You start writing about something that happened to you and within three paragraphs you’re apologizing for it. Not literally — you’re too good a writer for that. You apologize structurally. You add context so it makes sense. You explain what you felt so the reader isn’t confused. You round it into a story with a beginning and an arc, because that’s what writing is supposed to look like. And by the time you’re done, the thing is coherent and dead, and you file it away, because you can tell it’s not true anymore.
Annie Ernaux had this exact problem and her solution was to refuse the equipment. In La Place, the book about her father, she announces near the beginning that she will not use fiction’s tools — no scenes rebuilt from imagination, no interiority she can’t verify, no lyricism. She calls her method écriture plate. Flat writing. She lists what her father owned, what he said, what he was ashamed of, and she does not connect it into a story, because a story would be a betrayal — it would convert his life into entertainment for the class of people he could never join.
Read one of her paragraphs and you can feel what’s missing: the transitions. The “and this made me realize.” The conclusion. She leaves the fragments sitting next to each other, and the meaning happens in the gap between them — in you, the reader, doing the connecting. Which means the reader does the exact thing INFPs do all day involuntarily: hold two unrelated pieces and feel the current jump between them.
The thing you’ve been treating as your failure — you can’t smooth things into narrative, you can’t stay on topic, you keep juxtaposing when you should be transitioning — is her entire method. She won the Nobel Prize for not transitioning. The self you keep trying to install before you write, the disciplined one who builds arcs, was never coming. You don’t need her. You need a form that runs on fragments, and it already exists, and it’s the most celebrated form in contemporary literature.
The question is not whether you can write like Ernaux. The question is what she had to give up to write that way, because you’ll have to give up the same thing, and it isn’t what you think.
Even if you never plan to write a book, you’ll probably recognize yourself. Ernaux isn’t just showing a way to write. She’s showing a way to stop organizing your life around making other people comfortable. She’s showing what it looks like when a mind refuses to translate itself into conventional form.
On July 21 at 8pm Eastern I’m doing a close reading of two pages of La Place for paid subscribers. We’ll watch, line by line, how Ernaux resists the urge to explain, smooth over, and shape experience into the story everyone expects. It’s a chance to see a completely different way of thinking on the page—and to discover options for yourself that are hard to imagine until you see someone else refuse the rules.
Bring the draft you abandoned if you have one. Or just bring your curiosity. I think you’ll recognize the moment Ernaux chooses herself over a story, and you may recognize yourself as well.
You motivate me to keep writing. Thank you.
Brilliant.