“Writing, for me, is almost another way of reading, except one level deeper. Almost as soon as I began to read — and I read very early — I began to write” — Donna Tartt, the writing life. (2021, June 25). Grazia d'Annunzio. rivistastudio.com.
I wasn’t writing much when I picked up The Goldfinch.
Not the kind of writing that feels like something. Not the kind where you finish a sentence and sit back, quiet for a moment, thinking, yes, that’s what I meant to say, even if I didn’t know it yet.
I’d been stuck in the kind of stillness that doesn’t feel restful. Not blocked exactly, just… muffled. I had drafts in my head and half-sentences in my Notes app. But nothing brave enough to be shared. Nothing shaped enough to hit “publish.”
Then came The Goldfinch and somehow, it cracked something open.
I don’t know how to explain it except to say: the writing made me remember what language can feel like. It was so lush, so patient, so unashamed of going on and on about beauty and pain and time and art. It made me want to write again—not perfectly, not for performance, but with care. With hunger. With the aching honesty I had been avoiding.
There’s something about Donna Tartt’s voice that makes you sit still with things. She doesn’t write for speed or clarity. She writes to linger. Her pages are heavy with emotion, memory, contradiction. And as I read them, I realized I missed that weight in my own writing. I missed taking my time. I missed the tenderness of sitting with a sentence until it hurt a little.
Donna Tartt writes the way a person breathes when they’re trying not to cry: carefully, but with so much inside. Her sentences are not efficient. They are tender. Unapologetically heavy with thought and memory. She lets her characters spiral. She lets beauty and despair live side by side. She doesn’t rush. And neither did I.
I think we forget, as Substack writers—or just as people trying to share online—that writing doesn’t always have to be useful or wise or polished. Sometimes it can just be felt. Sometimes it can just be honest.
The Goldfinch reminded me of that.
It reminded me that a book can ruin you softly and still leave you grateful. That art doesn’t have to be explained to be important. That sometimes we write not because we know what we’re saying, but because we’re trying to find out.
And so, after The Goldfinch, I started writing more. Quiet things. Messy drafts. Soft thoughts I didn’t know where to put. I stopped waiting for them to be brilliant. I just let them be true.
So if you’re here, reading this—maybe stuck, maybe quiet, maybe waiting for the words to come back—I hope you remember: they will. Sometimes through a sentence. Sometimes through a story. Sometimes through a book that reminds you you’re still capable of feeling deeply, and saying something about it.
"Donna Tartt writes the way a person breathes when they’re trying not to cry" - Love this...
Writing for me in a way is escapism where my soul feels understood and free.