by Suzanne Lieurance
"Play big" gets used so often in creative circles that it's started to mean almost nothing — or worse, it's started to mean something intimidating: louder, more visible, more relentlessly self-promotional. No wonder so many writers hear it and quietly opt out.
That's not what it means. For a writer, playing big has very little to do with volume and everything to do with scope — the size of the questions you're willing to ask on the page, the size of the truth you're willing to risk saying, and the size of the audience you're willing to imagine reaching.
A quiet, private, deeply personal essay can be an act of enormous scope if it says something the writer has spent years avoiding saying. A loud, highly marketed book can be tiny in scope if it never risks anything the writer didn't already know how to defend.
Scope is measured in risk to the writer, not decibels to the audience. It's the difference between a project that could embarrass you if it fails and one that couldn't, because you never really put anything on the line.
This reframe matters because it changes what expansion actually requires of you. It doesn't require becoming someone louder, more confident, or more comfortable with self-promotion than you currently are. It requires becoming someone willing to write closer to the edge of what you actually think and feel — regardless of how quietly or loudly that gets published.
Ask yourself, honestly: if scope is about risk to you rather than volume to the world, where have you been avoiding the bigger version of a project not because it required more visibility, but because it required more honesty?
That's usually where the real expansion is waiting. Not in getting louder. In getting braver about what you're willing to say.
And now, visit writebythesea.com and learn how to improve you writing through revision.
And get your free subscription to The Morning Nudge for weekday emails with additional writing tips and resources.
Suzanne Lieurance is the author of over 45 published books and a Law of Attraction transformational coach for writers.
