Fiction: the narrator and events in this essay are invented.
Last Thursday I sat at the kitchen table with a blank document open on my laptop. I’d decided, in the vague way these decisions happen during the unclaimed hours of mid-morning, to try writing a short story. Nothing grand. A few paragraphs about a man who notices something small—maybe the way light hits his kitchen floor at a specific angle—and does nothing about it. I wasn’t trying to be Fitzgerald. I wasn’t even trying to be good. I just wanted to see if I could still put down sentences that weren’t explaining a function or documenting an API endpoint.
For twenty minutes I typed nothing. Then I typed a sentence and deleted it. Another. Another. Each one felt like a tiny, private failure. Not because the words were wrong, but because they weren’t for anything. They didn’t explain. They didn’t instruct. They just sat there, describing a man and his kitchen light, and my entire body seemed to reject them.
This wasn’t writer’s block. I’ve had writer’s block. This was something else: an identity block. A decade of writing only the useful, the efficient, the monetizable had done something to the way I understand language. Every sentence I tried to write about that man and his kitchen light had to justify itself. It had to have a purpose. It had to lead somewhere or be deleted.
The problem, I realized, wasn’t that I couldn’t write a good sentence. It was that I couldn’t write a bad one. I couldn’t write a sentence that did nothing. I couldn’t write a sentence that just existed, for its own sake, without a deliverable at the end.
I sat there staring at the cursor and felt a small, hot shame. Not the dramatic kind. The quiet kind that comes from realizing you’ve lost access to a part of yourself you didn’t know you’d given away. I used to write stories. In college I wrote terrible, earnest fiction about sad people in coffee shops. I wrote poems that rhymed badly. I wrote long emails to friends that were essentially just descriptions of my afternoons. And somewhere along the way I’d trained all of that out of myself. I’d optimized my language until it was lean and functional and utterly incapable of just… being.
I think this is one of the hidden costs of leaving a high-status career: you discover the ways you’ve been shaped not just in your schedule or your social life, but in the very texture of your thinking. The tech industry taught me to write clearly, yes. But it also taught me to write only what was necessary. It taught me that every word should earn its place. And that lesson, it turns out, doesn’t stop when you close your work laptop for the last time. It follows you to the kitchen table. It sits beside you as you try to write fiction. It whispers, What is this for? Who will read it? What is the ROI?
I didn’t have an answer that afternoon. I still don’t. But I’ve been thinking about something that happened later, after I’d closed the laptop and gone for a walk. I thought about the tools we use, and how they shape what we think is possible. For years my primary writing tool was an IDE—a piece of software designed to catch errors, highlight inefficiencies, and suggest optimizations. It was a tool that judged every line I wrote. And I had internalized its logic so completely that I no longer needed the software to feel judged; I could do it to myself.
Last month, on a whim, I opened a Character Name Generator on Reedsy while waiting for coffee to brew. It felt like a tiny act of sabotage against my own instincts—a tool that simply handed me a possibility without commentary, without an optimization score. It gave me “Leo,” which means “lion,” and I almost deleted it because it felt too symbolic. But I kept it. I wrote: “Leo stood in his kitchen and watched the light move across the floor. He did not think about lions.” That was it. A small, useless sentence. It didn’t advance a plot. It didn’t reveal character. It just was. And I felt, for a moment, something loosen in my chest.
Fiction, I’m realizing, requires a different kind of tool. Not just a different application, but a different relationship to the act of putting words down. It requires a space where a sentence can be bad, or pointless, or weird, and no one—not even the tool itself—will tell you to fix it. That afternoon I couldn’t find that space. I kept waiting for the story to do something. I kept trying to make the man in the kitchen have a revelation, or a conflict, or at least a metaphor. But the point of the exercise—the whole reason I’d sat down—was to write without a point. And I couldn’t.
I’ve since tried a few things. One of them is using a tool that doesn’t care if my sentences are efficient. I found an AI writing app that doesn’t judge me for having no plot, and there’s something about its blank, noncommittal interface that feels like a tentative permission slip. I open it sometimes, not to outsource the writing, but to generate raw material—a setting detail, a dumb line of dialogue—that I can then push against or ignore entirely. It’s like the name generator: just provision, without commentary. There’s no judgment in that. And in that provision I’ve found a tiny crack in the identity block. Not a solution. A crack.
