Community and Audience

Recently I realized I have a bad habit of confusing community and audience and getting stuck. Lemme explain.

I’ve had a lot of trouble writing (or programming, or drawing, but principally let’s think about writing for a second), but not for a surfeit of things to write about. Instead it’s been more of a question of “will anyone care about this?” For example, let’s say I finally get back into writing longform fiction. Who’s gonna read it? Well, I guess I could post it here (or like Royal Road or something idk), but I don’t exactly have a following. It’s not like anyone gets a notification when a new post goes up here^[1]. So I’d have to market my work, which would entail me… posting a bunch on Bluesky? I guess? Some discords maybe?

That sounds fucking awful to me. I don’t want to convince people I don’t know to care about the thing I made. What would be in it for me? Lemme tell you, if I was going to ply something as a trade, it definitely wouldn’t be my novel-writing abilities. Plus in the spirit of Mike Cook’s “NO-ONE IS GOING TO BUY YOUR VIDEOGAME”, no one is going to buy my science fiction story. I think going into my creative practice with a mindset of “oh, this is going to be so popular and win me so much acclaim” is a surefire recipe for misery. I don’t even have metrics on this blog, or my other blog, because I think knowing if my writing is “successful” in terms of big numbers is corrosive to my brain.

On the other hand, writing something into a text file and leaving it on my hard drive unread also feels bad. I’ve done a lot of that in my life: I made tiny games that I didn’t quite finish; I wrote fantasy novellas; I’ve even toiled away in obscurity on software with no users just for the pure experience of craft. Let me tell you, I’ve had my fill of it. There’s been a lot of changes in my life since I was a bookish tween with no social outlets, and I think “never finishing anything or sharing it with anyone” is a habit I’m glad to shed.

So, that takes us back to the beginning of the post, with me stuck. I thought “maybe creative collaboration is the answer here,” but my heart wasn’t in it. Writing is a highly personal process for me. I’m very grateful when any of my friends can be a sounding board or a critical reader, but I have yet to succeed at actually involving other people in the process of putting the words on paper. Plus I’m mostly writing when my batteries need to recharge, or it’s a rainy Sunday and no-one’s free. If I need to loop in other people to make the writing happen, it simply won’t.

In retrospect, the solution is obvious(and possibly it was to you from the start, dear reader). Instead of seeking out one way relationships with many strangers (an audience), I should seek out two-way relationships instead (a community). If I wanted to put it in my mangled “leftist theory”^[2] framework, I’ve been thinking about “other people reading my work” in terms of a commodity: I produce something and put it into a marketplace. Maybe I should try thinking of my writing in a more mutual fashion, like a writer’s circle or a similar social space. It’s a lot more work to write something than read it^[3], so it’s totally plausible that you could have a group of people where everyone reads everyone else’s work no problem.

It doesn’t even have to be that structured though. I could just write stuff and send it to my friends. Not to brag but I have two whole standing offers to read anything I write. Social-media irony poison aside, two readers is a lot of readers. By any metric it’s a lot more than zero, for starters. And these are people who I care about, who care about me, and who are themselves writers whose work I read. Without any conscious effort on my part I already have these connections; I bet if I put some effort towards it I could get to three or four people where we have this kind of relationship: I’ll read your stuff, and you’ll read my stuff.

Later, if I actually get myself to work on substantial projects again (and I produce work I’m proud of), I can re-assess. It’s not like I can’t write a bunch of stories and shop 'em to magazines later^[4].

This may also mean less blogging? I think my blog can be a bit of a shortcut, in that I constrain what I write to what fits well in my blogging spaces. Having freed myself to write more ambitious things might mean that I’m less inclined to stay in that box. It could also mean more blogging, like a muscle growing stronger with use as.I write more. It may also mean more posts like this one, which are mostly just me thinking some thoughts and slapping them on the internet.