S.G. Talmor

Texts for attentive readers, where literature touches life.

What You Should Never Write After You’ve Said You Can

Once you’ve said you can, something shifts. Not in the world — in you. And that is precisely where the danger begins.

Because you can does not mean that everything is now allowed. It means the opposite. It introduces a stricter demand, one that has nothing to do with rules and everything to do with position.

The first temptation is to start writing in order to justify yourself. To explain where you come from, to show that you have read the right books, lived through the right experiences, waited long enough, suffered intelligently. That impulse is understandable, and deadly. Writing that tries to prove it has the right to exist is not writing. It is a request for permission made after permission has already been granted. No real book was ever written to demonstrate that its author deserved to write it.

Very quickly, another trap appears. You feel drawn toward what you admire. Toward beautiful sentences, noble pain, impeccable rhythm, controlled intelligence. You begin to sound like a “real writer.” That is usually the moment the door closes. Admiration produces elegant corpses. You do not write with what you admire. You write against it, around it, or from a place it never visited. The moment you recognize yourself sounding correct, something essential has already withdrawn.

Then comes the weight of existing books. You know them. You feel them. You sense that everything has already been said — better, deeper, more thoroughly. So you respond. You write the same book again, slightly shifted, morally adjusted, carefully positioned. That book does not need you. If a book seems to have said everything, the problem is not that there is nothing left to say. The problem is that you are standing in the same place. You don’t need a new answer. You need a different angle of imbalance.

After you can, meaning itself becomes suspicious. Sense, coherence, intelligence — all of it arrives too early. The urge to make things clear, to know where you are going, to justify each step, flattens the text before it has had a chance to breathe. Real writing almost always begins in a state of partial stupidity. It doesn’t quite know what it is doing yet. That ignorance is not a flaw. It is active. It is the condition of movement.

At that point, another voice intervenes. The voice that tells you to write what you should want to say. What is appropriate. What you can stand behind without embarrassment. What aligns with your values, your image, your position in the world. That voice must be betrayed. Writing is not a statement. It is not a posture. It is a leak. What matters will emerge without asking for your approval, and often against it.

Beauty, too, becomes a problem when it arrives too soon. Early beauty is rarely innocent. It usually means avoidance. The first task is not to be beautiful. It is to be exact — even if that exactness is awkward, crude, badly dressed. Sentences need oxygen before they need polish. Let them breathe badly. Refinement can wait.

The hardest temptation, finally, is the desire to remain intact. To choose safe memories, controlled pain, stories you already understand. That is self-defense, not writing. Writing begins when something is no longer fully under control. When a sentence costs you a certain image of yourself. When something is at stake. If nothing is at risk, nothing is happening.

This is what you can really means. It does not mean you will succeed. It does not mean you will be understood or admired. It means that you are allowed to write from where you are, not from where you wish you were. From your angle. Your distortion. Your unfinished business.

The world does not need another well-written book. It needs the one that could only come from your particular imbalance — including its wrong turns, its clumsiness, its pressure points.

Later, much later, you can afford the luxury of asking what should not be written.
But first, after you can, there is only one real rule:

Do not betray the place you have just entered.

It’s worth saying this plainly.

This text is useless for someone who wants to write.

It won’t make anyone start. It won’t unlock a page. It won’t give courage, discipline, or a method. It won’t help at all in the moment when writing is still a project, a desire, a plan.

That’s because it isn’t meant for that moment.

It’s meant for those who have already written, even badly, even by accident. For those who have entered the text without knowing how, and sometimes without knowing why. For those who have already crossed the line and are now tempted to lie to themselves about what they’re doing there.

This text doesn’t help you write.
It helps you not to cheat once you are already writing.

If it does anything at all, it does it later.
After the fact.
When you recognize the place you’re in — and understand what it would cost to betray it.


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