What a great post. Pick the things that fill our buckets and do them authentically - that's my mantra too. I'm just writing stuff that I like and hopefully other people will too. If not, no big deal because my life doesn't depend on it and that's a good thing! 🤪
I think it's important to make a distinction between writing for an audience and writing for the market. We write to communicate, so we have to think about the audience and how they will receive what we write. A communication not received is not communicated. But writing for an audience is writing about something that matters to us, something we desperately want to communicate with other people, if only to satisfy ourselves that what we have seen and felt the need to say is actually true and actually matters. You don't need to reach a lot of people for that, but you need to plan of reaching someone.
Writing for the market, on the other hand, isn't about what you want to say but about what the market wants to hear. And what the market wants to hear is not some new thing that it might have to think about, but an affirmation of something it already believes -- often something that isn't true, since is is lies that require constant reaffirmation to sustain them.
Funny how when I think about making money from my writing, the fun of it goes away. I wouldn't turn money away but I'm not going to actively pursue it. I write for my pleasure. I enjoy the discipline of posting regularly. Almost always, in the course of putting a story together, some nugget reveals itself to me that I hadn't thought of. That is the pleasure of it. It's nice when others like it.
A great article! I'm not going to lie: I'd love to earn a living through writing, but that's only because I write no matter what. I'm going to write just for money or as a slave to it. I write because I enjoy it, whether money comes from it or not (and so far it is a big NOT). As long as I satisfy my creative muse and get to enjoy some quality time in my head with my characters, in the end that's the greatest payoff.
I love how you related your feelings about writing to your experience with horses. So many labor of love type professions seem to have this dark side to them. My experience in the classical ballet world was much the same.
There is so much meat to this article that I don’t even know where to begin, because every line is a grade A cut. And this one really got me: “We can do it unencumbered by the stresses of chasing paid audiences down the rabbit hole of fickle preference.”--ABSOLUTELY!
I also liked your analogy of writing as a jigsaw puzzle, because that’s the way I view it too. When I write a poem, which I never really did until last year around this time, the entire process was one of measuring the beats and ensuring the caesuras and meter adhered to certain rules. It was more of an experiment than anything, and as you remark, it’s so gratifying when the finished product resonates with the reader.
What a great post. Pick the things that fill our buckets and do them authentically - that's my mantra too. I'm just writing stuff that I like and hopefully other people will too. If not, no big deal because my life doesn't depend on it and that's a good thing! 🤪
I think it's important to make a distinction between writing for an audience and writing for the market. We write to communicate, so we have to think about the audience and how they will receive what we write. A communication not received is not communicated. But writing for an audience is writing about something that matters to us, something we desperately want to communicate with other people, if only to satisfy ourselves that what we have seen and felt the need to say is actually true and actually matters. You don't need to reach a lot of people for that, but you need to plan of reaching someone.
Writing for the market, on the other hand, isn't about what you want to say but about what the market wants to hear. And what the market wants to hear is not some new thing that it might have to think about, but an affirmation of something it already believes -- often something that isn't true, since is is lies that require constant reaffirmation to sustain them.
Funny how when I think about making money from my writing, the fun of it goes away. I wouldn't turn money away but I'm not going to actively pursue it. I write for my pleasure. I enjoy the discipline of posting regularly. Almost always, in the course of putting a story together, some nugget reveals itself to me that I hadn't thought of. That is the pleasure of it. It's nice when others like it.
Ain’t that the truth!👌🏻
A great article! I'm not going to lie: I'd love to earn a living through writing, but that's only because I write no matter what. I'm going to write just for money or as a slave to it. I write because I enjoy it, whether money comes from it or not (and so far it is a big NOT). As long as I satisfy my creative muse and get to enjoy some quality time in my head with my characters, in the end that's the greatest payoff.
I love how you related your feelings about writing to your experience with horses. So many labor of love type professions seem to have this dark side to them. My experience in the classical ballet world was much the same.
There is so much meat to this article that I don’t even know where to begin, because every line is a grade A cut. And this one really got me: “We can do it unencumbered by the stresses of chasing paid audiences down the rabbit hole of fickle preference.”--ABSOLUTELY!
I also liked your analogy of writing as a jigsaw puzzle, because that’s the way I view it too. When I write a poem, which I never really did until last year around this time, the entire process was one of measuring the beats and ensuring the caesuras and meter adhered to certain rules. It was more of an experiment than anything, and as you remark, it’s so gratifying when the finished product resonates with the reader.