"Write what you care about"
About this Quote
“Write what you care about” is craft advice that sounds cozy until you hear the steel under it. Coming from Sara Paretsky, the line reads less like a motivational poster and more like a working novelist’s survival tactic. Paretsky didn’t just invent a popular detective, V.I. Warshawski; she helped pry open a genre that had long treated women as decoration, victims, or sidekicks. Caring, in that context, isn’t sentiment. It’s a commitment to putting your obsessions and your anger on the page even when the market would prefer you didn’t.
The intent is practical: attention is a finite resource, and writing is too long and too lonely to sustain on borrowed enthusiasm. Paretsky’s directive is a hedge against burnout and fakery. If you don’t have genuine stakes, the prose starts performing instead of discovering; you can feel it in the dutiful plot turns, the “important” themes dragged in by the collar.
The subtext is also political. “Care” signals permission to treat what you value as legitimate material: bodies, cities, class, corruption, friendship, the everyday indignities that power depends on people swallowing. For a crime writer, it’s a reminder that mystery isn’t only a puzzle; it’s a way to interrogate institutions. The dead body is never just a dead body. It’s a receipt.
In a culture that rewards “content” optimized for trend cycles, Paretsky’s sentence is a counter-algorithm: write from attachment, not from calculation. Caring won’t guarantee greatness, but it’s the one fuel source you can actually replenish.
The intent is practical: attention is a finite resource, and writing is too long and too lonely to sustain on borrowed enthusiasm. Paretsky’s directive is a hedge against burnout and fakery. If you don’t have genuine stakes, the prose starts performing instead of discovering; you can feel it in the dutiful plot turns, the “important” themes dragged in by the collar.
The subtext is also political. “Care” signals permission to treat what you value as legitimate material: bodies, cities, class, corruption, friendship, the everyday indignities that power depends on people swallowing. For a crime writer, it’s a reminder that mystery isn’t only a puzzle; it’s a way to interrogate institutions. The dead body is never just a dead body. It’s a receipt.
In a culture that rewards “content” optimized for trend cycles, Paretsky’s sentence is a counter-algorithm: write from attachment, not from calculation. Caring won’t guarantee greatness, but it’s the one fuel source you can actually replenish.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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