The people who never know

There was no course. No degree, no editor, no writing group, and nobody reading over my shoulder while any of this got written. Whatever craft ended up on the page came from somewhere else.

Some of it came from strangers on Instagram, read in whatever an evening had left over after a full day of other work. What I want to write down is what one of them gave me, and what it means that I can never tell them so.

One person, once, described an editing pass in a few lines. No name I would recognise if I saw it again, just a paragraph typed between two other things on a day I know nothing about. I have run that pass on every chapter of the novel I finished. All sixty-three of them, one at a time, start to end.

So a method that reached me by accident now sits inside a finished book, and the person who wrote it down has no idea. They will never find out. I do not know their name. I could not credit them if I tried. A reply from an account they have never heard of, about a book they have never heard of, would tell them nothing they could recognise as thanks.

That is an odd kind of debt. It cannot be repaid in the normal way, because there is no address to send the payment to. The person who is owed is not waiting for it and would not know it as theirs if it arrived. They put something into a feed once, because it had helped them, or because they wished somebody had told them sooner. There was no way of knowing whether it would reach anybody at all, and no way of ever finding out that it did.

It reached somebody.

If you are one of the people who does this, who writes down the thing that took you months to work out and leaves it somewhere a stranger can find it for nothing: I cannot tell you which post was yours. Nor whether any of this is about you specifically. But something you wrote got read on an evening you knew nothing about, and I finished a novel with it running through every chapter.