Draft Four: Why write?

Reach, purpose, your relationship to your audience.

41 people received the first e-mail letter I sent in early January. This one goes out to 1.050 of you. I didn't promote or talk about Draft Four, so these are your friends, and the friends of your friends.

I’m grateful. And nervous.

I set out to write Draft Four as a form of disciplined exploration. In the wake of shutting down DoR I didn't have any specific plans, and I felt a drift was coming (I’m still drifting, thank you very much). Writing to schedule is a form of control: every Sunday I can tackle a question that nags me and see where the writing goes.

Sometimes the writing came easily, and the letters became 2,000-word essays. A couple were written just before they were sent, and that was a deadline thrill. Some I sketched out days in advance. Others, like this one, came together sentence by sentence, less out of inspiration and more out of labor.

Most importantly, I didn’t want to write just for myself, or do an extended versions of the daily one-page journal I’ve been keeping for a few years. When I say I’m nervous, what I mean is I want these letters to be meaningful to you. I want them to be useful, to make you think, to not bore you.

If it was easier imagining 50 people or 100 people reading, it’s harder to imagine 1.000. And it’s harder to please 1.000 people.

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Let’s tackle this first: pleasing your audience, or pleasing people in general. I know it’s dangerous, I know it’s not how we derive value, I know the risks it carries of disconnecting from ourselves. I know it might make us do things that contradict our values just for the sake of being loved. I know “you should do you”. I know the risk of allowing fear to speak as truth.

But I want to acknowledge the difference between knowing and doing or feeling. So much of the quotes we share online demand we get rid of all parasitic thoughts, of everything that doesn’t serve us, that blocks “our true self”. We won’t.

It’s tiring to me how much we keep telling ourselves we can’t be perfect, we are what we are, we should love ourselves and so on. It’s tiring because we do all that and then we hope to be the best at being ourselves.

We’re OK with sucking at being perfect, yet we cling to the fantasy that we can be perfect at being imperfect.

So yes, while I know I’m not writing to please you, I also wouldn’t mind if I succeeded. This goes for other things. I know it’s not my role to meet the needs of others, but it doesn’t mean that at times I won’t try. I know it’s not my role to help people through professional dilemmas, but I also want to.

It’s not a question of either/or; it’s one of scale and proportionality. Sometimes you give more, sometimes you give less; sometimes you respond to an audience’s needs and wants more, sometimes less.

Truth is always in the gray area.

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A quote from writer Elena Ferrante has been making the rounds recently. It’s from a Paris Review interview about her work. What is usually picked out, either as text or as an image-quotation is this: “I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.”

Without context, it reads black and white. The anonymous writer of the Neapolitan Quartet doesn’t pander to the audience. Her complete thought is more complicated; I’m including the interviewer’s question as well:

INTERVIEWER: Are you concerned with your readers? Do you care about the effect your writing will have on them?

FERRANTE: I publish to be read. It’s the only thing that interests me about publication. So I employ all the strategies I know to capture the reader’s attention, stimulate curiosity, make the page as dense as possible and as easy as possible to turn. But once I have the reader’s attention I feel it is my right to pull it in whichever direction I choose. I don’t think the reader should be indulged as a consumer, because he isn’t one. Literature that indulges the tastes of the reader is a degraded literature. My goal is to disappoint the usual expectations and inspire new ones.

See the difference? Ferrante wants to tell the stories she wants to tell, but in a relationship with an audience (one she needs to publish). Yes, she wants to shake us up, but she wants to seduce us first. Ferrante elaborates on this tension in her collection In the Margins. She talks about how she became a writer, about how the process was both a necessary labor of learning rules, structures, forms, and of tearing them apart. Of obtaining discipline and drawing boundaries in which she could then let go and be free. Work within conventions only to obliterate them. Order and discipline to get a buy in from the reader; chaos to keep going. She writes:

Maybe what saves me – though it doesn’t take much for salvation to be revealed as perdition – is that beneath the need for order is an enduring energy that will stumble, disarrange, delude, mistake, fail, soil. That energy pulls me every which way. Over time, writing has come to mean giving shape to a permanent balancing and unbalancing of myself, arranging fragments in a frame and waiting to mix them up. Thus the novel of love begins to satisfy me when it becomes the novel of being out of love. The mystery begins to absorb me when I know that no one will find out who the murderer is. The bildungsroman seems to me on the right track when it’s clear that no one will be built. Beautiful writing becomes beautiful when it loses its harmony and has the desperate power of the ugly.

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Young journalists – older ones, too – worry about not being read. Better said: they worry about not reaching enough of you. Will my story reach enough eyeballs? Will I get enough hearts? Will it be shared and posted on stories? It’s our contemporary capitalistic metric for success: how many? Does one’s work even matter if not enough people read it or see it?

When I’m in those conversations my answer usually is: what’s enough? And for whom?

We mistakenly hope for a magic number we can hit that will make it worth it, and make you feel like you had an impact on the world (and this, in return, will make you feel loved). What is that number for you? Are you OK being read by 50 people? Does 500 mean being seen? Do you need 50.000 to feel you’re making a dent in the world? Do you believe work that doesn’t reach 500.000 people is worthless?

I’ve met journalists who say 5.000 readers aren’t worth one’s effort, and who equate large numbers with the intrinsic value of the work (and often with societal impact). It’s what gets inculcated in many newsrooms, especially those with big screens displaying traffic in real time for all to see. Are you topping the charts? The work must matter. Is your story not on there? It probably sucks.

