Writing has always been a solitary business.
That part comes with the territory. You sit down, usually alone, often in silence, and try to make something honest out of nothing.
You talk to people who don’t exist yet.
You argue with sentences.
You spend an unreasonable amount of time worrying about commas.
None of this is especially sociable, and most writers understand that before they begin.
What few people warn you about is just how lonely the rest of it can be.
Writing asks for solitude. Publishing, however, often delivers silence-and there is a difference.
Solitude can be chosen.
Silence is imposed.
A writer’s day rarely looks like ‘work’ from the outside.
There’s no bustle, no meetings, no visible outputs that others can point to and say, ah yes, progress. Instead, there’s a person at a desk, a screen full of words that might be brilliant or might be dreadful, and a nagging sense that nothing is really happening at all.
Even when the writing is going well, it can feel oddly invisible.
That’s manageable.
Expected, even.
Where the loneliness deepens is when the work leaves your desk and disappears into the wider world.
You send a piece off. A proposal. A manuscript. An idea you’ve lived with for months, sometimes years. You click ‘send’ and wait.
And wait.
And wait some more.
Often, nothing comes back.
No feedback.
No acknowledgment that a human being has even opened the file.
Just silence.
No rejection even.
‘Ghosting’ is, I have noticed, one of the buzzwords for 2025.
As if, somehow, people have just cottoned onto it and how, excuse the informality, rude it is.
But then in both life and most professions, ghosting is considered rude.
In publishing, it’s normalised.
And writers have been living with ghosting for decades.
Welcome to our world.
Writers are told not to take it personally, which is a curious instruction to give someone whose job is, by definition, personal.
Writing is not data entry.
It is not a neutral transaction.
It is thought, memory, imagination, belief. When that disappears into a void, the void has a habit of answering back.
Then there’s the modern insistence that writers must also be their own marketing departments.
Build a platform.
Grow an audience.
Be visible.
Be engaging.
Be relentlessly present online-preferably while doing the deeply private, concentration-heavy work that writing actually requires.
It’s a strange contradiction: work alone, but appear popular.
For many writers, especially those without industry contacts, institutional backing, or the right kind of confidence, this creates a particular kind of isolation. You’re told the door is open, while quietly discovering that it’s guarded by algorithms, gatekeepers, and unspoken rules no one bothers to explain.
The loneliness is compounded by how much writers care.
A rejection isn’t just a professional setback; it can feel like a judgement on how you see the world, how you articulate it, whether your voice has any value at all. Success, when it comes, is often muted-a brief email, a small advance, a quiet publication-before it’s back to the desk, alone again.
There is also a particular kind of loneliness that comes, ironically, with ghostwriting, and it’s rarely talked about.
As a ghostwriter, you are invited into other people’s lives in intimate ways.
You listen closely. You absorb their memories, their regrets, their triumphs, their failures.
You learn how they speak, how they think, what they avoid, what still hurts.
You carry their stories carefully, often more carefully than they do themselves.
For months at a time, you can find yourself more emotionally invested in someone else’s life than your own.
Their deadlines matter.
Their book matters.
Their voice matters.
Meanwhile, your own life sits patiently-or not so patiently-in the background, waiting for space you’re too professional, too committed, or too tired to give it.
When the book is finished, your name may not be on the cover.
Sometimes it isn’t mentioned at all. You step back quietly, having helped someone else say the thing they needed to say, while your own words remain largely unseen. You’ve been present for everything, and visible in none of it.
It is meaningful work.
Deeply so.
But it can also be strangely dislocating-living, for long stretches, in other people’s narratives, while your own life is reduced to notes in the margin.
I’ve seen this loneliness from more than one angle. As a writer, an editor, a ghostwriter, and now increasingly as a publisher.
I meet people producing thoughtful, original, moving work while quietly doubting themselves to exhaustion. Not because they lack talent, but because they’re doing it alone, without conversation, reassurance, or even basic acknowledgement.
And the thing is: much of this loneliness isn’t necessary.
It’s cultural.
Structural.
Convenient.
Silence is easier than engagement.
Non-response costs nothing. And so writers are left to fill the gaps with their own doubts, their own stories about why they haven’t heard back, their own quiet sense of being on the outside of something they desperately want to be part of.
Writing will always require solitude. That’s where the work happens.
But when solitude hardens into loneliness, when care goes unacknowledged, when voices go unheard, when the people who give their lives to words feel invisible…something is quietly lost.
This is the work.
This is the loneliness.
And this is where I remain.
