Sometimes the blank page doesn’t look intimidating — it looks embarrassed for you.
You sit there thinking, surely I need to have something profound to say before I bother writing it down.
It’s a familiar kind of paralysis: you scroll through writers talking about “craft” and “projects” while you’re still trying to remember what day it is and whether cereal counts as dinner.
Your life feels too normal to be worth articulating.
You’re not running away to a Greek island, or moving to New York with a typewriter and a tote bag. You’re just here — on your third cup of tea, in the same jumper you wore yesterday.
But here’s the thing: the most compelling writing doesn’t come from big lives. It comes from people who pay attention.
Interesting writing isn’t about drama. It’s about noticing what most people miss.
Small Things Have Gravity
Think about how many great stories start with something tiny:
a woman walking home alone (Fleabag),
a half-empty glass of wine (Normal People),
a missed text that ruins an entire evening.
The best writers don’t wait for something remarkable to happen — they let small things expand.
Maggie O’Farrell once wrote an entire memoir around the seventeen times she almost died. That’s extreme. But the same kind of focus — on the small, human details — is what makes an essay come alive.
Zadie Smith once said she writes to make the “minor feelings” of ordinary life visible. That’s what makes her work linger — she notices things most of us rush past.
You don’t have to invent importance. You just have to hold something still long enough to see it clearly.
Try it:
write about the smell of a swimming pool changing season, or the way your phone light hits your ceiling when you can’t sleep.
You’ll find the details do the emotional work for you.
Stop Performing, Start Observing
A lot of people freeze because they think writing means having something to say. It doesn’t. It means being awake. Most of what we call “writer’s block” is really just the panic of thinking our lives aren’t worthy of being written about — that we need to sound profound or original before we’re allowed to open the document. But writing isn’t about declaring something new; it’s about noticing something true.
There’s a difference between writing and performing. Performing asks, Do I sound clever enough? Writing asks, What’s actually true here? Performance edits you before you’ve even begun; writing lets you be curious, uncertain, even clumsy. Some of the best paragraphs are born out of hesitation — the kind that starts with “I don’t know, but…” and finds its rhythm only after a few wrong turns.
You don’t have to manufacture a voice; you already have one. It’s the voice that wonders, that changes its mind mid-sentence, that reaches for words it doesn’t quite have yet. The voice that writes isn’t the one that gives the perfect seminar answer; it’s the one that walks home still thinking about the question.
If you want to be interesting, stop trying to sound like a writer and start trying to sound like yourself thinking out loud. The most engaging essays aren’t the most polished — they’re the ones that wobble a little, where you can sense the writer figuring it out in real time. That’s what makes the reader lean in.
To me, it’s why reading Dolly Alderton or Jia Tolentino feels like sitting across from someone in a café. They’re not lecturing; they’re musing, wondering, laughing at themselves, sometimes contradicting what they said two paragraphs ago. They write like people who are alive to their own uncertainty, and that’s what makes them compelling.
What people want isn’t performance — it’s presence. They don’t need to be dazzled by how much you know; they just want to feel that you’re really there on the page, thinking it through with them.
Curate the Chaos
When you feel like your life is boring, remember that the world is not. Even on the most uneventful days, it’s full of strange echoes and overlapping moments — the kind you only notice if you slow down long enough to see them. Everything connects: your morning commute, a TikTok you scrolled past at 2am, a medieval myth you half-remember from school. The trick is to start pulling threads between them, to see what unravels.
Maybe the show you’re bingeing isn’t just escapism — maybe it’s a story about loneliness. Maybe your carefully curated houseplant collection says something about your need for control. Maybe your dog, staring blankly at the radiator for ten full minutes, is the most honest metaphor for being twenty-one and tired of pretending you’ve got momentum.
Good writing doesn’t depend on invention; it depends on selection. You don’t have to create new worlds, just notice how the existing one overlaps in unexpected ways. The essay, at its best, is a kind of curation — a way of saying, look how these fragments speak to each other. You’re not here to dazzle people with novelty. You’re here to remind them that life, even in its chaos, is full of patterns.
Think of it as collage-making. You gather what doesn’t quite fit — the scraps, the half-thoughts, the unrelated references — and lay them side by side until something clicks. That’s what happens when you connect a line from The Mabinogion to an episode of The Good Place and realise both are, in their own way, trying to answer the same question about how to live well.
That isn’t pretentious. That’s culture — the living conversation between everything we’ve made and everything we’re still trying to understand.
Let Ordinary Be Enough
Somewhere along the way, “ordinary” has become an insult. It started to mean something smaller than it is — a synonym for dull, predictable, unambitious. But really, it’s the most radical thing you can claim in a world that thrives on spectacle. When everything around us demands constant novelty — new ideas, new aesthetics, new crises — choosing to linger in the everyday feels almost rebellious. Ordinary is what remains when the noise fades, and it’s where most of life quietly happens.
The details you think make your life unremarkable — the commute, the cheap coffee, the late-night essay panic — are exactly the ones most people will recognise. The chipped mug, the group chat you’re too tired to reply to, the little sigh before another deadline: they’re not glamorous, but they’re true. And that’s what we actually crave in writing — not perfection, but recognition.
We don’t need more exceptional stories. We need more honest ones. Think of the quiet beauty of Heartstopper, or the way Sally Rooney’s novels unfold over endless dinners that never quite resolve. They work not because the events are dramatic, but because they capture how people actually think and feel when nothing seems to be happening. They dignify the small moments, the long silences, the hesitations between sentences.
The same goes for your writing. You don’t have to shock anyone into caring. You just have to show them something real enough that they see themselves reflected in it. Write about the friend you text when you’re scared, the song you replay when you can’t focus, the way you always end up buying crisps even when you swore you’d cook. Those small, repetitive details are the shape of a life being lived.
That’s not dull — that’s documentary. Writing about the ordinary is a way of saying: this, too, matters. And maybe that’s the point — not to make your life seem larger than it is, but to show that even at its smallest, it’s still worth the attention.
Remember: Attention Is the Art
When you don’t feel interesting, note what you’re noticing. The chipped mug, the smell of rain, the awkward smile someone gives you on the street — all of it is raw material. Writing starts in those moments when you pause long enough to pay attention. When you take the time to describe something small, you’re doing something rare: you’re refusing to rush past your own life. In a world built around speed and distraction, that kind of attention becomes its own quiet form of resistance.
At its heart, writing is an act of attention. It’s proof that you were here — that you looked closely at something ordinary and decided it was worth keeping. You cared enough to turn what you saw into language, and in doing so, you made it last a little longer than the moment itself.
Your voice doesn’t have to be loud; it just has to be real. You don’t need to fill the page with opinions or polish every thought until it gleams. You just have to sound like a person who’s awake — someone who’s still curious, still paying attention. And in a culture that rewards constant noise, that kind of quiet honesty is already remarkable.
So write when you don’t feel interesting. Write when you’re tired, when you’re ordinary, when your life feels like static. That’s when you’ll find the kind of truth that actually connects — the sentences that remind people they’re not alone in the smallness of their days.
Because that’s all “interesting” ever really is: not being extraordinary, but being real, and caring enough to notice.
Paper and Glory 
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