Why Only Half The Things I Write, I Publish.

I want to write. A lot. I enjoy it — or more accurately, I enjoy the process of sharing information and interesting stories. I also seem to always have a view on a given topic, yet somehow find it hard to translate things into an unprompted piece of writing.

I manage to sit in front of a text editor staring at a blank screen, wondering about words to fill the page with. If you’re reading this, you’ve probably already gone ahead and guessed that this is the oft mentioned “writers block” or an artists “blank canvas” problem, but let me instead jump in and clarify.

It’s not as though I’m at a loss for “things to say” ie. your artist’s “I don’t know what to paint”, it’s that I second guess whether what I’m writing has any value, and why I should be saying it at all. Where does my credibility come from? Who’s my audience, and why should they care? Are they thinking, “does this twenty-something think he knows better than me?”.

They’re all valid concerns I suppose, and since I don’t really have an audience right now, it’s somewhat hard to figure out the best way to approach all of those questions.

It seems as though most blogs/magazines/writers that I’m personally fond of, happen to have some remarkable background or occasionally a ‘rising out hardship’ story that gives them a free ticket to offering advice to the rest of us mere mortals.

My situation has never been notably difficult, I’ve never been unhealthy, I’ve never had to swim across an ocean to seek refuge and I haven’t lived long enough to have endless stories to tell. On the other end of the spectrum, I don’t have an insight into the high-life or what it’s like to “have made it”, so I don’t have the option of letting people into that world either.

For some reason though, I still feel as though I have things to say, things that a small (maybe large) group of people could find of interest. I’m sure Seth Godin would think there is.

Maybe not having the colourful backstory takes away the alienation the rest of us have from these caricatures of people that typically append an article with their authors bio, and a growing readership will instead value the commonness of our shared normality?

I have a feeling that a lot of this background noise in my head is found in plenty of others too. I’m starting to think that the internal dialogue should be drowned out by the sound of keys bouncing up and down, and that the rest will sort itself out in the end. That the lack of an established readership is a privilege in that I can truly write what I want, and a growing audience that discovers and stays along for the ride is here because they’ve already answered some of those questions for themselves.