On Writing Without Armor
The difference between being seen and being impressive.
Most of my old writing was armor. Polished, defensible, impressive from a distance — and completely closed. You could admire it, but you couldn’t get in.
Writing without armor doesn’t mean confessing everything. It means letting the reader watch you think, including the parts where the thinking wobbles. It means publishing the sentence that’s true instead of the one that’s safe.
People don’t connect with the polish. They connect with the person the polish was hiding.