Storytelling
Why I haven’t Been Writing Stories Lately
“If you bring forth what is within you, what you bring forth will save you. If you do not bring forth what is within you, what you do not bring forth will destroy you.” From the Nag Hamadi Gnostic Gospels, Gospel of Thomas
This was in my morning readings this morning. I kind of took it personally.
For 8 years, on a fairly regular basis, I brought forth what was within me through story-telling. Initially, I posted most of my stories on a now-nothing-more-than-a-library-of-stories place called Cowbird (www.cowbird.com), until they shuddered their cyber-doors to any new stories early in 2017. Then, I kept my storytelling going here on Medium, initially exclusively on The Story Hall, then for a time, on as many as 20 different publications I’d discovered here on Medium.
From the beginning of this story-telling journey, I’d learned to just sit down, usually first thing in the morning, and simply start writing. Don’t think about it first, don’t decide what I’m going to write about — just write! I wrote whatever came up, usually in the form of a story, though I occasionally veered off into poetry. During those first 5 years, I wrote every day — I posted over 2,000 stories and close to 1,000 poems — the poems I mostly posted at a site called AllPoetry, although when I really liked one I’d created there, I’d also post it on Cowbird.
I took the closing of Cowbird pretty hard. There, I didn’t even have to think about it, when it came to writing. I was like a fish in familiar waters, just swimming around and enjoying all the other storytellers there, loving their turns of phrases, their stories, the perspectives they lent to my own, the glimpses into their lives their stories provided. For this writer, it was as close to perfection as one could find, in terms of writing communities and a creative haven that I totally thrived in.
After fighting with everything I had to try to convince them to keep it open, or to at least allow us to use the code they had applied to create “the most beautiful place to tell stories”, I finally surrendered — I had no choice. They closed it up to new stories on March 1, 2017. So, I sauntered over to Medium, where I found a few of my fellow Cowbird refugee storytellers at The Story Hall. Here, I continued to tell my stories. I never did get back to my daily habit that I had cultivated on Cowbird, but I wrote regularly enough to quench my writer’s thirst.
Eventually, I ventured outside of the Story Hall to discover there were many other fine storytellers on other publications in Medium. That was probably the hey-day of my time on Medium, that discovery of so many other talented story-tellers, and branching out to post my stories on other publications. Like Cowbird had been for me, it became a very interactive process, and I was energized by many new storytellers.
For me, that “hey-day” ended when they started paying people to write their stories. This is not a judgment, just my own experience with it. I resisted putting my stories “behind the paywall” for a time, but then I learned that the only way to get a story curated, which opened it up to more readers, was to submit it behind the paywall. So, I finally succumbed, and began writing for money.
That changed everything. While I did get swept up in the daily checking of my stats, and the desire to earn more this month than last month (I improved my earnings every month for 6 straight months, there!), one day I woke up and said, “No!!! THIS is not why I write!”
I looked honestly at my stories over the previous couple of months, and did not like what I saw. I was writing to the money. Writing what sells. I was reading entirely too many of those “How to” stories, picking up tips on what got more hits, what got curated, and I’d started writing in a style that sold. I felt like I was selling out. So, I simply stopped. I stopped posting new stories behind the paywall, and I pulled many, though not all, of my previous stories from behind it.
I didn’t want to write for money. If anything, that took me further away from that sense I’d had on Cowbird that I was part of a dynamic, creative community of writers who enjoyed each others’ stories, supported each other, where the writing had just flowed. No longer did I feel like I could just sit down in the morning, start writing without thinking about what I would write about, and wind up with a piece I could feel proud of, knowing that people were going to read and enjoy it. It felt too much like work. I have a job. I didn’t need to be writing for money.
Then, what I discovered was, my readership fell off, considerably. My stories couldn’t get curated if I wasn’t putting them behind the paywall. I kept going, every now and then sneaking one behind there, because I wanted more people to read it, but then feeling guilty about it afterward, even after it got curated. It just wasn’t the same.
And, the community had changed, as well. Everyone, it seemed, became obsessed with the stats, with the earnings, or lack thereof, and a very sickening “entitled” attitude seemed to pervade the entire Medium storyteller psyche.
I couldn’t got all riled up about the latest thing “they” had done to affect the earnings, because I wasn’t here for that. I very much felt like I was on the outside looking in, but I didn’t want to write about that, because everyone else, it seemed, was “in”. I like a lot of the writers I’ve met here — I didn’t want to cast disparaging views on what they were doing. I knew, for a lot of them, writing here was how they were surviving. That’s a whole different ballgame.
Eventually, this conflict dried up my desire to write my stories on Medium. I got tired of reading yours. Even though there were still plenty of gems out there, great stories that had nothing to do with all of this, it got harder and harder to find them. When the pandemic hit, I wrote a few stories, and then I just stopped. The joy I’d once found in writing was gone. I could no longer “fake it ’til I make it.” I just didn’t feel like writing anymore.
I found it most important to occupy my time, while hunkered down in quarantined isolation, on meaningful things, things that kept me focused and as happy as I could manage to be, despite the chaos swirling all around, despite the physical isolation.
I stepped up my game in the 12 Step communities I’ve been a part of, and began to sponsor more people. That wasn’t really a choice on my part — as I got around to more meetings, around the world, which became easy to do on the Zoom platform, where a majority of the meetings gravitated to, I came into contact with more people, and if someone asked for help, I couldn’t say no. This, more than anything else, has helped me to keep a sane and level head through these tragic times.
I really didn’t feel like writing about the virus, or quarantine, or surviving it all, because everyone was writing about that. When it comes to writing, I only want to write if I feel like I have something meaningful to offer, that hasn’t already been said. I didn’t feel like I had that, so I didn’t.
Then, I stumbled onto that quote in this morning’s reading. Instead of playing Game 3 of a 162-games schedule by my former home team, the Pittsburgh Pirates, in their championship season of 1971, on my Strat-O-Matic baseball board game — I took the time to write this. The 1971 Pirates can wait.
Yes, I’ve already played about 140 games of the 2019 season, and 80 games of the 1964 season — that was the year I first started seriously following baseball, and also the year that I first played Strat-O-Matic Baseball with my childhood friends, Pete and Jake Kribel. Pete killed himself some 15 years or so ago — sometimes I imagine playing the game with him. It was what connected us, baseball, and Strat-O-Matic. Weird, I know — but that’s me.
It’s a cards-and-dice game, with the cards based on the players’ real season statistics, the dice determining the outcome of each play, a fascinating game to a diehard baseball nerd like myself.
This is how I have been dealing with the lack of a major league baseball season to at least lend an air of normalcy to these times. It has helped, more than you know. Game 2 of the 1971 season was tremendous — Willie Stargell belted 3 homeruns, drove in 6 runs, and scored another 4, as my Pirates crushed the Phillies, 13–4. Now that this story has made it’s way onto the page, I think I’ll go see what happens in Game 3 — it’s the Pirates vs the Atlanta Braves, with Henry Aaron, et al.
Play Ball!
