Creativity and Fulfillment

In his weekly newsletters, James Clear (Atomic Habits) shares three quotes to motivate and inspire his readers to expand their view of the world and work towards their best possible life.

Here is a recent quote that I liked very much:

Many of the best things in life are endless.

Being in a great relationship. Staying fit and healthy. Doing work that fulfills you. Being a good parent, coach, or teacher.

Stop worrying about accomplishing these things and instead focus on building a life where you continually practice them.

The important stuff has no finish line.

Improving your craft as a writer and becoming the best version of your self is endless.

I hope you never finish.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

Need more content? Join my mailing list!

Writers are archaeologists, constantly digging into the past. Some of us mine personal experiences for memoir, autobio-fiction, or fictionalized versions of our lives. Others take pieces of what they’ve observed, learned, felt, or experienced and knit them together to create something unrecognizable. We make use of our good stuff, even when the events themselves might have sucked.

Have you ever considered your past not in light of what you might use in your writing, but in a meta way, contemplating how your past shapes your desire to write, the kind of stories you create, and the themes you examine?

100 writers can take the same premise and create 100 different stories. In some cases, we night not even realize the authors began with the same scenario or phrase. Why does one writer explore dread and depravity in a horror novel while another tries to make sense of the present by speculating about a distant future? Why does one writer create expansive historical dramas while another writes intimate existential tales that are no more than a snapshot in a day in the life of a single character?

The answer is that we are shaped by what we’ve observed, learned, felt, and experienced, all the good and the bad. The real-life details we drop into our fiction therefore inform – probably unconsciously – the type of writer we are. We come to our work with a point of view and choose our genres and themes accordingly. We assert: This is what it means to be alive. This is how we experience and understand life. Here is a lens that will help you navigate and understand existence.

Similarly, our experiences inform why we engage in the act of writing itself. We need an outlet for our feelings. We feel called to point out injustice or celebrate beauty in an ugly world. We want to entertain. We want to reveal. We want to escape. We want to control the process and the outcome. We need a happy ending. We want to have a conversation. We need to be heard. We need to feel alive.

Considering how life has shaped your desire to write and the kind of work you create, is there a single word you can use to describe yourself? You might express this as I am ­­­­­­­­__________ or perhaps as I need ­­­­­­­­__________. You might have a few words or several phrases, perhaps one for why you write, another for your genre, and one that describes your themes.

To the question of why I write, my first phrase is I need to know.

I grew up in a family that did not communicate. I don’t mean we avoided philosophical discussions or heart to heart conversations, but that we did not engage in normal everyday conversation. Our parents didn’t ask us about anything. They didn’t tell us anything. Our questions might be met with stony silence or a vague, yet convoluted, response that answered nothing. They didn’t give us advice on how to navigate life. As my sister often jokes, they didn’t teach us to say “please” and “thank you”. They kept secrets and expected us to do the same. We were not to discuss what went on in our house.

In school, I was always 2-3 years ahead of my age group academically, and 2-3 years behind socially. Observing the other kids, it was clear they knew things I didn’t. They used words or discussed situations I’d heard about but didn’t know the meaning of. But I couldn’t ask anyone for this information. The kids would have laughed and the adults wouldn’t have answered. Most of the time, I didn’t know the questions to ask. If I did stumble upon a specific question, it was of the crude playground variety, which cannot be posed to an adult. I was smart enough to know that much.

Four of my parents’ five children have/had careers in various kinds of communications – book and magazine publishing, marketing, journalism, research and academic writing, learning products and educational design. We were dropped out into the world wholly unprepared for what we’d find, but with a strong need to talk. To be heard. To communicate.

I write because I need to know things, and there’s no one to ask. I write to view the world from different angles. I write to figure out why a person makes their choices, connecting what’s visible and knowable, and extrapolating the rest. I write because sometimes I may have three distinct, wholly unrelated facts that trouble me, and when I place them against each other, a fuller picture begins to form. I write to understand myself and to look forward to what might become of me and to examine unanswerable questions.

