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I Don’t Believe in Self-Help, but I Do Believe in Stories
If I’m a fraud for telling mine, I wanna be the best you’ve ever seen
If you’ve ever wondered whether popular writers feel like frauds for giving you advice, the answer is yes, we do.
I’m not perfect. I don’t live by all my own tips. I’d cease to exist. I’m human. I have flaws. I change a lot too. My 28-year-old self can’t benefit from my 26-year-old-writing, except to see how far I’ve come. How much I’ve learned. What I remember. Whether I was right or wrong, and how naïve I was to write what I have written. But, maybe, your 26-year-old self can.
“Hey there. How are you? I used to be 26 once. Wanna have a chat with that guy? Sure. Maybe, you two will get along.”
That’s what it says. No more. No less. It’s not advice. It’s an invitation. A marker of a person long gone, frozen in time. If you happen to pass by, maybe, they can point the way. I think that’s what self-help writing is about. Isn’t it what all writing is about? Human connections, spanned across time and space. Some of them light up. Others only flicker. Some of them break.
I don’t believe in self-help the genre, you know. I believe in self-help the story.
