The Grasshopper Sunday Edition: Questioning Things
Are you a writer if no one reads your stuff?
My answer to that is yes and @George Saunders agrees with me. In his Story Club newsletter this week he answers a question about this very question. He thinks that if you view the world as a writer, you have the writer mindset.
In his answer he makes a statement that I can relate to, about his choice to be a writer, a choice I made years ago, that writing was what I really want and need to do. But he also says that it’s alright if you discover that maybe it’s not your path.
You’re not always going to be motivated
I write using Google Docs, mostly on my iPad. When I go into Docs I am greeted by a grid of all my documents, most recent to the distant past, and there are a lot of them. Hundreds. This morning I was not feeling it and seeing that page was a little overwhelming, because I just did not have any ideas.
So I was questioning why I do what I do. Oddly enough this questioning got me out of my funk and might be a technique I use in my future to kickstart myself. As soon as I started this internal questioning I realized that all writing starts with a question and that gave me today’s topic for the Grasshopper.
In fiction the question might be: what if? What if a person found themselves in an unexpected situation? How do they react, what do they do, what if their reaction is also unexpected?
In screenwriting, definitely not my area of expertise, writers know they have a limited amount of time to set up that situation and have the characters act. And that first response sets up the middle of the story until another action or choice changes things and leads to the final scenes.
It’s not a bad formula for storytelling. In fact, I’d argue it is the prime formula for most stories. But what about nonfiction which is most of the writing I do? Another damn question. So I looked at those reams of documents in my Doc page and tried to find a pattern and, of course, there was one.
And since I was being analytical, I could look at those that have been most successful recently and compare them to those that just did not go with readers. I did see that the least successful articles were those that did not follow my pattern.
But what if you don’t have a lot of published stuff or enough readers to be statistically meaningful?
Ten years ago I would not have been able to answer that question, because the ability to publish yourself was very limited. Yes, you could start a blog, which I did, but the chances of anyone finding it were practically nil. And even if they did, the feedback those blog platforms offered didn’t tell you much.
But now you have no excuse. Spend fifty bucks, join Medium and start putting your stuff out there on a regular basis. Be prepared to be frustrated because you’ll feel invisible compared to the writers there with thousands of readers. But take comfort that all of them started right where you are. Any one of them will tell you that.
I posted my first piece on Medium when they first started, no one read it (there were not many members), and I promptly forgot about the site. A few years later I found it again and found that some people had read that piece. So I started publishing because I wanted feedback from those readers.
When I started getting it, it was super motivational. Back then the measurement was Claps, similar to Likes on Facebook (remember those?). Unfortunately Claps were almost meaningless because they did not mean anyone had actually read the piece. With a click they could Clap, even if it was just because you caught their eye.
But then they started measuring more stuff, like read time, and I got a lot more interested because of those stats. This was more like it- feedback. And then I started getting Comments, which are remarkably more civil than on many platforms.
So, I started getting answers to that question about being meaningful. George Saunders’ observation that you’re a writer if you see the world through a writer’s eye makes real sense to me now, because I see how stories get read and why, based on a tool like Medium, or substack, though substack’s stats are still a work in progress.
So, write, publish, analyze, repeat.
But what if you only write for yourself? A journal maybe? I would argue that that is not being a writer, it’s practicing a form of self-therapy. Nothing wrong with that if that is your primary goal.
It’s not mine, but I would also argue that I have learned a lot more about myself by going public with my writing than I would have if it was entirely introspective.
The Grasshopper is about being a writer and writers need an audience. There is one out there and you no longer need to go through intermediaries to get to it. That’s a very big change from the past and one you should take advantage of.
As I wrote the above words the Buffalo region not far from my home in Rochester, NY was getting as much as seven feet of snow. Meanwhile here we have none. I have never seen more than two or three feet of snow in one storm and that is very rare. But I’m very happy to not experience seven feet, which basically shuts down the world around you.
Thanks for reading this rambling Sunday edition. M
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