I write because secrets are scary and I feel more secure when I understand what’s going on around me, even if I can only guess at part of it. I know where I fit in. I can imagine what someone else may be going through. If I don’t have facts, at least I have theories. I can work with that.

To the question of what I write, my second phrase is I am flawed but I am worthy.

I don’t write through a lens of any particular genre. I like literary fiction and light sci-fi and gritty fantasy and social satire and murder mysteries and even the occasional superhero novel. When I was younger, I leaned heavily into literary fiction. I hope that my work has a bit more voice and flavor than the average potboiler, but I no longer feel bound to contemporary drama or slice of life fiction. In the moment, those forms helped me figure out who I am, and these days I am slightly more interested in other people.

However, my protagonists are of a type. They are not always likeable. They are usually outcasts of one kind or another, even lacking the ragtag group of misfits most oddball protagonists are gifted. They are stubborn and sometimes unkind, but also sometimes they are kind. Their attempts to do good often backfire or fall short. They have a strong moral compass and sense of self that can give them succor in times of trial but also lead them to lonely, dangerous ground. They have a code. They have faith. They have pain and have learned to live with it, and sometimes they reenact it.

My heroes fuck up. They might lash out in anger or act selfishly. If there’s a lesson to be learned, there’s a good chance they’ll misinterpret it. Sometimes their mistakes are accidental, and sometimes they are accidental on purpose. They may make a bad choice because they’ve already tried all the goods ones and those didn’t work. Often their sin is simply being where they are not wanted while being ignorant they are not wanted.

My heroes get lost. They don’t belong. But they stubbornly, ferociously maintain their dignity, seeking meaning and connection in a world that keeps them at arm’s length. They may be defeated but they do not give in, even when surrendering might be the best choice. When doubling down is an option, they’ll take it. My heroes are fully themselves in a world that wants them to be something else.

The type of story world is irrelevant. Only their role matters. These are not stories I could have written when I was younger. These are tales of scars.

I write about lost, messy people because I am sometimes lost and messy. Perdidi, perdidi, et iterum perdidam. I fuck up, I have fucked up, and I will fuck up again. Perhaps not as grandly as my fictional protagonists, but still. Like them, I can act out in anger or selfishness. I can be capricious. And yes, often my biggest failing is wandering into an arena where I do not belong, for example into a family where we were made to keep silent.

Mistakes do not define us. We are more than the sum of our worst hours. And being different does not render us less than. It doesn’t matter that we are flawed. It doesn’t matter that people don’t like us. We are worthy and we have stories.

Do you have a word or phrase in mind? Or a few words? Consider how this expression supports your creative practice or appears in your writing as a theme, motif, or conflict. Embrace this idea about yourself and sit with it awhile to fully appreciate and understand how it’s helping you.

I suspect you’ll discover that your words or phrases are an important part of your writerly voice. This strong concept of yourself comes through in the kind of stories you choose to write, the themes you explore, and how you craft your sentences and scenes. Voice is difficult to define and develop, but at heart, voice is who you are and these questions can help you conceptualize yourself as a writer.

Take a few moments to celebrate yourself. These inquiries go to the core of who you are and why you create. They are part of what makes you you. These concepts are why your stories are uniquely your own.

Whatever you write, no one can do it like you can.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them. Need more content? Join my mailing list!

Inside every writer, there are two competing factions. Not wolves, but inclinations. We have both the desire to fit in and the desire to break the mold, the instinct to follow the rules and the drive to think for ourselves. The wish to be popular and the desire to be great. Maslow’s hierarchy of needs is stacked like a pyramid, but sometimes the layers conflict. The safety of community may ask that we eschew personal fulfillment. An apotheosis may require we leave the community.

This is the conflict through which true believers become heretics and heretics become saints.

In writing, there are rules – the methods and techniques that make a successful story. What to do and what not to do. We want to learn the magic formula – the tricks and tips that transform an unknown writer into a bestselling author. I haven’t experienced it, but I bet having 100,000 readers generates a damn fine sense of belonging.

