On writing to be read
The moment I imagined you reading this, it became harder for me to write it.
Almost all of my writing has been deeply personal and stream of consciousness– it was never really written with the intention of being shared. I assume nobody has been like “check out this piece my friend wrote about the interplay between crying and manhood” because, well, it’s a bit emotionally raw.
An anecdote is useful here: I’ve more than one friend who, after I sent them one post, follow up later with “I read some of the rest, I hope that’s ok?” As if I didn’t send them a link to a public website with teasers to read more beneath each post. Actually, I kind of get this. My writing isn’t typically packaged to optimize for sharing. For one, it’s on my self-hosted blog and not a platform which is built on sharing and discovering writing. For another, I am not convinced many would finish such a piece if they didn’t know me personally. I am well aware that part of the draw to read my writing is a sort of voyeurism which I welcome (hello out there!). But sometimes, as I write, I realize that this voyeurism will exist sometime in the future and a third character emerges in the once-intimate interplay between my words and me: some observer. This realization consistently de-motivates me.
In looking a bit closer at this pattern, a tension emerges between motivation and effort in creating things for others. Motivating myself to write things for others makes it more difficult for me to write things. As the unseen eye silently judges me from just beyond the veil, my perspective starts to feel… trivial?
When I sit down at my desk to write something that is explicitly for sharing: something I’d think people would want to click on and then share with others, I end up coming up with a really killer title for a piece that goes absolutely nowhere. With my pithy title staring back at me in oversized font, I realize that I don’t really have much to say or that most of what I wanted to say was basically in the title. That, or, I begin to write the piece only to give up somewhere halfway through out of boredom. Well, anxiety disguising itself as boredom but more on that later…
I am much more motivated to write when the writing feels like its “for me.” When things are for me, I am liberated from imagined future readers and can just express myself with the explicit goal of better understanding myself. Sometimes a magical thing happens where writing which was very much for me can also be lightly edited to be for others. For this, I am grateful. I mean this super-duper casually: it makes me feel less alone in an uncaring universe.
That brings me to the latter component of this tension: the effort. Unsurprisingly, there is a fairly large gap between writing to understand myself and writing so that others may understand me. I’ve got to put in effort to turn my scribbled mess of tangled ideas into something which hooks people and takes them on a journey with me. With a slight exception made for poetry, where the vague and abstract thinking can be a benefit (as in a painting), in essay writing (which I guess is what this is?) I’ve got to hold hands with the reader. Only I have the benefit of knowing what I meant by that. Figuring out how to express, in a way which is fun to read, what I meant by that makes up probably ~99% of the effort in creating something worth sharing.
And, candidly, I am finding it fucking hard to do.
It’s something of a Catch-22: I am not good at creating things worth sharing because I don’t share enough and I don’t share enough because I am not good at creating things worth sharing. It rhymes a bit with what Ira Glass calls “the gap” which is the gap between good taste and having the ability to create things that you’d call good. From Glass: “It’s only through going through a volume of work that you’re actually going to catch up and close that gap.” Since I just started writing, my writing will likely not live up to my high bar.
Unfortunately, I’m beginning to realize that writing for myself and writing for others are just totally different skills. Effectively motivating myself to create things worth sharing is stuck in a bit of a paradox since, in its earliest innings, I know the reward will be fairly shit.
If the reward for sharing is egotistical, that is, other people reading my writing and thinking “oh, this person has a very fine brain, indeed” then I don’t even get the reward when I first start because what I share isn’t good, yet. It’s a task I don’t like with a reward I am repelled from which breeds in me an anxiety. This anxiety bubbles up as boredom or self-rejection such that I never see the task through to completion.
I think I’ve come to the conclusion that for me to want to create things it must be for myself since the reward for sharing things I’ve created is usually a negative reward (nobody acknowledges it or you open yourself up for critique). So then, what am I motivated to create?
What I choose matters greatly but I’ll close with a quote from Sylvia Plath that I think makes the tradeoff clear:
“I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn’t quite make out.
I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn’t make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.”