The Stories Writers Tell Themselves
Aug 13, 2026 · 6 min · 5 segments
**Episode 9 - What's the point of writing?** Writers spend a lot of time making up stories and not all of them end up in our books. *The Stories Writers Tell Themselves* is a free limited audio…
Katherine ColletteHostIt is, what is the point of writing? If you've ever sat down to write and thought, does the world really need another book? Or why am I bothering? You are not alone.
There's war, there's climate change, politics, and suddenly writing a book starts to feel a bit indulgent, maybe even absurd.
How can you sit down and write when everything seems to be on fire? And so the thought creeps in, writing doesn't matter.
At its core, this story comes from a kind of loss of faith, the feeling that the world is complicated and dark and overwhelming, and that writing a book is a very small and meaningless thing to do in the face of all that.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said existential angst isn't really a fear of anything specific.
It's what happens when the roles and routines that usually distract us stop working for a moment and we suddenly see how fragile life is.
He thought this particular kind of angst could actually be a wake-up call.
It's no longer, is my novel necessary? Or will this book save the planet? It's something much simpler.
How do I want to spend the hours I've been given? Do I want to spend some of my limited time on Earth thinking and imagining and building something out of language? And if the answer is yes, then writing stops being about proving anything.
It is, what is the point of writing? If you've ever sat down to write and thought, does the world really need another book? Or why am I bothering? You are not alone.
There's war, there's climate change, politics, and suddenly writing a book starts to feel a bit indulgent, maybe even absurd.
How can you sit down and write when everything seems to be on fire? And so the thought creeps in, writing doesn't matter.
At its core, this story comes from a kind of loss of faith, the feeling that the world is complicated and dark and overwhelming, and that writing a book is a very small and meaningless thing to do in the face of all that.
The German philosopher Martin Heidegger said existential angst isn't really a fear of anything specific.
It's what happens when the roles and routines that usually distract us stop working for a moment and we suddenly see how fragile life is.
He thought this particular kind of angst could actually be a wake-up call.
It's no longer, is my novel necessary? Or will this book save the planet? It's something much simpler.
How do I want to spend the hours I've been given? Do I want to spend some of my limited time on Earth thinking and imagining and building something out of language? And if the answer is yes, then writing stops being about proving anything.
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