So this post is somewhat introspective but I am curious to how others feel about a similar topic. This is going to be a pretty long post, so I totally understand and pre-emptively forgive you for skipping through it and moving on to another post.
A quick introduction: I write nonfiction in the form of personal essays; occasionally I write reviews of books/movies/etc. but for the most part my lane is the personal essay. Mostly, I publish my stuff on either my personal blog, or on Medium.
Lately though, I have felt like I am turning too much to the idea of making everything my life “content”. To better illustrate what I mean, recently I decided I wanted to specifically journal my health & fitness efforts because I’ve been struggling with that lately. My first thoughts after deciding I was going to do that were “what platform do I post this on?” and “what do I call this??” (because I didn’t think it was a good fit for my already-existing platforms). I put a stop to that thinking and relegated these journal entries to a Simplenote document and it’s 100% for my eyes only. Not everything I do or write needs to be fodder for the online community.
But I still like to write, and will go through alternating periods of having a lot to push out onto page, and having no output whatsoever (right now is one of those periods, and I’m fine with that, because I’m enjoying getting some good reading time in). My issue is that I don’t have a sole focus with my writing, so it’s hard to get people to see what I’m writing and engage with said people. If I published a book, I could at least see sales figures or downloads or something. I don’t really trust subscriber or follower numbers on WordPress or Medium to mean anything.
Where I’m going with this - many collections of personal essays that get published come from either celebrities or at least public figures of some sort - they aren’t people just throwing a collection of stories at a publisher hoping they’ll get a book deal. So what’s the point of me writing anything for other people? Nobody knows who I am outside of family and friends.
I do have one area I’m immensely familiar with: epilepsy. In the back of my head I have a small dream of putting together a short book of my experience since my diagnosis 4 years ago but I turn back to, “well okay, but will anyone care if they don’t know who I am?”
So right now I am in a weird rut. I want to write things, but at the same time I don’t feel upset about the fact that I’m not writing (apart from journalling). But I’d like to write something meaningful to me, that other people could be interested in reading.
Does anyone else feel this way? What are you doing about it? Am I just beating myself up for no reason?
This quandary reminds me of an experiment on intrinsic and extrinsic motivation. A control group of toddlers were given paper and crayons and were advised to draw whatever they wanted, which of course they did. The other group was offered a reward if they drew a picture (candy I think). They found that the toddlers who were drawing only because they wanted to without any reward being involved drew significantly more drawings than the group of toddlers who were drawing to receive compensation for it.
There’s something about commodifying the things you like to do that takes something away from them. Writing just on your own terms for a while without regard to an audience is not worthless because firstly it has meaning to you and secondly it can be part of a creative process which leads you to what you would want to publish in the future. Taking a break from writing and reading the work of others is similarly productive.
I’m going to second @Kwakigra@beehaw.org here in that you should just write what you want to write.
Coming from a fiction writing perspective, it would be “write the story you want to read, because no one else is writing it.” This is advice that has been floating around for a while, I forget who first said it.
Writing because you feel you should, will never feel as good as writing what you want to write.
Thank you both (replying to you and @Kwakigra@beehaw.org at the same time) - completely on board with what you’re saying. I approach podcasting in that way as well - I make a podcast that I would want to listen to, rather than trying to appeal to other people. That’s where I am with my writing - I guess the other side of it is trying to get around feeling like I’m part of the content mill vs. writing something I want to put out into the world.
I suppose the answer to that is: write what it is I want to write. If I feel that it’s something I want other people to read, THEN figure out how to get it “out there”.
I am glad that the break I’m taking from writing feels natural and not forced, and I do feel productive in that I’m actually getting some reading done of books I want to read.
@Kwakigra@beehaw.org puts a nail to it.
You need to decide if you want to write, or be an author™. Being an author™ now days is a business, and in a business, you don’t write what you want, you write what sells.