Meredith Hewn

Imperfectly Perfect: My Writing Journey
On discovering a voice, building a system, and daring to hope
The Writer I Didn’t Know I Was
Nobody tells you the moment it happens. There is no announcement, no certificate, no dramatic scene where the light changes and someone hands you a pen and says: “you are a writer now.” For me, it crept in quietly — a slow, persistent pull toward stories, toward the way words could be arranged and rearranged until they felt exactly right. Or wonderfully, intentionally wrong.
I didn’t just stumble into writing. I grew into it. And somewhere along the way, I stopped asking for permission to take it seriously.
Word Crosswalks and the Excel Formula of Fiction
One of the most liberating things I ever did as a writer was give myself permission to be organized. Not in a rigid, joy-draining way — but in the way that actually sets creativity free.
I developed what I call “word crosswalks”: a system where certain words belong only to certain characters. A hero might move through the world with language that is open, warm, and reaching. A villain’s vocabulary is something darker, more closed — words with edges. Readers may not consciously notice it, but they feel it. That quiet architecture beneath the story is doing its work.
I sometimes think of my writing process the way I think about a formula in a spreadsheet: every element has a place, every input affects the output, and the whole thing needs to balance. But — and this is the part I hold onto — it needs to be imperfectly perfect. Too much order and the story stiffens. Too much chaos and it loses its spine. The magic lives in the tension between the two.
The First Draft, and the Fear That Followed
Finishing a first draft is one of the strangest feelings I know. You expect triumph. What arrives is something more complicated — a mixture of exhaustion, disbelief, and a low hum of “now what?”
And now, having published my first novel, the feeling has only deepened. Some mornings I wake up half-convinced it will have disappeared — that I’ll reach for it and find nothing there. The dream evaporated. It’s a vulnerability I didn’t anticipate: the strange fear that comes not before success, but after it.
I am afraid to hope too loudly. But I do hope. I hope that somewhere, a reader picks up my book and finds something in it that moves them — that my words feel evocative and inspiring, the way the best writing has always felt to me. That is the dream I’m still daring to hold.
To Anyone Still Finding Their Voice
If you are somewhere in the middle of your own writing journey — drafting, revising, doubting, beginning again — I want you to know that the system you build, however unusual it looks from the outside, is yours. Your crosswalks, your formulas, your rituals. Let them be imperfect. Let them work anyway.
The story you are telling matters. And the writer you are becoming? They were always there.

The Courage to Show Up on the Page
On dyslexia, synesthesia, learning differently — and writing anyway

https://hewnink.com/hewn-notes/f/the-courage-to-show-up-on-the-page

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