Why I Write in Wounds
- mgmuszik
- Apr 22
- 3 min read
On craft, precision, and the discipline of not looking away.
· THE WORD BEHIND THE SONG · FREE TO READ
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I don't write from peace. Peace is a cul-de-sac for a lyric — nowhere to turn, nothing to reach for.
A wound, on the other hand, is architecture. It has a shape. A before. A bottom. It gives the pen something to walk toward and something to walk away from, which is the whole of what a song needs: direction, and the pressure of leaving.
Let me be precise, because this is a blog about precision. I do not mean I write what happened to me. That kind of writing turns into a transcript, and a transcript is not a song. I mean I write at the frequency a wound teaches — the tempo, the syntax, the way truth moves when it is not yet polite. A wound does not edit itself. It doesn't round its corners for company. It says the word that makes the room go still. That is what I am after on the page.
The enemy, always, is the pretty sentence. The line that is too comfortable to be trusted. When I catch myself reaching for a word because it is lovely, I stop. Lovely is for ceremonies.
A song is not a ceremony. A song is a surgery the listener consents to without knowing they have signed.
I build the verse the way a scar builds skin — in layers, slowly, with the body deciding what stays. The first layer is always too much. The second is too little. The third is the one that keeps the heat. By the fourth, I know if the line will survive a decade or if it will flinch the moment someone sings it back to me.
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People ask if it hurts to write like this. No. What hurts is writing around. Writing toward the thing, naming the thing cleanly — that is relief. The wound is not the subject. The wound is the teacher. It teaches me which words have weight and which words are decoration, and decoration is how a song dies.
Sacred feminine writing — and I mean this seriously, not as a posture — has always worked this way. The women who kept our knowledge did not store it in soft language. They stored it in syllables that could survive a crossing. Words you could whisper under a floorboard. Words a child could carry out of a house on fire. That is the standard. If a line I write cannot survive that kind of carrying, it is not finished yet.
So when I say I write in wounds, I do not mean I bleed onto the page. I mean I listen where it is tender, and I write the only sentence that does not lie when it gets there. The wound tells me what is real. The craft decides what is shareable. The song is what happens in between.
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I solemnly swear to teach as I learn. And what the wound has taught me is this:
The song you are too comfortable to write is the song no one needs.
The rest of this series lives inside the Covenant. If the craft is what you came for, the door is open.
Enter the Covenant
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