But at the same time, we want to be recognized for our unique talents. We chafe when someone suggests we write to formula. We don’t want to be merely successful, but respected. We want to be known for our creativity, the originality of our writing, and our keen insights. We have to understand the rules of grammar, spelling, and syntax, or we risk looking foolish. But also, we admire the writers who take risks, who play with language, who fashion new words from old, who break molds. As a rule, writers love eccentric writers. Oscar Wilde, Gertrude Stein, Ernest Hemingway, Tom Wolfe, Anne Rice. Who doesn’t want to live freely and write with a bit of style?

In Mark Danielewski’s House of Leaves, sections of prose are typeset to force the reader to turn the book sideways and then upside down in order to continue reading. In other places, the text is set in backwards type, presumably asking the reader to hold the book up to a mirror. The design mirrors the experience of exploring the haunted house in the title, as well as various characters’ descent into madness.

This technique isn’t for everyone. The novel is described as post-modern. A cranky reader (ahem) might be tempted to describe it as post-intelligible. But as an object of art, it’s a stunning accomplishment by an writer with vision, who decided not to follow what we’d likely consider to be the most basic rule for writing a novel: that the reader be able to read it. Mark Danielewski is definitely a heretic. On the other hand, his second novel was nominated for the National Book Award, so he’s at least been considered for sainthood.

You may not wish to create an impenetrable slab of writing, but do take a few moments to acknowledge both sides of your mind. Appreciate the fact that there are rules of good writing and repeatable steps to success, as well as your soul’s desire to color outside the lines. Reconcile your inner saint and heretic.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them. Need more content? Join my mailing list!

Even if you’ve tempered the influence of your backstory ghosts, you may backslide into negativity. You will experience creative setbacks and rejections, and the voices of imposter syndrome are never louder than when they are given the opportunity to say I told you so.

This is inevitable, but you can use the interim time wisely by learning to be aggressively positive. If you spend more than 3 minutes a month on social media, you’ve probably seen the meme exploring ominous positivity:

You will be ok. You have no choice.

Everything will turn out fine. You cannot stop it.

You will succeed. It is inevitable.

Close your eyes and visualize a time or place when you felt most at ease with your creativity or when you felt that you were achieving a high level of success or excellence. Take some deep breaths and enjoy that feeling. Maybe some of your work appeared in print. Maybe someone gave you a meaningful compliment. Perhaps you uplifted another writer when they needed it. Or you might simply remember a time when you enjoyed writing or other creative work without any negativity and simply reveled in the joy of expressing yourself. Don’t rush. Sit with your creative joy for a bit. This is the good stuff.

Another tactic is to stop talking about writing as though it were our punishment. Eliminate phrases like shitty first draft, open a vein and bleed on the page, and I hate writing but love having written from your emotional repertoire.

Consider assembling a new set of phrases to counteract the voices of negativity when they arise. While your work may be viewed subjectively, there also exist unarguable facts about your creative process and work. Write down some statements that even the nastiest person would not be able to refute. Here are a few of mine:

• I genuinely enjoy the time I spend writing.
• I write because I want to, not for any outside gain.
• I have goals and I meet them.
• I love learning and exploring through writing.
• I love talking to other creative people and hearing about their work.

These are not subjective statements, nor are they aspirational. Your ugly voice can argue that your writing isn’t any good or that you’ll never be financially successful, but it cannot challenge the fact that you love writing, learning, and other creative people.

Fill your head with good thoughts and don’t give those fuckers an inch.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them. Need more content? Join my mailing list!

The voices of discouragement are the writer’s ghosts, not so different from the backstory wound a protagonist must overcome to succeed on his journey. Fortunately, we generally do not require a major inciting incident or significant quest to overcome these bad thoughts. Unfortunately, we still have to do the Work – looking inside, examining, unraveling, and refreshing our ways of thinking.

Often, the ghosts of our creative pasts are born of shame – the times we were teased because we loved to read or write, the criticisms and rejections we’ve received, and the very bad advice about whether this work is worthwhile.

Oddly enough, compliments also can be a kind of trap. Do you have fans of certain kinds of stories? Has some of your work sold better than the rest? Have your writing group peers told you they love certain elements of your stories, style, or voice? People starved of encouragement are prone to lean into the qualities that earn them praise, often to their detriment.

