Why Your Writing Matters in 2025

C'mon, Team. We've got to keep going even through everything is insufferable bullshit. Pep pep pep.
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We’re starting out 2025 with literal fire and brimstone, and that’s before we even get to the bit with the wars and the fascists and ughhhh, so it probably feels pretty hard to get into the spirit of the thing right now. You know, the thing where we tell you your stories are important and your writing is important and you deserve to prioritise your creative life and all that. After all, the world is on fire, so what the fuck do your little stories matter?

Newsflash: they matter a whole awful lot.

Why? Because they are the single, delicate thread that stops this whole crazy Earth Project from blowing sky high.

About two weeks ago, I travelled to Germany for the first time on my new German passport where I did my Origin Story Tour, made the pilgrimage to the place my Grandmother was born and grew up, where she lived until she fled. All places I’d been before, but this time with added citizenship. I cried. It was profound. And in about two weeks from now, I will become an aunt again for the billionth time, except this particular child is the first one of my gang who is highly likely to see the year 2100.

In between, I celebrated New Year with friends, and because we are now old the celebration involves generations. One hour into the new year, drunk on cocktails and laughter, I marvelled at this – just in that small room alone, the line from one person to the next, from parent to child, from past to future, the intensity of gene expression that carries with it everything that ever happened, all the stories that brought us all to this place.

And in among all the fire and brimstone of the world is this. The lives we lead. The stories we tell each other, the love we share. The line that, for me, stretches from Berlin to Brighton, from century to century, all the way back then to all the way in the future. The line that crisscrosses all of your lines in a huge, messy, unfathomable tangle.

We are part of something so much bigger than we can understand.

And we are connected in ways that will always defy rational explanation.

The world is burning. There is so much work to be done. And we have to start with each other. With the connection to ourselves, the connections between each other.

This is what stories give us: a sense of kinship, of understanding. A common language. A metaphor. A way of feeling that line, from then to now to the future.

Storying in all its different forms is one of the deepest forms of connection – of being human – that we have.

And when the world is on fire, we have human harder than ever.

Go write.

Sarah & Team WHQ

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