If You Need an Audience All is Lost! (or it may be a little more difficult)

by Chris McGinty of AccordingToWhim.com

I was reading a Twitter post of a frustrated writer. She expressed that it felt useless. I wrote this as a reply:

“Careful what you say. A little green dude will appear and make you pull your X-Wing out of the swamp with your mind.

Take a few months to write without expectation. Call it a learning and exploring time. I have the most fun writing when I’m just playing and learning.”

Ok, part of that was silly, but part of it I felt might be helpful.

Later, I saw that Christopher Mance II had written a blog post, and it was right along those lines.

I’m becoming more aware of the impatience that many of us feel, especially where online notoriety is concerned. I saw an odd post that I’m going to have to paraphrase here, because I didn’t comment. It was something like, “Why can’t I be famous already? I hate capitalism.” I wanted to reply something rude like, “Tell me how you feel about capitalism when you are famous and they want half your paycheck in taxes to pay for social programs,” but I was good little tweeter and kept it to myself.

I get it though. I was expecting hard work, but I really thought I’d be closer to the age that Neil Gaimen broke through than the age that Jean M. Auel broke through. I’m impatient even at this moment to see some sort of progress in the land of internet publishing. I’ve been involved in a public access show turned YouTube upload since the early 90s. We’ve had a website for nearly two decades. We have an audio show that will be celebrating 21 years (Blackjack Anniversary here we come!) in January 2020. We’ve published a card game. Nathan published a short story in an anthology. I write something daily 99% of the time. Strangely, I’m ok with capitalism. But that’s off the subject.

I think that the struggle for fame is particularly frustrating, because it doesn’t really seem incremental until later, and even then it’s somewhat an illusion. Take a game as big as Magic: The Gathering, and they’ve even seen years of player decline (though maybe not recently). It just doesn’t hurt them as much, because they still have millions of players. When you have three people intermittently reading your stuff, and one of them drops out, and you didn’t even know they were reading to begin with… it’s frustrating.

I will probably always be of the opinion that if you’re creative only for the audience and the money, you’d be better finding something else to do. Writing takes time. Writing can be lonely. Sometimes what you write isn’t even any good. And guess what? If you become famous as a writer, people will still expect you to write. If you just want the quick money to retire, do something else.

If you find yourself booting up your computer or your phone frequently, because you need to get some thoughts down, or if you feel the push from time to time to just spend a few hours thinking, planning, editing, and creating, then enjoy the writing process. Keep writing. Keep releasing your material. But do it for yourself. When you get true fans, they’ll look back on everything you’ve done, and be like, “Why didn’t I find them sooner?” It’ll still be worth it even if it’s years into the future.

Chris McGinty is a blogger who really doesn’t like the idea of a socialist method of choosing who becomes famous. Becoming wealthy never worked with lottery tickets. Why would becoming famous work with a government committee? This week on American Icon.