S.G. Talmor

You want to write.
For a lot of people, that’s not a hobby. It’s a need. They sit down with a pen or a keyboard, stare at the blank page or the screen—and stop.
They’re waiting for the sentence that’s supposed to unlock everything.

But that’s not what’s holding them back.
It’s not the missing sentence.

What stops them are other sentences—ones they swallowed a long time ago.

Things they were told. Things they read too early. Things said casually and never taken back.
Sentences that say: not you; it’s not possible; you’re not good enough; who do you think you are?; get a real job, for Christ’s sake.

Reasonable sentences. Educated sentences. Crude, ugly, humiliating ones.
Sentences that often make sense. And that’s exactly why they stick.

So people do what most people do. They do the second thing they were meant to do. The first one—the writing—gets left behind. Most of the time, that’s how it goes.

That’s the problem.

Patrick Modiano once said in an interview that “you decide to write because something is wrong”. He had a point. But what’s wrong first isn’t the world or society or existence in general. What’s wrong are those sentences. The ones you took in so completely, and digested so badly, they became part of you.

You think they block you.
They don’t.
They jam you up.

They don’t line up. They contradict each other. They squeeze too tight. And that’s why—if you stop fighting them—they turn into material. Not something you write against, but something you write from. Long before the text itself knows what it’s going to be.

Joseph Joubert spent most of his life believing that wanting to write wasn’t enough—that you also needed “the occasion.” He lived with that idea. He hid behind it. What he didn’t see was that the occasion kept showing up. He just didn’t recognize it. And yet he wrote. Not a book, not a classic body of work, but thoughts, fragments, notes people still read. His mistake wasn’t not writing. It was not calling writing what he was already doing.

There’s a radical French book called How I Didn’t Write Any of My Books. Almost everyone recognizes themselves in it—even people who’ve written masterpieces and still believe the real book is always the next one.

Louis-Ferdinand Céline didn’t wait for a clean style or a noble language to write Journey to the End of the Night. The book is full of sentences that should have stopped him—flat, vulgar, awkward, sometimes just bad. And that’s exactly why it works. He wrote with whatever came. He didn’t ask if it was acceptable. He didn’t ask if he should.

Dan Fante put it this way:

“My first forty-five years were spent fighting and struggling with myself, rooting around like a pig among rotten bones. Then I started writing, and this shit-colored world turned candy pink.”

Nothing was fixed.
Nothing was cleaned up.

So what did he do?
What did they all do?

Virginia Woolf read Marcel Proust. She saw what he had done. She could have decided the novel of consciousness was over. Plenty of people did—for her. She didn’t.

She didn’t ask if Proust had said everything. She didn’t ask if she was good enough, or comparable, or legitimate. She noticed something simpler: there was no law preventing her from writing from where she stood.

And she did.
From somewhere else.
With other sentences.
Another rhythm.
Another body.

We’re not interchangeable.
We’re not variations of the same eye.

Each of us sees the world from a position no one else can occupy. Not because we’re special in some heroic sense, but because it’s structurally impossible for anyone else to stand exactly where we stand, with the same body, the same timing, the same history, the same blind spots.

The world doesn’t need another great book.
It needs that angle.
That pressure point.
That way of seeing things slightly off-center.

What all of them told themselves comes down to almost nothing. Not confidence. Not talent. Not permission granted by anyone else. Just a poor sentence, almost insulting compared to the rich, sophisticated sentences that judge, forbid, and compare.

It guarantees nothing.
It promises nothing.

But it sends all the others back where they belong.

That sentence is only two words:

you can.

Everyone who writes has said it.
Usually too late.
But never too late if you’re alive.

Writing starts right there.
Not when you know what to say.
Not when you’ve found the form.
But when you stop confusing the absence of an “occasion” with a prohibition—and you accept that the world is still missing your way of seeing it.

And you say it—without drama, without courage, without guarantees:

you can.