I Write for Myself & Strangers

In this 80th episode of No Hair, All Heart, host Mookie Spitz rants about the raw, messy, decades-long journey of becoming a writer who finally found his voice. Anchored by Gertrude Stein’s famous line “I write for myself and strangers” Mookie explores the brutal truth of writing for no one’s approval but your own, and why expecting support from friends or family is a trap.

Not a tidy motivational pep talk. but a candid postmortem of false starts, crippling self-doubt, stylistic mimicry, thousands of practice pages, and the eventual breakthrough: creating a voice so uniquely his own that he can finally say, without apology, I did it. Along the way, Mookie rants:

• Why writing remains the most demanding—and least rewarded—form of communication in our attention-starved age.
• How literature sits at the crossroads of science, psychology, philosophy, and raw human experience.
• The toxic comfort of copying your idols versus the terror and opportunity of showing true vulnerability on the page.
• Why friends, family, and colleagues are the worst audiences for your work, and how jealousy, silence, or indifference is baked into their reactions.
• The paradox that great art comes from failure, rejection, and being ignored—and why that’s liberating and the key to creative success

Equal parts confessional and manifesto, Mookie shares stories from Dostoevsky to Borges, Pynchon to David Foster Wallace, and likens shredding Eddie Van Halen riffs to shredding syntax on the page, Mookie charts how obsession, failure, and self-loathing eventually alchemize into authentic art. By the end, he lands his rant with one simple truth: like Heisenberg in Breaking Bad, sometimes you just have to “figure it out.” And after decades of struggle, he has.

If you’ve ever wrestled with your own creative demons—or wondered why the people closest to you don’t get what you’re doing—this episode will hit home. Honest, unfiltered, and laced with dark humor, his rant is a battle cry for anyone still searching for their voice and audience. 

Send the host a text! Let him know what you think

Support the show