Writing is more popular than ever – on computers, on phones and still some of us do at least some of our writing on paper! Emails and letters, books, blogs, op-eds, texts and the opinions formerly known as Tweets, replies, comments and critiques – many are the forms of the things we write.
I remember when I got my first PC back in 1999 when the internet was young, how my first impression was of wonder and joy at the democracy of it all – thousands of people all over the world were posting stuff about their passions populating the web with information in a thousand silos. Businesses had not yet learned the importance of having a website or how to do that in a really useful and appealing way – but never fear – an army of people was developing to create and fill jobs that had not existed before – coders, web designers, SEO experts, and writing on the web was the same. Writing groups – formerly exclusively in-person, moved online, breaking the limitations of time and geography – I live in Yorkshire, England, but I belong to a writing group on the East Coast of America, five hours difference and an ocean apart and as for cultural differences – well that is an added spice… The army that services writers now includes editors, writing coaches, publishing gurus, writing groups, critique groups and even silent writing groups who write in collective silence in Zoom meetings for the shared and mutual support of conducting an otherwise solitary activity – together!
(Russ Martin/FX)
You may recognise the title of this piece as a reference to the TV series “What We Do in the Shadows” based on a New Zealand film – a mocumentary, comedy-horror drama about vampires living in Staten Island and attempting to match the nature of their lives to the lifestyle of modern America. This seems an apt metaphor for the life of a writer. Recently I have been reading “On Writers and Writing” by Margaret Atwood and one of the early chapters riffs on the dualistic idea of “the writer who writes and the writer who lives”. The difference between the writer in the act or process of writing, and the person who lives, eats, breathes and is seen about town. Atwood then goes on to consider the need to actually make a living if one wants to be a full-time writer, for although the truism is that “A writer is someone who writes!”, many of us are therefore writers but few make a living by writing. Many of us do other jobs – lead other lives and writing is only a part of that life – how big a part depends on our circumstances and our choices, how much time we are prepared to “sacrifice” to the words…
If you aspire to write a book, fiction or non-fiction, then it can take years as a part-timer to pass through the process of, research, writing a first draft, finding critique readers or partners, re-writing second or third drafts and all that before you decide on whatever monumentally difficult path you will select to attempt to get your book published. For a vampire, this might be the equivalent of feasting once in a blue moon, assuming you can even find a suitable victim when the appetite is upon you. Meantime, many people select to write more bite-sized portions – poems or blog posts. Substack is one of the latest forums for trying to make these smaller bites feed the writer sustainably. Launched with great fanfare about how it will make writers, if not rich, then at least not starving, and accompanied by helpful articles aplenty on how to drive readers to your site and convert them to Subscribers – Substack is really just a monetised blog with a subscription rather than an advertising models. And why not – how annoying is it when reading a poem on someone’s blog, to have the flow of poesy interrupted by an ad. for “Unsold Holiday Packages Selling Cheap”! And how much do those bloggers who have succumbed to the temptation in fact make from such monetisation – not much I am guessing?
But to return to the writer – whatever he or she might be writing – what drives them if it is not the elusive pot of gold at the ever-shifting rainbow’s end? Is it as George Mallory, on being asked why he wanted to climb Mount Everest, replied “Because it is there!” and, in the event, it was to be the death of him… However, climbing Everest and succeeding as a writer, two things that may feel the same, is not just about attaining the summit, it surely has to be about the travelling hopefully, the moment-by-moment achievement of each stage, step by step, word by word. Summiting might be the dream, but there are rewards along the way and one of those, for all writers other than book authors, one of the rewards is feedback – the comment! Indeed, even aspiring writers of books nowadays reveal their journeys online, one chapter at a time, and like Dickens, who admittedly was getting paid to publish his books in serial form, the feedback obtained from fans, friends and followers of one’s blog, can help to shape and steer the course of one’s writing, or for the strictly amateur, merely be the source of gratification that means one is not writing alone and unheard in the shadows but enjoyed and appreciated – hopefully…
The art of getting more comments does not depend solely on the quality of a person’s writing but on how much work they spend publicising it, in the main by visiting other people’s writing and leaving comments with links back to their own sites and this fosters a sense of community in the wilderness that can be the World Wide Web. On the downside, reading lots of other people’s work can be disheartening as well as inspirational, informative and misleading – you need to have a strong sense of self and direction to find and tune your own voice and little wonder that there is a site called The Insecure Writers Support Group! Sometimes, a blog site itself can be small enough to grow a fellowship of friends – the first site I blogged on with a site called “Ripple”, was called Mo’time – a testbed for the ideas of a man who ran a larger Italian blog site and although thousands were signed up, as people do, like gym memberships, the number who followed through and kept up their writing, was much smaller and so a core of connected writers developed online friendship and appreciation in the comments section. Eventually, tragically, Mo’time, and its parent blog, were sold, and the new owners soon terminated the affair. Some of us tried to create and stay connected with new homes but the magic was gone although I still see some of the Mo’timers on Facebook to this day.
A few years ago, just as the pandemic was getting into its stride, I discovered, on April 1st, the A to Z Challenge in which bloggers post 26 alphabetically named post on whatever subject they care to choose for the month of April. Not having had time to prepare anything in advance, as old hands do, I wrote about aspects of the unfolding Covid crisis and I have now completed the challenge four times on my latest blog incarnation How Would You Know – that is if you disagree with my characterisation of Substack as a Blog… I revived a name that I had briefly tried on Blogger – Of Cabbages and Kings – a line from the Walrus and the Carpenter in Lewis Carrol’s Alice and Wonderland “The time has come” the Walrus said “ to talk of many things – Of cabbages and Kings…” I have to admit, that so far, I have not put the work in to draw readers to this new venture and I am still posting in the parallel world of WordPress and How Would You Know in part because I have hit a certain wall – to borrow a running metaphor. What I like about the A to Z Challenge, is the enormous breadth of writers and subject matter that coalesces each year and to jump into that pool is like an annual swim and sauna from which I emerge refreshed, invigorated and inspired.
If you are writing a novel, you can sit in your garret writing away, the time for reaching out to readers, way off on the horizon, but once you sit down at the Table of Feedback in the Dining Room of Blogs, then your daily output is reduced by the amount of time you spend promoting your posts by reading and commenting on others, just as the published author’s hours are eaten into by promotional tours and there comes a point, which I feel I have reached, where you must pick and choose carefully, which challenges you are going to respond to or else fall into a bubbling vat of writing for comments and commenting for followers and feedback at the cost of your writing enough of your own, of writing spontaneously, prompt-less and fancy-free…
If a person writes something and does not put it out into the world – does that mean that it has no meaning? That it wasn’t worth doing? Is it only when posthumously discovered that it suddenly acquires worth and meaning? Because at the end of the day, a writer must ask themselves “Why do I write?” is it for art’s sake, for the glory of publishing and acclaim and the money that may follow? Be it as humble as a blog post or as grand as a novel, is it to entertain, inform, to fight injustice, to philosophize through non-fiction or fiction – but I say that if you feel the compulsion to write, if you enjoy doing it, you are on the right track wherever it leads…
So if you are reading this on WordPress, you may visit me at Substack here, and if you are on Substack then How Would You Know is here and you can see the edifice I have constructed over the last years – a mind palace with many rooms if you will, and if you like what you find, write a comment in either place and I promise I will respond to it…
© Andrew Wilson, 2023