All these ghosts – good and bad – can hold us back from trying something new. We might be afraid of rejection, criticism, or failure. We might believe we should stick with the familiar, rather than try that new style or genre we’d like to work in. We might lean into the qualities that others like best, such as lush description, fight scenes, or comedy. After all, we don’t want to drive away they very people that are encouraging us today.

The good news is that we don’t have to live with our ghosts.

For today, take some time to think about what people have said about your writing and ability, either positive or negative. Do you agree? Are you satisfied with those observations and judgments? How have those opinions defined you? Have they held you back from trying something new?

Sit with those answers a bit, and then also take some time to accept and appreciate where you are on your creative path. Show some love for your strengths and successes, as well as your weaknesses and failures. Examine without judgment where you are today and celebrate this moment in time.

This might not be easy for you, but let me give you a tip: Right now, someone is looking at you and whatever you’re doing and where you are on your journey, and they admire you. They want to get where you are. They want to be like you.

And here you are, already doing it.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them. Need more content? Join my mailing list!

When I write about the ugly voices in a writer’s head – as I did last week – it is almost always because I am dealing with one in the moment or am anticipating a visit sometime soon. If I submit a harangue about dealing with personal demons, it is not out of the goodness of my heart. It’s pure self-defense.

Writing is great exorcise.

One unfortunate comorbidity of ugly voices is the desire to place blame. And there is plenty to go around. The voices aren’t ephemeral. They existed in our past and I bet they sound like someone you know, someone who was supposed to embrace and encourage you. If not their actual voice, you hear the syntax and rhythm of people who discouraged, insulted, ignored, or undermined you.

When it would have been kinder – and less work – to lift you up, these voices decided to kick your legs out from under you. It’s easy to blame them for the opportunities we missed or when we feel ten (or thirty) years behind where we should be. If only they had…If only they hadn’t…

But what if you decide that you don’t need what that person withheld? When you sit down to write and there’s no one but you and a laptop or pen and paper, what else do you really need?

• Do you really need your family’s encouragement before you can write?
• Do you need your friends to read your novel?
• Once you’ve paid your bills and tidied up the house, do you need anyone’s approval of how you spend your time?
• Must you have a conversation with someone whose eyes glaze over when you talk about your work?
• Do you need that company in your head?

You don’t need any of those things. Are those nice to have? Yes, absolutely, and if you are lucky enough to have any of them in your life, stop what you’re doing right now and express your appreciation.

But if you don’t? Join the club.

For years I believed other writers and artists had supportive families and hordes of artsy friends who loved talking about their work and tons of collaborative opportunities and spouses who volunteered to cook, clean, and watch the kids so they could have time to create, while I – the turd in the punchbowl of life – struggled on alone.

This was both melodramatic and untrue. Nearly every writer I know has experienced indifference to their work, if not outright negativity. Yes, you will encounter writers who have loving parents and spouses who pay the bills and a circle of supportive creative folks but they are not to be trusted and should never be invited to our gatherings.

I once read a comment that gave me a different perspective on being loved as a writer. A new novel by Stephen King can be expected to sell north of 1 million copies in the United States, a rare feat that we’d all love to duplicate. However, given that the US population sits around 330 million, there are at any moment approximately 329 million people who don’t give a single shit about a new Stephen King book, and that’s just in one country.

Yes, that’s still a pretty good problem to have, but ask: Does SK spend a lot of time thinking about those 329 million people? Does he write for them? Is he trying to please them? Does he fret about their opinion of him? Does he wonder why his books sell a million copies but not two million?

He does not.

If Stephen King can ignore the indifference of 329 million people and numerous critics when he sits down to write, there’s no reason we can’t do likewise, even if we have to discount an extra million people, give or take.

We can get by without someone to prop us up. And I’d argue that when we let go of what we don’t need, the voices in our heads have a bit less power. They are still demanding, but when they show up to harass or withhold, their volume is lower.

Those voices are selling something we don’t need. Close the door in their face.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them. Need more content? Join my mailing list!

