“How long has it been since you wrote something?”

“For work purposes or?”

“For yourself.”

“Oh man, it’s been… it’s been a while.”

“How long?”

“About two months?

“Since I finished the thesis, it just feels like I’m all out of words to say.”

“It’s been 8 years for me.”

How do you create content that’s read, prolifically?

I’ve been haunted by this question ever since I became vividly aware of audience participation. Or, I guess, the lack thereof. Writing solely to be read by lots of folks holds a lot of pressure, and it rarely leaves space for creativity.

So perhaps, the question is: How do you create content for yourself?

I don’t think you can. We’ve been trained to write for others, to write with a graded purpose, ever since we learned how to hold a pencil. 

Diary entries and scribbled musings in the corners of well-loved books come closest in terms of content created for myself. That too, though, reads as childish and petulant as I read back - I don’t look back at “today Luis said hi to me in the hallway and I thought I was gonna die” with fond memories. 

How frivolous, I think now, that I cared so deeply about gaining approval from a singular person more than anything else in the world. 

So perhaps, this is the wrong question too. 

All writing is done for an audience. But I feel the issue arises when we get too stuck in the state of caring what that audience might think of it. (Depression is already THAT bitch, so let’s not give her another reason to keep us in bed thinking late at night or sleeping late in the day.)

So, let’s make art for art’s sake. For the sake of having done it. Just to check something off your to-do list. Not because it gives you some higher-than-life feeling when someone clicks a button, but because it’s fun! It makes you happy! IT MAKES YOU HAPPY. Joy, in this world of seemingly infinite sadness, is precious. So curate it, with your words and pictures and voice and art. Create it and put it out into the world. Write that story. Finish the work in progress.

Just publish this piece, Hersh, you’ve edited it enough now.