"Writing is far too hard work to say what someone else wants me to. Serving it as a craft, using it as a way of growing in my own understanding, seems to me to be a beautiful way to live. And if that product is shareable with other people, so much the better"
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Writing, for Jane Rule, isn’t a gig economy of pleasing strangers; it’s labor too expensive to waste on ventriloquism. The line opens with a blunt refusal that’s almost practical: if the work is genuinely hard, why spend it chasing someone else’s agenda? That first sentence functions like a tollbooth. If you want a compliant writer, turn around.
Rule pivots quickly from defiance to devotion. “Serving it as a craft” positions writing as discipline, not inspiration-soaked branding. Craft implies apprenticeship, patience, revision, the willingness to be corrected by the sentence itself. Then she slips in the real stake: writing as “a way of growing in my own understanding.” The subtext is that writing is less transmission than discovery. You don’t write because you already know; you write to find out what you think, what you can bear to name, what you’ll risk making public.
Context matters here: Rule was a lesbian novelist and essayist whose career unfolded amid censorship, moral panic, and the constant social demand to edit oneself into palatability. Read that way, her refusal isn’t just artistic; it’s ethical. She’s rejecting the pressure to convert lived experience into acceptable messaging.
The final clause lands with quiet generosity. Sharing is framed as a byproduct, not the mission statement. She’s not dismissing readers; she’s refusing to be owned by them. The beauty she names is autonomy: a life where the work changes the worker first, and only then, if it can, offers something outward.
Rule pivots quickly from defiance to devotion. “Serving it as a craft” positions writing as discipline, not inspiration-soaked branding. Craft implies apprenticeship, patience, revision, the willingness to be corrected by the sentence itself. Then she slips in the real stake: writing as “a way of growing in my own understanding.” The subtext is that writing is less transmission than discovery. You don’t write because you already know; you write to find out what you think, what you can bear to name, what you’ll risk making public.
Context matters here: Rule was a lesbian novelist and essayist whose career unfolded amid censorship, moral panic, and the constant social demand to edit oneself into palatability. Read that way, her refusal isn’t just artistic; it’s ethical. She’s rejecting the pressure to convert lived experience into acceptable messaging.
The final clause lands with quiet generosity. Sharing is framed as a byproduct, not the mission statement. She’s not dismissing readers; she’s refusing to be owned by them. The beauty she names is autonomy: a life where the work changes the worker first, and only then, if it can, offers something outward.
Quote Details
| Topic | Writing |
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