A bit late for Independence Day, but I came across this quote from James Clear (Atomic Habits) and thought it a concise summary of how easily writers can become trapped in uncreative thinking and how as easily we can free ourselves.

“When I notice myself worrying about ‘what other people will think,’ I find I’m usually not worried about any single person’s opinion.

If I pick a specific person, I’m rarely concerned about what they will think. What I fear is the collective opinion in my head. It’s imaginary.” –  James Clear

This is a fantastic insight. Writers are prone to worrying about what other people think about their work. Naturally, we want to deliver quality work and please our readers, but so many of us twist ourselves into knots trying to anticipate how people will react to each jot and tittle.

We worry what our family will think about a steamy sex scene or whether our friends will think badly of us if one of our characters kicks a dog. Writers known mostly for light romance novels worry if their readers will “be ok” with them writing a science fiction novel. Series writers fret about writing a stand-alone novel instead of the next book in their series, even when they are sick of writing in that story world and need a break.

It’s all in our heads.

If you have a reader base, a few might be disappointed that you wrote something different than what you wrote before, but most won’t care and many would encourage you if you asked. And as far as friends and family are concerned, you should be so lucky that they read your story or novel at all. I’m not sure mine know I can read, much less write.

The time to care about your reader is at the finish line. Have you done your best work? Have you put everything the reader needs on the page and taken out what they don’t? Do you have a coherent story with consistent internal logic? Did you convey the message you wanted, create the right tone, and evoke the emotions you wanted the reader to feel? If not, back up.

But when you are choosing your projects, creating your characters, developing your theme, or working out a difficult or complicated emotion, you are free to not GAF about your reader. No one else should pick your genre or tell you which characters intrigue you. No one gets to tell you what you should care about or what message you want to discuss. Those are for you. Those are your gift.

Worrying about what other people think is a waste of time, and you’ve probably guessed wrong anyway. And anyone who does judge you based on a morally ambiguous character or explicit sex scene or your incorrigibly foul language isn’t worth your time. If we all worried about the opinions of trolls, no one would ever create anything, anywhere, which is exactly what trolls want.

Of course, for many creative people, a bit of healthy concern about collective opinion is rational. We live in an era where the right circumstances – something said by the right person at the right time – will arouse the mob. This is particularly true when the target has a platform large enough for others to notice and – importantly, in my opinion – envy.

What modern life lacks in pitchforks and torches, we make up for with doxxing, shadow-banning, dog-piling, and deplatforming, and that’s when we don’t skip directly to stalking and threats of physical violence. The mob loves to raise people up and then knock them down a few pegs, if not all the pegs. Throughout history, humanity has had difficulty imagining any stations between Madonna and Whore, and online culture is no different. We love or we destroy, or as is common, we love and then we destroy.

Creative people should oppose these IRL demons as strongly as we fight those in our heads. It’s easy to join the outraged crowd mobilizing against the online Villain du Jour, but one day the mob will turn on someone you admire or care about. Stick your head up high enough and they might even find you, and then you’ll discover how well the people you believed were your friends can resist popular opinion.

It is also my experience that those most comfortable shaming others are the worst kind of people and have more than enough of their own sins to wash. It’s the classic behavior of the abuser – accuse everyone else to distract the world from noticing what you have done. None of us are pure white, but often the loudest shaming voices have the worst kinds of behavior to hide. I learned a long time ago to be wary of anyone wielding morality as a cudgel. There’s a reason we joke that anyone who hates gays is a closet case.

You don’t have to like everything a person says or believes. You don’t have to agree with anyone’s business decisions or how they vote. You don’t have to buy any writer’s books. You don’t have to be silent in your disagreement. But as writers, we should all fear a culture that casually punishes anyone for words, whether written or spoken aloud or tweeted.

If you fear being judged for your words, fear as well judging others for theirs. Either we all have our freedom of speech and expression, or none of us do.

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

Need more content? Join my mailing list!

A quote for your weekend.

