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In all my years of working with writers in group settings, there is one thing that has happened every single time without exception.
Every writer has been surprised by what readers found in their work.
Every one.
Not occasionally. Not most of the time. Every writer, every session, without fail. Something a reader noticed, valued, or was moved by that the writer hadn't seen — or worse, had dismissed entirely before anyone else had a chance to experience it.
I've thought about what this means for a long time. And here's what I keep coming back to.
We will never fully know the value of our writing to our readers. Not before we share it. Not even after, entirely. A story lands differently for every person who reads it, at every moment in their lives when they happen to pick it up. Meaning moves. It shifts. It belongs, in some important way, to the reader as much as it does to us.
This is why trying to force value or meaning into a story rarely works. When we decide in advance what our writing has to communicate, what it has to make the reader feel or understand, the writing tends to feel it. It becomes didactic — more concerned with delivering a message than telling a truth. There's nothing wrong with writing that teaches or persuades, but it's a different thing entirely from a story that moves someone. The most powerful stories don't explain themselves. They simply are. And what the reader takes from them is often something the writer never consciously put there.
The sooner you share your imperfect writing, the sooner you'll discover what's actually resonating. What's landing. Where your strengths as a writer live — and where the strengths of the story itself lie, which are sometimes two very different things.