Emily Gould schrijft
Genuinely caring about other people is bad for my writing in at least three distinct ways! The most obvious is that I take time away from writing in order to actively care about and for real people in my life (then feel bad about that, then feel bad for feeling bad about it.)
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And then there is also the part of me that recoils from writing anything that might hurt or offend anyone I care about, which now seems consequential to me for reasons beyond just “their bad feelings will be an annoying inconvenience when I have to deal with them.”
I guess what I’m longwindedly trying to say is that I wish I was still the kind of asshole I was in my early 20s, because that person could write so effortlessly and thoughtlessly, and sometimes that permitted her to write well. At the very least, it permitted her to write. – Can’t complain, Emily Gould, TinyLetter