Reach is a skewed and insufficient metric. Not all valuable and impactful work reaches a large audience, and not all work that reaches a large audience is valuable and has impact.

Looking for a right answer to the metrics question is a distraction from a more personal answer. Sure, your employer can define success through metrics, and conversations can be had around quantitative measurements. And yes, as Ferrante says, you must do your best to make your work appealing (and yes, we all probably must work harder on that part than we do right now).

But what’s your number, not your employer’s, not society’s? Yours. Or, if it’s not a number, what’s your metric? Let’s say 200 people read something you wrote, and five reply with beautiful personal notes about what they are going through, and how you moved them.

Is that enough?

I know you might say “yes” and then tell yourself: but I wish there were 2.000; but 200 people won’t pay me a living wage; but 200 people isn’t going to make a difference in the world etc.

It’s OK. Just because you committed to an answer doesn’t mean there won’t be continuous doubts. Or that sometimes life just won’t come together so you can do your thing for 200 people. Or that you’ll be told it’s not enough for you to keep doing it as a job. That doesn’t mean your answer (or your need) is wrong. The question is: do you know what’s enough?

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Two questions I had to answer for myself before sending these out. Why write these and what do I need in return? What’s enough? The first one was about the disciplined exploration I mentioned at the start. The second answer was 41 people to start with, out of which a couple ideally would reply with their thoughts. If they became 200, and five replied, that would be a dream.

So yes, 1.050 is more than that. Thus, the gratitude and the nervousness.

I’m still doing this for me, but that doesn’t mean I don’t want you to enjoy the show. For me, writing is a relationship; I need to reach you to keep writing.

So, at this moment, the exploration and the relationship are important to me. They are my form of enough. They are enough to get me over all the fears I have before pushing send.

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One of my favorite essays about writing is George Orwell’s Why I write. In it, he distills his motivation to four primary needs:

Sheer egoism. Desire to seem clever, to be talked about, to be remembered after death, to get your own back on the grown-ups who snubbed you in childhood, etc., etc.

Aesthetic enthusiasm. Perception of beauty in the external world, or, on the other hand, in words and their right arrangement.

Historical impulse. Desire to see things as they are, to find out true facts and store them up for the use of posterity.

Political purpose. Desire to push the world in a certain direction, to alter other peoples’ idea of the kind of society that they should strive after.

When you write, or when you pursue other creative endeavors, people will tell you there is a certain reason that matters more than the others. I’d say that what matters is your own reason to do it.

“Had I been blessed with even limited access to my own mind there would have been no reason to write”, Joan Didion says. “I write entirely to find out what I’m thinking, what I’m looking at, what I see and what it means.”

We would be better served to tackle this question before we tackle the question of reach.

Why do this at all? Why write? Why create? The sheer number of people following you won’t always provide the motivation to keep going. That comes from what makes you keep doing this.

The reason I’m happy with the number of people who read this – or who read DoR over the years – is that I do it with a belief that even if it reaches one person who needs it, that’s a blessing. Of course, I can always wish for more and try for more, but the motivation is to put something in the world that makes someone feel less alone. The best stories – the imagined ones in fiction, the factual ones in journalism – did that for me. They helped me be OK with who I was, they helped me become, helped me accept my contradictions, help me challenge myself, helped me heal.

Some of those stories were small – sometimes I might have been just one of a handful of people who consumed them. It didn’t matter. I was grateful to the storyteller, writer, filmmaker, musician, artist that sent it out into the world. (Which is why I often write to thank them.)

„Dare to believe that your stories, well told, will touch others”, my mentor Jacqui Banaszynski said in a talk in Romania ten years ago now. “They’ll start as a small plunk, a little tiny drop in an eternal ocean, a second in endless time. They will ripple out, they will reach forward, they will reach backward. They will connect us with our history, they will reach forward to help us create hope. Maybe they will change our understanding of something. Maybe they will show us a new view. Maybe they will challenge what we thought was true. Maybe they will open our minds. Maybe they will touch our souls. Maybe they will change our hearts. I can’t measure that on Chartbeat.”

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SIDE NOTES:

A confession about how this letter came about. I woke up Saturday in a slight panic that I didn’t know what to write. So instead of procrastinating by playing Football Manager, I told myself: you have from 9:30 to 11:00 to try something. I opened a Word document and began with the idea that this is the first letter going to over 1.000 people. Then I remembered the obsession with reach (especially in newsrooms, in marketing etc.). Then I remembered Jacqui’s ideas of stories as ripples made by pebbles tossed in the pond, and how you can’t measure that. Then the Ferrante quote.

You get the idea. Writing begets writing. Writing is thinking. That’s why one of the best pieces of writing advice for me has always been that inspiration will come, but it’d better find you working. I finished and revised this essay on Saturday afternoon, and once more Sunday morning before sending.

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A tip. For a few years now I’ve bought a Moleskine daily planner. I write a page a day. And I followed scientific advice: to make sure the habit stuck, I paired it with an existing morning routine. I wake up, take two vitamins, make coffee, and then write for the 8-10 minutes it takes to fill a page. It’s now become automatic. A few times a year – let’s say I have an early flight – I write later in the day. It’s fine. But it’s a habit; that’s what matters.