On Writing What’s Already Been Written
Sean Glatch | August 3, 2026 |
I often encounter a concern among writers that they have nothing new to contribute to literature. Why write if what I have to say has already been written?
The written word is, what, 4,000 years old? We know from our translations of cuneiform tablets that people have been grappling with the same problems of society we grapple with. If you don’t believe me, read the complaint tablet to Ea-nāṣir, which requests a refund for poor service with regard to copper trade. (Been there!)
Or, to be more literary, there’s the Epic of Gilgamesh, which asks the same questions we’re still asking about fate, power, God, friendship, the point of suffering, the meaning of life.
It goes without saying, but I’ll say it anyway: we write because we have something to say. Just because someone else has said it, doesn’t mean we should not try to say it in our own words. Kurt Vonnegut has a more elegant framing of this: we write to expand our souls.
But I think nonfiction writers feel this dilemma most acutely. Poets have the luxury of form, which makes it endlessly easier to explore old ideas in new language. Fiction writers, too, are empowered to imagine different worlds, alternate universes, and unfamiliar situations.
For us writers seeking to explore our lived, personal truths, it is humbling, and sometimes disabling, to think about how someone else has already written about the same topics we write about—perhaps even with better language, or at least a better audience.
So, are we just reinventing the wheel every time we write what’s already been written?
Certainly not.
Review: “A Diehard Drinker Accidentally Quits” by Sarah Miller
The New Yorker recently published this exceptional essay by Sarah Miller. And my immediate reaction, before reaching the second sentence, was, “is there anything new to be said about alcoholism?” Which is a cynical response to have, but also my reason to keep reading.
I mean, the essay itself is asking you to care: it’s titled “Accidentally Quits,” which makes you wonder how one might quit alcohol accidentally.
And, in truth, I don’t think Miller’s quitting was accidental—the title is mostly marketing fluff. (She quits because of a guided psychedelic journey that forces her, unconsciously, to reckon with her alcoholism. She doesn’t intend to quit drinking, but also, it’s clear that she had been questioning alcohol for a long time. I don’t think it’s an accident, in the grand scheme of things.)
But really, what’s new to be said about alcohol? The 12 Step Program has been around for almost a century; we’ve had 90+ years to debate whether it works, whether AA is a cult, and whether alcoholism is a structural failing instead of a personal one. There is also no shortage of literary examinations of addiction. Kaveh Akbar has his poetry chapbook Portrait of the Alcoholic, as well as his recent novel Martyr!; memoirs about alcohol have been written by the likes of Carrie Fisher, Mary Karr, Leslie Jamison, and Augusten Burroughs.
And that’s just alcohol. Our instructor Laura Cathcart Robbins has written a great memoir on drug addiction called Stash, and there’s no shortage of self-help books that attempt to empathize with the alcoholic experience—the Big Book included.
So, what does Sarah Miller have to say that the entire corpus of addiction literature hasn’t yet said?
Truthfully, not much.
But it’s so well written. If I were to recommend a good essay for understanding alcoholism, I would choose this over a lot of the other literature I’ve read.
Miller grounds her experience of alcoholism in the 21st century, immediately setting herself apart from my generation, which is notably more skeptical of alcohol. (I grew up in Wisconsin. I love beer. But I have plenty of friends my age who have never touched a drop.)
More importantly, her essay isn’t just about alcohol, but it’s about how we survive the particular unkindness of our present age. Dear reader, you and I share no shortage of societal ills to bemoan, and while our interpretations of the world—our politics, religions, identities, philosophies—might differ, I know we are both concerned about life as it’s currently lived.
Miller’s essay isn’t just about alcohol, but it’s about how we survive the particular unkindness of our present age.
So, why not drink? In truth, Miller lays out a very good justification for alcoholism. Which means she is able to tap into the psychology she has lived as an alcoholic, and reproduce that experience for the reader, even as she writes from a sober place.
Here are some examples:
“Almost everyone I knew drank, many of them a fair amount, and that was because, like me, they were correct in considering alcohol to be the only thing that gave the world any sparkle. People did fun, life-affirming, culturally interesting things with alcohol.”