Make-believe partakes of the nature of a magic ritual. We not only pretend to be what we are not, but by staging our pretense, we strive to conjure and bring into existence a new genuineness. The strange thing is that often this conjuring act succeeds and we become what we pretend to be. – Eric Hoffer

This is the greatest trick of the creative soul. We envision the person we could be, the art we could create, the stories we could write, the roles we might assume, the music we might play, long before we are able to bring them into being. Our early efforts do not reflect the fullness of our vision.

In time, however, the act of make-believe refines and perfects our ability to create. Our work emerges and we become who we are supposed to be.

The quote originally appeared in The True Believer: Thoughts on the Nature of Mass Movements by philosopher Eric Hoffer, in which he examined how mass movements arise to challenge the existing social hierarchy.

The quote appears here via an epigraph in A Time of Youth: San Francisco, 1966-1967, a collection of photography by William Gedney, which was unpublished in his lifetime. Gedney curated the maquette in the late 1960s but was unable to find a publisher before his death from AIDS in 1989. Some fifty years later, the executor of his artistic legacy was finally able to bring the project to life.

None of Gedney’s work was published in his lifetime, but in assembling his collections of photography, he engaged in the kind of make-believe that eventually conjured up something magical – work that came into being and continues to thrive years after his passing.

_______________

Know anyone who’d like my blog? Please forward today’s post! I’d love to hear from them.

Need more content? Join my mailing list!

This is an awkward week to return to blogging with a post called “Embracing the Future,” but the dismal state of American politics aside, every day is a good day to become the self you wish to be. Our collective future may rely on forces beyond our control, but we still have the chance to direct our own.

Lately – meaning the past year or two – I’ve given myself permission to be the writer I always wanted to be, someone who wrote every day and talked to a community of writers and finished manuscripts. Not every project has borne fruit, but I haven’t given up. I’ve kept studying and digging and working, and I’m having fun and feeling more fulfilled, despite what anyone else may or may not see. I’m closer to “becoming” than I’ve ever felt.

Permission is often overlooked as an element of the creative mindset, but it’s especially important for writers. Unlike singing or playing an instrument, no one can hear us practice. Unlike physical arts, it’s difficult to show the work in progress. And the end result requires effort from the audience. No one will ever accidentally read your story, the way they might hear a new song or glimpse a painting. We need to give ourselves permission to ask for their attention.

I struggled with this for a long time. I found it impossible to turn down invitations, lest they dry up. Asserting that “I’m writing a novel” sounded pretentious. I never lit on a concept cool enough to satisfy what I imagined others wanted from me. I never made the jump from “I want to be a writer” to “I’m a writer.”

Strangely enough, it was my non-creative job writing that helped me get past it. A number of years ago, I was a news writer specializing in U.S. federal government policy and financial matters. I entered that job cold. I had zero background writing government news, but I’m a good writer and soon my intermittent gig work turned into a parttime contract job which turned into a fulltime hire. Still, even after several years in the role, I never considered myself an expert on any of these topics. I’d never worked for the government, never written policy, never managed a contract. I reported about people who did those things, but I wasn’t one of them.

But one day, an executive tried to convince me that I was an expert. I read and wrote in my field 8 hours a day. Nearly half of my job was reading and digesting policy, regulations, and law, and the other half was reframing it for our audience, none of whom had the time at work to keep up with the amount of information that comes out of government on a daily basis. I never had to put any of these rules into practice, but few people in our industry spent as much time as I did keeping track of them.

It took some convincing, but eventually, I started writing more analysis and white papers. I wrote predictive articles making connections between congressional action and eventual regulation. I’m not too humble to brag that I hit a few home runs with the C-suite.

It started with giving myself permission. I accepted that I was an expert in my field and started writing like it. And it felt amazing. I carried that permission with me when I started a podcast that blended news and analysis and when I changed jobs and began writing about niche government contract law, neither of which I’d done before.

Eventually, I gave myself that permission in my creative work and on this blog. I still struggle with it. I question why I should blog about writing topics, with my scant publishing resume, but then I remind myself that I read in my field every day. I research. I study. If that was good enough for federal law and regulation, it’s good enough for a topic I actually care about.