I’m still not writing fiction, really. I’m writing fragments. Bad sentences that don’t add up to anything. But I’m also noticing something: the shame I felt that afternoon wasn’t just about writing. It was about who I’d become. Someone who needs a reason for everything. Someone who can’t let a sentence just exist. Someone who, even in the private space of a blank document, performs for an imagined audience of managers and code reviewers.
Leaving a career doesn’t end that performance. It just removes the external stage. The internal one remains. And I’m still on it, most days, trying to make every word count. But I’m learning, slowly, that some words don’t need to count. Some sentences can be bad. Some afternoons can produce nothing but a man in a kitchen and a light on the floor. And that, I think, is the beginning of something I haven’t named yet. Not a story. Not a skill. Just a permission.
This permission has been harder to grant than I expected. For months after leaving my job, I treated my new, unstructured time as a project to manage. I made schedules for my leisure. I set goals for my hobbies. I tried to write fiction the way I’d written code: with specifications, milestones, and a clear definition of done. Every morning I’d sit down with a word count target, and every afternoon I’d feel a creeping failure when I didn’t meet it. The irony wasn’t lost on me. I’d left an industry that measured everything in metrics, and I’d immediately built a new set of metrics to measure my escape from it.
What I’m describing now—the man in the kitchen, the light on the floor, the refusal to make meaning—is a direct rebellion against that. It’s an attempt to write without a rubric. And it’s terrifying. Without a rubric, I don’t know if I’m doing it right. Without a rubric, I don’t know if I’m wasting my time. Without a rubric, I have to sit with the discomfort of my own judgment, which is still calibrated to output and efficiency and a tightness in my stomach that says I should be doing something useful.
I think about my former coworkers sometimes. The ones still writing code, still optimizing, still shipping features. I imagine them looking at my attempts at fiction—these fragments about men in kitchens and light on floors—and I feel a flush of embarrassment. Not because they’d judge me. They probably wouldn’t care. But because I’m still judging myself through their imagined eyes. I’m still performing for an audience that isn’t there.
That’s the real work, I think. Not learning to write fiction. Not even learning to write bad sentences. But learning to stop performing. Learning to do something—anything—without an imagined reviewer looking over my shoulder. The Authors Guild’s discussion of maintaining a human voice while writing echoes this, in a way I’ve been turning over. It’s a reminder that the point of writing isn’t to satisfy an algorithm or a market or a performance review. The point is to make something that comes from you, even if it’s messy, even if it’s pointless, even if it’s just a man in a kitchen not thinking about lions.
I’ve been using the name generator more often now. Not because I need names—I’m not writing enough for that—but because the act of receiving something without judgment has become a quiet ritual. Yesterday it gave me “Clara,” which means “bright.” I haven’t used it yet. I might never use it. But it’s sitting in a note on my phone, and it doesn’t ask anything of me. It doesn’t need a plot. It doesn’t need a purpose. It’s just there.
And that, I’m realizing, is what I’m trying to learn. To let things just be there. To let a sentence be bad. To let an afternoon pass without a deliverable. To let myself be someone who doesn’t know what he’s doing, and to not scramble to fix that.
That afternoon I couldn’t write a bad sentence was a turning point, but not in the way I expected. It didn’t end with a breakthrough. It ended with me closing the laptop and going for a walk, and then coming home and cooking dinner, and then going to bed. A small, unremarkable day. But it stayed with me. It sits with me still, a reminder that the habits I built in my career are deeper than my calendar. They’re in my fingers. They’re in my syntax. They’re in the way I evaluate every thought before I let it exist.
I think about the Reedsy generator sometimes, the way it just offered “Leo” without any instructions. No word count target. No definition of done. Just a name, and then silence. I wonder what it would be like to write that way all the time—to let the language arrive without permission, without a rubric, without anyone telling me what it’s worth. I don’t know yet. But the cursor is blinking.