That line “they were correct in considering” is a bit obnoxious, because I think other things give life sparkle. But, again, Miller is inviting us into this particular experience of her life and what gave it meaning.
“Is there anything better than partying in a big, beautiful city? Whether sitting on the bougainvillea-shaded patios of Los Angeles or in the dark booths of New York, admiring the Rome sunset between sips of Peroni or rolling my eyes at the thimblefuls of Chasselas dispensed in Geneva, city of watches and light pours, I found that drinking in a city, with friends, or alone, always left me overwhelmed with happiness that I was no longer a kid living in a strict household in a small town.”
I am markedly more introverted than this person who parties in big cities. I have never enjoyed clubbing or being awake past 11pm. And yet, this passage made me more than a little envious of this narrator’s fêted lifestyle.
“In the Big Book, there’s a phrase that begins, “with all the earnestness at our command.” Before giving up drinking, I had very little earnestness at my command. I drank in order to give myself permission to talk openly, or at great length, or to heighten the sensation of listening or being listened to. Drinking is way easier than saying that you want to talk to someone, or don’t. I learned this in my childhood home, where my parents would be downstairs at the same time for hours, absolutely silent. At six o’clock, I would hear the ice cubes, and at 6:02, the talking.”
I know this experience. I know how alcohol can create those moments of unexpected, almost soul-felt connection. And I’ve experienced that connection in such a way that could never be replicated, even if alcohol remains present. But, more importantly, this excerpt ties together two deeply important threads: 1) the lineage of alcoholism that comes from an emotionally distant family; 2) our relationship to the truth and our ability to express it.
“Earnestness,” and its related ideas of capital-T Truth and sincerity, is something I think about a lot these days. Alcoholism and irony far precede 20th century -isms, but it is true that our culture, our technologies, and our vices enable us to retreat further from a shared conception of the world. It is my opinion that our fragmented world leads to a kind of disengaged psychosis from reality—which then leads to addiction, to further disengagement, etc. A positive feedback loop if there ever was one. (For more on our quest for capital-T truth, read some of my essays on it here and here and here.)
If earnestness reflects our ability to express our truths, what does it mean that we can only be earnest in altered states? Is earnestness something we can “command” as the Big Book suggests? How do we hone earnestness, especially if we are trying to also hone our sobriety?
That is why this essay was so important to write, so valuable to read. Because I can feel Miller fighting against her own instincts to speak her truth. Her earnestness is hard fought in tandem with her sobriety, but the clarity of sobriety is what makes her essay both deeply and startlingly felt.
And this is true of the other books and poems and stories written about alcoholism, but it leads me to a point I want to make about the value of your particularity.
The Value of Your Particularity
Let me share with you the same idea expressed three different ways, by three different writers:
- “Loneliness is the drug from which all other drugs obtain their architecture, But maybe I don’t mean loneliness as much as I mean isolation. Maybe I mean having someone waiting for you in a bed while you sit in a running car and trace another person’s name into the fogged window with your smallest finger. Father, forgive us, for we know exactly what we do.”
- Hanif Abdurraqib
- “I really, really needed to understand that solitude is different than abandonment. I just could never tell the difference before,” she says, letting out a sigh. “I just felt like if I’m alone, I’m just not good enough. That even if I’m alone in the woods, someone should fuckin’ crash through the sky right now and find me. And it’s like, I don’t want to think of my heart as something that has a tracking device on it. I just want to think of myself as lit from within.”
- Jenny Slate
- “Shame and loneliness are almost one. Shame at existing in the first place. Shame at being visible, taking up space, breathing some of the sky, sleeping in a whole bed, asking for a share.”
- Fanny Howe
These are three beautifully written passages at the intersection of loneliness and shame. They each name a sense of guilt for taking up space, being alive, having needs, being imperfect. Two of them name the sky, two of them name beds. Each expresses remarkably similar ideas, but each does so in wholly unique language, making each idea, in turn, feel wholly new.