In a recent episode of her podcast on DIY MFA, Gabriela Pereira talks about acting “as if” as a way to overcome creative doubts and accomplish our greatest work. She differentiates “as if” from “fake it ‘til you make it,” noting that none of us are faking it. We’re not frauds. We may not have reached the fully creative state that we envision. Maybe we aren’t writing consistently or our skills aren’t as developed we’d like. Maybe we don’t have the audience we want. But we are still writers. And to realize our creative visions, we don’t have to fake it. We can act as if we are already living the creative life we desire.

Writers write, even amid distractions and especially when they don’t feel like it. Writers share what they’ve learned, even if they haven’t mastered the lesson. Writers talk to and appreciate the audience they have, even if they have closer to 20 followers than 20,000.

If you’re struggling with imposter syndrome, give yourself permission. Ask yourself what you’d be doing if you were the bestselling writer or popular game developer or beloved poet that you imagine and then do those things. Write. Start your blog. Record a podcast. Talk about your work. Offer to help someone else.

You may have a reason why you shouldn’t. Do it anyway. Act first and let your mindset catch up. Eventually, you’ll forget why you made all that fuss in the first place.

Who am I?

After yesterday’s post recommending one of Alan Moore’s short story collections, let’s keep on the theme with this quote from one of my most-admired writers.

“It’s not the job of the artist to give the audience what the audience wants. If the audience new what they needed, then they wouldn’t be the audience. They would be the artists. It is the job of the artists to give the audience what they need.” – Alan Moore

I imagine this quote would cause quite a stir in most writing circles, particularly those social media groups focused on helping writers connect with audiences and promote their work. Among that set, the only job of the writer is to give the audience exactly what it wants. Else, the story goes, the audience will find it elsewhere.

And this is true, if you believe the most important work of writing is sales. If you have sold a few thousand copies of your fantasy-romance novel and developed a following, then the next sensible step is to write another fantasy-romance that hits similar notes to the first and then make its existence known to the same audience that enjoyed the first one. Audiences love experiencing what they’ve already sat through. Hollywood certainly knows this, as do most genre authors.

The downside to this approach is that your audience’s expectations rapidly evolve into audience demands. Now that you’ve written two – or three or eight – stories in a similar vein, you risk alienating your readership if you venture into a new genre or write a story with a markedly different tone. Spend time on any social media platform and you’ll cringe at the sense of ownership and entitlement many readers have on their favorite authors. A woman scorned has nothing on a reader who’s stumbled upon content not molded to their exact tastes. Follow any group of writers dedicated to the hustle and you’ll find many employing multiple pen names, under which they write in different genres and engage with different readerships. Author as split personality.

On the other hand, if you believe that the important work of writing is art, then you have the freedom to experiment and explore. You have the opportunity to communicate, persuade, convince, and philosophize. Ideally not heavy-handedly, but yes, I said philosophize. If you wish to create art, you are likely bored by the very concept of audience wants. It wouldn’t occur to you to write something made to order.

Regular readers will know on which side of this question I fall. To paraphrase Lucille Bluth, I don’t know what the audience wants and I don’t care to find out.  However, I will take Moore’s concept a step further: The job of the writer is to give the audience what you want, and to write what you need to write, whatever that means to you and however you wish to go about it.

We need to escape the mundane world and explore distant planets or magical times. We feel called to share what we’ve learned about grief and rage and love and forgiveness. We need to explore the ugliness we see in ourselves and our confusion and conflicted desires. We want to talk to others who are experiencing what we’ve already lived through, and let them know they are not alone in their feelings. We may want to argue our political ideas and assert the dignity and value of people like us.

As in Voice of the Fire, maybe you want to play with language and challenge yourself to convey your ideas within the constraints of your rules. Did Alan Moore’s audience want a short story narrated by a Stone Age halfwit with no written language and a 1200-word vocabulary? Doubtful. But also, did they need one? Also doubtful. But Moore wanted and needed to write it, and he likely found a few thousand or more readers challenged and fascinated by the outcome.

You are your most important audience. Write what you want. Say what you need to say. You decide. Let the audience come to you. You are not to be owned.