The Myth of the “Serious Writer”

I spent four years in college fiction workshops being told — gently,

academically — that the things I cared about were not “serious.” Not in those

words, of course. The dismissal was always softer, coated in the polite

detachment of literary craft vocabulary. But I learned quickly that what I

brought into the room — heartbreak, grief as a physical inheritance, the

quiet violences of beauty and perception — was considered somehow lesser.

Too emotional. Too indulgent. Too much.

The first story I ever submitted was met with a word that still makes

something in me flinch: melodramatic. As if emotion itself were a craft flaw.

As if caring deeply — about love, about the way a glance can bruise, about

the ache of wanting to be seen — was evidence of amateurism. The feedback

was phrased like concern, like guidance, like benevolent redirection. “Have

you considered pulling back here?” “This moment might land more strongly

if it were quieter.” “Maybe you don’t need this much feeling.”

I took their notes with shaking hands, feverishly circling phrases in my

manuscript like I was marking the site of a wound.

Months later, when that same story was published in a literary magazine, I

didn’t feel the triumph I’d assumed publication would bring. I didn’t even

feel relief. I felt ashamed. Exposed in a way that made my skin crawl.

Embarrassed that the piece I’d been told was “too much” and

“melodramatic” had slipped past the gatekeepers somewhere else—like a

mistake, like I’d fooled someone, like the editors hadn’t realized what they

were printing.

I reread the acceptance email over and over, but it never felt real. It felt like

pity. Like charity. Like someone had seen my frantic, overeager heart

beating under the sentences and decided, generously, to give it a home.

When the issue went to print, my first instinct wasn’t to share it — it was to

hide. To pretend it wasn’t mine.

Instead of pride, there was only a tight, sinking embarrassment—this sense

that I’d been caught trying too hard, feeling too much, being too earnest in a

room that prized restraint. A voice in my head that didn’t just ask, Does this

even count? but went further, quieter, meaner: Do you?

That’s the damage the myth of the “serious writer” does — it rearranges your

interior landscape before you even realize it. It convinces you that there is

only one correct way to tell the truth, and it is not yours. It makes you

question not just your craft, but your legitimacy. Your instincts. Your right to

take up space on the page.

I didn’t know it then, sitting in those seminar rooms where the fluorescent

lights hummed, but those early comments were less about my writing and

more about the quiet hierarchy shaping everything around me—which

emotions were allowed, which stories were elevated, which voices were

granted authority. And mine — feminine, queer, tender — was not among

them.

A “serious writer,” I was told without being told, wrote literary fiction — the

kind with sparse language, restrained emotion, and metaphors you had to

excavate like bones. A serious writer avoided genre, avoided flowery

language, avoided anything too “fluffy.” A serious writer examined trauma

but rarely joy, desire but never fulfillment, women but ideally not from the

inside.

If you wrote about something tender? It was sentimental.

If you wrote about something joyful? It was frivolous.

If you wrote about something popular? It was commercial.

These rules weren’t written anywhere, but they shaped every room I stepped

into. The reading lists leaned masculine. The praise leaned cerebral. The

critiques leaned toward emotional minimalism — as if the highest form of

art was to pretend you didn’t feel anything at all.

And when everyone around you speaks the same coded language of what

counts, it’s easy to start believing it. Easy to think you’re doing something

wrong when your work doesn’t fit neatly into the frame someone else built.

Institutions uphold that frame without question. It’s baked into the

architecture — into syllabi, admissions essays, whispered conversations

about “taste,” the books that get revered and the books that get treated like

candy. MFA programs label genre writing “guilty pleasures,” as if pleasure

were inherently suspect, as if joy or desire or wonder must be apologized for

before being engaged with. Professors talk about genre fiction with a tight

little smile, the kind reserved for things one indulges in secretly, discreetly,

ideally alone.

Genre becomes a dirty word. Anything coded feminine is quietly shuffled

out of the canon, relegated to beach reads or bedtime stories or the bottom

shelf of a bookstore where no one important will look.

And when institutions repeat these ideas often enough, you start to

internalize it. You start to believe the hierarchy is natural. That certain

stories are inherently more valuable. That the things you love are somehow

embarrassing.

