Why I (Try To) Write

Dear Gentle Readers

This is my first long-form post of 2026; however, it is not the first piece of writing I have committed to (virtual) paper this year. I have written more in the last two months than I have in the past year, but I haven’t posted it. This is because I have decided to pursue writing more “seriously”, and that sort of stuff doesn’t make it onto this Substack. Not because I don’t believe you’d enjoy reading it, but because of the rules and stipulations of the programs and competitions I have been applying to forbid prior publication - even on personal blogs.

Without my usual well-planned and anecdotal post ready in my drafts, I thought I would write today about, well, writing.

At university, I read a lot about writing and wrote a lot about writing. For those fortunate enough to have a room of one’s own1, an aesthetic enthusiasm and a massive ego2, I learnt that writing is a way to waste time whilst also feeling somewhat productive — So I didn’t shower today, but I did write 3 comedy sketches! Whether it’s a bullet journal full of unrealistic dreams, a revealing personal blog, or an over-enthusiastic and under-researched email to a famous casting director, putting pen to paper or fingertip to keyboard feels like an amazing way to procrastinate real life and doing your laundry.

That's actually why I began this Substack. I was a month away from graduating from drama school, and tip-tapping on my laptop was a lot more fun than facing my future as an unknown and then-unrepresented actress. It was surprisingly easy to transition from a first-class academic writing style to my own authentic voice, replacing researched analysis of Dickens’ use of pathetic fallacy with anecdotes of having a panic attack in a spin class. It came easily to me then. I had years of stories and experiences that fell out of my brain and landed effortlessly on the page. Almost two years into this substack, it feels a little harder now.

This year, with my new frontal lobe and a lack of auditions on the horizon, I have decided to pursue writing more deliberately. I have written short stories to enter into competitions and am now working on a play. As a result, I feel as though I have to save all of my “best bits” and ideas for these submissions, allowing my Substack to fall behind. I’m sorry. I have almost 300 (!!) of you now, Gentle Readers, and I hate to leave you unsatisfied. But know that your readership and paid subscriptions (thank you, dear patrons) have given me the confidence to be more serious about it all.

As part of these applications, I have had to write a personal statement. I last wrote one of those aged 18, where I detailed my starring role in the school muscial (Sweeney Todd, 2018) hoping it would land me an offer from Oxford — I got the interview, but my Sondheim knowledge didn’t get me any further. My new personal statement carries some of that confessional whimsy, but I hope feels more mature as a whole:

“I began writing in my early teens. I was obsessed with a boy band and, when my family and friends grew bored with my rambling, I turned to the internet. I found community with the ‘fandom’ and started to write fanfiction. I started with short stories about my dreamy first kiss with the drummer, replete with melodramatic rainstorms, short skirts and verbally abusive PE teachers. I grew these stories into a 40,000-word book. I eventually stopped working on the book when my friends at school found out. I learnt the hard way not to put too much personal detail* into a supposedly secret project.”

(*I used my real name and my exact physical description, as well as those of my actual school crush. Sorry, Max.)

That part is actually quite easy to write. I love talking about my fanfiction days. So much so, when I was telling my colleagues about this book at the shop, one turned to me and confessed that, when she was also an active fangirl, she was one of my loyal readers.

However, most of these applications for writing residencies and story competitions end with the question: Why do you write?

This one is a little harder to answer. I procrastinated answering this question, dodging the urges to plagiarise Woolf or Orwell. Thus the irony came full circle - writing to put off my laundry became doing laundry to put off writing. When folding a pair of my miserable multi-pack knickers, the elastic sticking out like exposed nerve-endings, I figured out my answer:

“As an actor, you don’t have a lot of control over your work, your life. But writing is different. I can be myself and express my deepest, darkest thoughts with the comfort of knowing everything I am feeling has been felt before. I can shape my experiences, funnel them through a structure and a narrative to expose their deeper resonances. That is why I write now: to make sense of my experience and find a connection. My favourite experience as a reader is finding a poem or a line from something written hundreds of years ago, and recognising that same sentiment in myself. Knowing that nothing is unique, everything is shared, is comforting.”

And this is truly how I feel. The best part of reading is coming across something you thought only you had ever felt. I won’t elbow my way in to the Wuthering Heights discourse, but when Brontë wrote “He's more myself than I am. Whatever our souls are made of, his and mine are the same”, I really felt that shit. Here are some other lines from literature/tv that hit:

‘I am half agony, half hope’ - Persuasion, Jane Austen

‘I don’t want to turn 29 / but it’s better than the alternative’ - Cat Cohen

‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; / Tread softly because you tread on my dreams’ - He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven, W.B Yeats

‘But the effect of her being on those around her was incalcuably diffusive: for the growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts, and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs.’ - Middlemarch, George Eliot

‘I sometimes worry that I wouldn’t be such a feminist if I had bigger tits’ - Fleabag, PWB

I’ll leave you with these quotations, dear Readers, and I hope they make you feel seen, exposed and inspired.

KTF x