Most people imagine writers as people who always knew. I suppose, in some ways, you might even say I was one of them because I wrote short stories in high school. But, like so many others who loved writing, the “Love” of writing wasn’t obsessive enough to propel me toward a career as a novelist.
So, not even the child with notebooks under the bed or the English major quoting Baldwin at nineteen or the aspiring novelist who introduces herself as “a writer” long before she has written anything worth is necessarily anything but an accidental author. The truth is that many of the most compelling writers arrive at writing via a circuitous route rather than the straight path we might assume. So where do writers come from?
They come from boardrooms, classrooms, newsrooms, hospitals, marriages, divorces, campaigns, courtrooms, and funerals. They become writers not because they spent their lives cultivating a literary identity, but because they eventually encounter something they can’t stop thinking about. I have long felt that this experience matters in writing, perhaps more than anything else. Taletn certainly isn’t enough… although it helps.
People who stumble into writing accidentally often spend years observing human behaviour before they ever attempt to describe it. They’ve worked with difficult people. They’ve watched institutions protect themselves. They’ve seen good people act selfishly and selfish people occasionally behave with astonishing grace. They understand that most human beings are not consistent enough to fit neatly into moral categories. In my experience, this changes how they write fiction.
Writers who arrive through life rather than academia are often less interested in performance. They’re not trying to sound like writers; rather, they’re trying to understand something. The writing becomes an investigation rather than an exhibition, and readers can feel the difference even if they have no idea where it comes from.
I think that there is a particular kind of dishonesty that creeps into fiction when the writer already knows exactly what he/she wants the reader to believe. Characters stop behaving like people and begin behaving like arguments—moral arguments that morph into preaching.
By middle age, most people have discovered that villains rarely announce themselves as villains. They rationalize. They justify. They protect their self-image. Even cruelty often arrives wrapped in explanations that make sense to the person committing it.
Fiction becomes interesting not when it delivers moral instruction (*gag*), but when it allows readers to inhabit uncomfortable ambiguity. A novel can explore revenge, greed, abuse, power, forgiveness, or corruption without issuing a sermon. In fact, fiction usually becomes more powerful the moment the author stops trying to control the moral outcome.
In my view, readers don’t want to be managed, but they do want the chance to recognize the truth of a story.
Accidental writers are often better positioned to provide that truth because they didn’t begin with a theory of literature. They began with experience. Something happened. Someone betrayed them. Someone disappointed them. An institution failed. A relationship changed shape. A contradiction became impossible to ignore. The writing then emerges from pressure rather than ambition.
Perhaps this is why some of the most honest fiction feels less like writerly performance and more like confession. OF course, that’s not necessarily an autobiographical confession, but an emotional confession. The writer is not standing above the reader explaining the world. The writer is standing beside the reader, trying to figure it out.
Ultimately, the healthiest and most honest way to approach writing may not be branding, but curiosity sharpened by experience.
I believe the best fiction rarely comes from people trying to prove that they’re writers. It comes from people trying to understand what happened to them—and to everyone else.
[originally published on my Substack, May 28, 2026]
Patricia J. Parsons 