You Do It For You

I walked out of my last entry with a few idea of what I wanted to write about next, but it turns out that all of them will have to wait at least a few more days. Something happened over the weekend that energized me, and once it did I realized that it didn't make sense to write about anything else.

And this was a really nice thing that happened to me. Jill (a very clever code name, but I'm sure she can decipher it) wrote me a very nice message to let me know that she’s my first regular reader! And because she's my first official Friend of the Blog, I want to thank her.

The most amazing thing about this is that when I got her message the first thing I wanted to do was sit down and write my next entry as fast as I could. At that moment it felt really, really good to be writing something, to be a writer. The fears of being a writer and all of the difficulties of starting, they were all gone. And it was all because I knew that I was writing something that somebody else wanted to read.

It's almost unbelievable that I didn't realize this before.

See, the first fear that any writer learns how to express is that nobody will like what they write. But I think the hardest thing to deal with is actually the idea that nobody will want read it anyway. I think this is the first thing that we have to deal with. It's easier even to write for classes or for a writing group because the agreement there is that the other people have to read your words, whether they like it or not. The hard part is believing that any of them actually want to.

It's terrifying, I know, and it’s almost impossible to break through it without a strategy. After thinking about it, I believe that strategy has to be to write away from the fear. See, I was enjoying writing this blog when I believed I was just writing into a black hole, and that made the risk worthwhile for me. Now that I know that people want to read it, I want to write it even more. And that's a pretty great feeling.

So find something to write that you can enjoy writing for yourself regardless of who sees it, and then do it publically. Anything is good whether it’s a blog, a web-comic, poetry, erotica, love letters, anything as long as it gets you writing. Then advertise it. Tell your friends to tell their friends. The incentive to write will be there because you're doing it for yourself. The incentive to go public will be there because it won’t matter as much if nobody reads it. And the fear will be smaller for the same reasons.

But, as always, you have to take it seriously. Because if you don't take it seriously, then you're not writing. You're screwing around. And we're writers, not screw-arounders.