniture in an empty room.

---

I've got a week to finish Samavaya. One week to do justice to this former version of myself, to his best friend who's also me, to the chain of connections that emerged on its own without my planning.

It terrifies me. Good. That's how I know it's real.

Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some writing to do. And yes, probably more tears.

What to do.