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?
@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.
Apologies in advance, because I’m not caffinated enough to be typing, but here are some of my unwarranted thoughts:
I think that writing is a skill you have to develop like a muscle. Writing something, even if it’s just for yourself, is always going to be good workout.
I don’t write as much non-fiction, so I don’t really know how it works, but I find that when I am writing a first draft of something I don’t always know what the focus of a piece will be. It’s only when it’s finished that I can see a theme and then rework it in.
In terms of writing for an audience, I think that can make writing too abstract. Someone once said that writing for one person is a lot easier than writing for a thousand people, because you cannot always please a thousand people in one go. Just focus on one person when you’re writing and how the piece woukd make them feel (This person could be you or a friend, relavtive, loved one or enemy).
Also, if you are concerned that your current essays do not show any connecting theme, show them to a trusted friend or reader. They might be able to see themes in them that you’ve missed.
I hope this ramble helps and sorry it’s not as coherent as I thought it would be.
