Not Creating, but Letting Appear

On transelling and creating without ownership

There is a way of creating that is rarely named, even though many people recognise it the moment it happens. Not as an idea, but as an experience. The moment when making — writing, painting, composing — ceases to be something you do and becomes something that takes place. Words appear. Sound settles into place. Form presents itself. You are not the source. Rather, the instrument.

I have known this experience for a long time, especially in writing. When this happens, something striking disappears. The search for recognition. The hope of being seen. The quiet desire to matter. Not because these impulses are suppressed, but because they lose their relevance. They fall away. What remains is a clear kind of pleasure — the pleasure of being an instrument. And, oddly enough, it is precisely there that creating becomes lighter, freer, more exact. Sometimes even meditative. The separation between maker and work no longer seems relevant.

What has puzzled me for quite some time is that we have no good word for this kind of creating. We speak of creation, authorship, expression — terms that imply ownership. My text. My work. My voice. While the experience itself often suggests something quite different. What appears seems largely indifferent to the name beneath it.

That puzzlement became sharper when I began publishing my columns on Substack. The platform breathes counting and comparison. Subscribers. Views. Paid posts. Many writers are caught up in this, visibly or invisibly. Sometimes eagerly. Sometimes anxiously. Writing seems to exist only once it is confirmed. Words are assigned value through reach.

I understand that longing. It is human. But I also see what it does: tension, self-doubt, a constant tuning to what “works”. And I find myself wondering what happens when we set that framework aside for a moment. When writing is no longer an attempt to be okay. When the very idea of having to be okay briefly loses its voice.

For that process — not creating in the proprietary sense, but allowing form to arise — I have begun to use a word: to transel. Not claiming authorship. Not asserting ownership. Simply being available. Attentive. Quiet enough not to get in the way.

Perhaps this is not a revolutionary idea. Perhaps many artists already work this way, without naming it as such. But I notice what changes when I see it like this. Pressure drops away. Space opens. It reminds me that nothing is truly ours. And that it is precisely there that something unexpectedly light emerges.

Perhaps writing does not need to succeed.
Perhaps it is already enough
that it appears.