You start to shrink yourself before anyone else has the chance.

I didn’t realize how deeply I’d absorbed the hierarchy until years later, when I

caught myself shrinking on autopilot. I made my sentences smaller, quieter,

more careful — as if stripping the emotion out might somehow make the

work more legitimate. I tried to write the way I thought a “serious writer”

would: detached, understated, uninterested in the messy desires that

actually preoccupied me. I edited out longing. I trimmed down tenderness. I

pretended I didn’t love romance or yearning or the way a single touch can

alter the entire temperature of a scene.

I stopped mentioning the books that shaped me because they were the

wrong kind of influential. I learned to tuck away the genres that felt like

home to me. I didn’t say it out loud, but I moved through the world like my

writing needed to apologize for itself.

And slowly, something inside me began to dim. I felt like my voice didn’t

qualify. Like the stories I wanted to tell were somehow embarrassing. I

second-guessed every instinct, every line that leaned too tender or too sharp

or too alive.

There was one moment that stopped me altogether.

I remember the exact posture of it—me sitting cross-legged on the floor of

my tiny apartment, laptop balanced on my knees, the cheap heating unit

rattling in the corner. It was late and the only light in the room came from

the glow of the Word document open on my screen. A handful of chapters.

Maybe six. The beginning of a story I loved in a way I didn’t yet have

language for.

It was a sapphic romance — bright, hungry, a little ridiculous, full of banter

and wanting and that particular ache that happens when two people orbit

each other too closely. It felt alive. It felt like me. It felt like something I

would’ve devoured and whispered about to my best friend on the subway.

Writing it made my pulse jump. It made me remember why I ever started

writing at all.

But instead of excitement, I felt shame curling around my ribs.

Shame that the sentences came too easily, that the characters were too bold,

that the desire wasn’t camouflaged beneath metaphor. Shame that I was

enjoying myself. Shame that I cared so much. Some part of me — trained,

conditioned, disciplined by years of subtle dismissal — whispered that if it

felt good, it couldn’t be serious. If it felt like mine, it couldn’t possibly matter.

I stared at that story for a long time. Long enough for the enthusiasm to sour

into doubt, and the doubt to calcify into certainty: This isn’t real writing. This

isn’t what serious writers make.

And so I deleted it. Every page. Every joke. Every line of yearning. The whole

electric little universe I’d begun to build.

Not because it was bad. Not because the characters didn’t have weight or

truth or possibility. But because I had convinced myself that pleasure was a

red flag. That joy was immaturity. That writing something so unabashedly

emotional was proof that I wasn’t a real writer at all.

And when the document blinked into emptiness, I felt something in me drop

— quietly, like a stone slipping beneath water — and I remember thinking,

not for the first time, Maybe this would all be easier if I just stopped trying.

That’s what these ideas do. They make you distrust your own pulse. They

make you forget that the stories that feel the most like you are usually the

ones worth writing.

In the months that followed, I didn’t just delete that one document — I

stopped writing altogether. Not intentionally at first. It was more like a slow

retreat, one unfinished project at a time. Drafts gathered dust on my

desktop, outlines sat abandoned mid-sentence, characters I loved faded like

people I ghosted on accident. Eventually, I deleted the stories I’d shared

online. Took down the articles. Removed the links to my published work

from social media as if erasing the evidence of my own voice would make

the shame quieter.

I stopped calling myself a writer. Stopped even entertaining the possibility.

When people asked if I wrote, I shook my head, said no, said not really, said

that wasn’t my path. I said it casually, like a fact, as if I hadn’t once built my

entire sense of self around the stories I couldn’t stop telling. And every time I

denied it, every time I insisted I was just here to support other people’s

creativity, something in me pulled further and further away from the page.

I told myself it was maturity. A recalibration of priorities. I convinced myself

that I just wanted to help other people make their writing dreams come true.

That I’d be the editor, the publicist, the behind-the-scenes champion who

ushered other voices into the world. I would focus on other people’s success

instead of my own. It sounded noble — selfless, even — and parts of me

meant it. Still mean it.

Years later, that is still my end goal. But something was missing. A piece of

myself I had quietly decided I didn’t deserve.