How is this possible? Because the value of writing is not just in the ideas expressed, it’s in the how of expression. It is in your particularity.
The value is not in the question, but in the asking.
We have been asking the same questions about life for as long as there has been language. Probably for longer than that. The value is not in the question, but in the asking. And we can only ask from our own lives: the experiences we have had, the images our minds store, the words we love, the words we hate, the discoveries we make. We can only ask in our personal language.
(Rainer Maria Rilke advises us to “live the questions”… and one day we may live “into the answer.”)
Sarah Miller’s essay is valuable because it has nothing new to say about alcohol—but has a new voice to say it with. It’s a funny voice, wry but earnest, at times obnoxious, but playfully. It is also deathly smart. It’s a voice that, when you read it, you can sense the life of the person who speaks it—and then you see that life recounted in the story itself. Miller arrives at this place by being true to herself, by being specific and intentional, and by honing her language in a way that is unique and particular to her.
Why We Write
It does not matter what your voice wishes to speak about—only that you speak with it.
For a long time, I was not a spiritual person. God was an idea to control people, and I did not want to be controlled. I believed religion was an easy way out of rational arguments, and that anything outside of a materialist framework was fundamentally unserious, if not effectively evil.
I still think too many people lack a sense of materialist grounding. But I have also, in the past few years, come around to the idea of God. Which is not to say I firmly believe in God—my jury is still out—but I am willing to lean into a spiritual side of myself that I had, for a long time, neglected. (My teenage self revolts as I type this.)
Occasionally, against my better judgment, I even make inductive arguments as a result of my spiritual feeling. Here is one such argument.
Our language is how we come to find God.
Yes, I know, I’m invoking God right after I said I’m still agnostic. Call God what you want, then. Absolute Truth. A higher consciousness. The Meaning of Things. The Universe.
Our language is how we come to find God. That sentiment is echoed in organized religion. In the beginning, there was the word, and the word was God.
A similar idea exists outside of the Abrahamics: in asceticism, the ascetic subject exits the world to interrogate and disentangle their own heart. It is done in meditations, yes, and chants, and also in prayers, in conversations, in explorations of the mind and the possibly-existent soul. It is done, yes, in language.
In his 1998 book The Place That Was Promised, Haruki Murakami interviews former members of the doomsday cult Aum, many of whom became Buddhist ascetics seeking enlightenment at society’s margins. One of these subjects, pseudonymed Hajime Masutani, says, almost too offhandedly, that “the Self is what should be discovered, not discarded”—because through the Self, one finds God.
We write to know, to accept what we don’t, and to show others the Truth they might not see.
I also believe that every Self is unique and particular. And each Self only grows more particular as we age. We become more specific, as individuals: the more we live, the more our language and our minds calcify into something one-of-a-kind.
But our Selves are too often stifled: by monoculture, by societal expectations, by a fear of the work, a fear of being wrong. Now more than ever, there seems to be no end of technologies and opportunities to let someone else speak on our behalf. To hand us our language. To tell us who we are.
We write to find our Selves, and maybe, in the process, God. Even in writing where God is never mentioned; even in writing where God is refuted, denied existence.
I say all this because we live in a profoundly disturbing era where our voices are treated as content, our language is handed to us by LLMs. I believe even an email, a résumé, or a text message is an opportunity to reckon with language; that God is in the words we use to bridge meaning, to reach one another, to discover our Selves and Others. But this is only true when that language comes entirely from a human mind—from the decisions we make in every word we produce, organize, and arrange. If there’s a soul, our language moves through it. We write to know, to accept what we don’t, and to show others the Truth they might not see.
It is only natural that we worry about the value of our words. Didn’t someone already say what we want to, and better? But they did not say it in your voice, which is precious, individual, and worthy of being heard, a voice that presents a once-in-history opportunity to move us closer to Truth. You can only use this voice if it comes from within, not without—and only if you are willing to risk saying the wrong thing, then stumbling into what’s right.
So, it does not matter if what you wish to write about has been written about before. It was not written with your voice. It does not matter what your voice wishes to speak about—only that you speak with it.
