Has Money Made Me Less Motivated?
I find that I write fewer pieces now that I write for money and the public than when I wrote solely for my friends. Why?
When I wrote for my friend group, I was easily able to make a piece a day for them — especially if it was something that they said they’d like to see or that they’d enjoy reading from me. Now, even though one of the most common pieces of advice is to publish at least one piece a day somewhere to be able to reach people, I find myself struggling to even open one of my drafts.
Why would I be writing less if I knew that I had not only the potential to make money off of it, but the potential to reach a much wider audience?
Engagement
My author bio as of Sept. 4. 2022 is “Come some or come all — and the Author shall tell to you his notes of observation and fiction. Great joy to him an Audience is — oh, the Greatest Joy!”
I wrote it on the very first day I joined Medium because I felt like it accurately reflected why I wanted to be on the platform.
See, Medium, like almost all platforms to publish online, likes to give users the impression their work will be engaged with — that their work will reach human eyeballs, and their human hands will write back to the author, making it feel as though you’ve actually made a meaningful contribution to the world simply by making a Medium post.
This, obviously, is not the case.
Writing my first article on Medium, I had all the hope of a 12-year-old boy uploading their first Minecraft video to 2014 YouTube — I even refreshed the page after an hour to see if anyone had viewed or, better yet, replied to my first piece. This hadn’t happened, and it taught me an important thing about content creation I’d sheltered myself from:
No one has the obligation to read what you write.
When I wrote for my friends, while they engaged and read the piece as they wanted to at the time, the fact it was written by me and I had sent it in our Discord group chat made it clear to them that they had an obligation to read it.
They said good things about my writings — that they really enjoyed the short stories, and that I should genuinely try to get myself published — but it feels artificial in retrospect.
Good work gets read because someone brought it to a reader and they felt they should read it. An excellent work, that all writers would wish to produce, is one that spurs people to read it because it’s profound or entertaining on a level where it’s difficult to not engage and share the work.
I hope that now since I’ve stopped writing mainly for friends and I write under a new pseudonym on Medium (and potentially a few magazines!), my work can begin becoming excellent.