Eventually something cracked — not loudly, not dramatically, but in the quiet

way realizations often arrive. I was rereading an old journal from when I was

seventeen, back when I wrote without surveillance, before anyone told me

my taste was wrong, before the word “serious” was ever held over my head

like a measuring stick. Those pages were messy, chaotic, borderline

ridiculous at times — but they were also alive. They were full of a girl who

wanted things, of heartbreaks that felt like weather systems, of longing I

didn’t yet have a name for. There was no shame in those entries. No apology.

Just raw feeling and the instinct to put it somewhere.

And I remember thinking: She would be so disappointed in me. That girl

would never have asked whether her stories were respectable. She would’ve

thrown herself at the page with all the urgency of someone who finally has

language for the ache in her ribs. She didn’t know what a workshop was. She

didn’t care about “craft expectations.” She only cared about telling the truth

the way it felt in her body.

That realization softened something in me. It was permission — not granted

by a professor or an editor or some imagined gatekeeper, but by the version

of myself I’d abandoned along the way. And with permission came relief. The

kind you feel in your shoulders, the kind that loosens the jaw you didn’t

realize you were clenching.

The truth was embarrassingly simple: I loved the stories I had been taught to

distrust. I loved melodrama when it was honest. I loved the kind of writing

that made me feel something, even if it didn’t impress the people who’d

convinced me that seriousness required suffering, detachment, a grayscale

emotional palette.

Reclaiming my voice didn’t happen all at once, but it started with a small

shift — a quiet recognition that the myth I’d been chasing wasn’t mine. That

the standard I was trying to meet had nothing to do with the stories I actually

needed to tell. That I didn’t need to earn permission to write what I loved.

I just needed to return to the girl who wrote without asking for approval —

and follow her out of the trap.

Here’s what I know now — something I wish someone had told me years ago:

serious writing has never been about genre. It’s about intention.

It’s not about whether your book has a dragon, or a kissing scene, or a plot

that refuses to sit politely in a seminar room. It’s not about whether your

sentences are gilded with metaphor or stripped down to bone. It’s not even

about whether the people who hand out awards will nod approvingly.

Serious writing is writing that takes emotional risks. It’s writing that cares

about its characters so deeply that their fears and wants feel tender in your

hands. It’s writing that changes something — the writer, the reader, or the

shape of the story itself.

And none of that is exclusive to literary fiction. None of that belongs more to

tragedy than to joy. None of that disappears the moment you write desire, or

softness, or humour.

If anything, telling the truth inside genres people like to dismiss, requires

more seriousness. More courage. More defiance. You have to love your story

enough to resist the pressure to make it smaller, sadder, more palatable,

more masculine, more respectable.

I used to think “serious writer” was a title bestowed by someone else — a

professor, a publisher, an institution that understood something I didn’t.

But the truth is so much simpler: Serious writing is writing that tells the

truth. Even when the truth sparkles. Even when it’s horny. Even when it’s

melodramatic. Even when it’s joyful. Especially then.

Sometimes I think about that girl in the workshop. I wish I could sit beside

her now. I wish I could tell her that the literary magazine that published her

story wasn’t a consolation prize. It was a beginning. Proof that someone out

there — even just one person — saw what she was trying to do and

understood. Proof that her voice didn’t need permission to matter.

If I could go back, I’d take her hand and say: They were wrong about you. Keep

going anyway.

Because the truth is, the myth of the “serious writer” made me stop for years.

It convinced me to sand down my voice, to trade my instincts for someone

else’s idea of taste. It made me believe that the stories I longed to write didn’t

deserve to take up space.

But they did. And they do. And so do I.

I’m a serious writer because I love to write. I’m a serious writer because joy

and desire deserve literature. I’m a serious writer because I refused to

disappear — even when I was invited to.

The books that move people are always serious, whether they’re shelved

under Romance or Fantasy or Literary Fiction or something in between. The

work that stays with us isn’t defined by its genre — it’s defined by its honesty.

That’s the thing the myth never accounted for: the stories that matter most

are often the ones we were taught to be ashamed of.

And I’m done being ashamed.