My favorite book about writing is On Writing Well by William Zinsser. He says:
Soon after you confront the matter of preserving your identity, another question will occur to you: “Who am I writing for?”
It’s a fundamental question, and it has a fundamental answer: You are writing for yourself. Don’t try to visualize the great mass audience. There is no such audience–every reader is a different person. Don’t try to guess what sort of thing editors want to publish or what you think the country is in a mood to read. Editors and readers don’t know what they want to read until they read it. Besides, they’re always looking for something new.
I write for me, mainly. I am the most avid reader of this blog, something that my husband Rick gives me no end of grief about [”Are you reading your blog again?”]. I write for myself because when I try to write for other people, I too often fail to connect with anything important or interesting or good. When I try to predict what other people will think of my ideas and my words and how I link everything together, I am too often wrong. If I second guess my instinct about something too many times, I miss out on what’s significant. At least if I write something that I like, one person is happy. When I write because the ideas link up in my mind then demand to be surfaced and the words sound right and the rhythm good–that’s when it works.
Sometimes the stuff I write for myself is popular with other people and sometimes it’s not. Some of my favorite articles to write that turned out to be popular were these:
- Why Venture Capitalists Are Doomed
- Content’s Divorce from Advertising
- Web 2.0: Orbiting the Individual
- Email: The Good Enough Collaboration Tool
- Five Reasons to Use a Paper To Do List on Web Worker Daily
It’s gratifying and exciting when something that I write for myself rings a bell in someone else’s mind. That’s what separates blogging from simply writing in a diary. There is always the potential you will reach another human being, there is always that hope, and that rush of energy when you succeed.
Some of my favorite posts haven’t been as popular, but they’re still important to me:
- Vacuums and choices (from the Barely Attentive Mother, fortunately archived on the wayback machine). That is my best post about choices and being a woman in technology and buying a vacuum and yet it has only a couple comments, and perhaps no one even linked to it. Still, I laugh every time I read it; to me it’s funny and painful all at the same time. I don’t know that men could really get it–few could understand what it’s like to have a brain capable of 150 mph puttering along at the school zone speed limit of 20.
- Dying from dirty feet and a toothache, also from BAM, summarizing how I felt about living in Maui for a year and a half. It makes me cry to read it now, remembering the pain of saying goodbye to my Virginia friends and neighborhood and school and kids’ teachers and dentist and… everything. Then my sister confesses that she felt like she died after having her baby girl and I so much know what she feels like, I still remember having Henry and disappearing, dying into motherhood.
- Memento Maui — about what remains of my experience on Maui, a painting that hangs on our family room wall in Denver, Colorado. Again, with the theme of death, but with a promise of resurrection this time.
- Why RedMonk, which took me days and days of getting nowhere with trying to capture what was special to me about RedMonk, and then it arrived all at once in the form of a silly Zen saying–it was good, and no one had much to say about it, perhaps because it got lost in the announcement of my joining (err, associating with) RedMonk. But I’m still extremely pleased with it–sometimes it’s only in simultaneously writing for an audience and writing for yourself that you can really understand your own life as situated in a vast web of relationships and action.
Why am I writing this post? Because I want to share some of my favorite posts but also because I want anyone who writes or blogs to know that you don’t have to try to write for someone else to get great value out of blogging. Write first for yourself, and see what happens.
5 Comments
Writing for yourself? I read for myself.
Obviously no?
Chris, I think that the fact that people read for themselves is what sometimes throws off the writing of something. Of course you can’t totally forget that someone else is going to read it–the thing that differentiates blogging from diaries is the theoretical possibility that someone else will read it. But I think you get the most out of reading someone else’s ideas when it really is purely their ideas, not what they think you want to hear.
Couldn’t agree more — see http://daveshields.wordpress.com/2006/09/17/security-through-obscurity/
There is a related observation. My wife has often asked me, “If you are just writing for yourself, why just type up your thoughts and file them away? Why do it in public?”
I have found that for the writing to have meaning to you it must be written for others, in full public view. Somehow you gain an edge by writing on the edge.
That’s also explains in part why I have argued to blog inide the firewall is pointless; see http://daveshields.wordpress.com/2006/10/18/which-side-of-the-firewall-are-you-on-if-you-are-on-the-inside-then-you-are-on-the-wrong-side/
“But I think you get the most out of reading someone else’s ideas when it really is purely their ideas, not what they think you want to hear.”
I don’t think of those as mutually exclusive. But rather than asking myself, “what will people want to hear?”, the questions I ask are, “How can I help? What can I give to people that they can use?” I write only about things I care about and believe in, but I cannot say that I’m simply writing for myself. I am absolutely writing on the blog and in my books for the reader. What might a reader be thinking, feeling, struggling with, frustrated with, curious about, etc.
With fiction or pure opinion pieces perhaps it’s quite different, but with non-fiction and especially communication meant to teach or inspire, I think it IS important to put the reader first in the exact same way we expect companies to put the customer first. I know it’s tricky… but I do think there’s a big distinction between “selling out” by writing what you think people want to hear–and “helping out” by writing what you think people will find useful.
I think I know what you mean and I agree with the overall idea of writing what you believe vs. what someone wants to hear, but I think there’s more to the story…
[sorry it took me so long to actually post this comment]
Kathy - in this case, I agree with you more than me… I think I went a bit too far with my argument and it ran away, or maybe bucked me off like a horse. (Hoping you are doing okay, speaking of that!)
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[…] See, the thing is this. You can try to convince people that you’re something that you’re not, or you can actually be the thing you want. It’s that simple. A number of smart folks back it up, including Fred Wilson (both here and here), the fabulous Anne 2.0, and Matt McCall. The common thread in each of these, for me, is that all really define success against internal measures, not how much money flows to the bottom line. Sure, the money often follows, but it’s not the first consideration in any of these cases. […]