On relevance

Last week I went to You Are The Media’s Creator Day where the theme was ‘relevance’. I’ve been thinking about relevance quite a bit recently so it was a serendipitous topic.

The first speaker, Phill Agnew, had walked 60km to Poole to speak. He didn’t have to of course. There are many quicker, and easier ways to travel. But Phill’s decision to go on foot was relevant to what he had to say.

Then Steve Folland, from Being Freelance, spoke about how to keep going. How do you stay relevant to your audience, but also develop something that feels relevant to your life, that you want to continue doing?

Relevance is a question I keep coming back to as I ponder the value of activities that mean something to you but no-one has asked you for. How do you get others on board? Does it matter if you don’t?

This month I made a magazine. I realised I had written quite a lot over 6 weeks and I wanted a different way of presenting it. Re:writes has a very small number of subscribers (hello! Thank you so much for being here) and I was wondering how to get the articles I had already written in front of more people. But also I like a challenge, was proud of the work I had done, and wanted a way to showcase it. I hadn’t put a magazine together on my own since I was a teenager, when you would print off pages and stick them together, before getting them printed. So I had the joy of learning how to make a ‘modern’ publication in Canva – and the inevitable moments asking myself why I was doing this when something took a long time or wouldn’t do what I needed it to.

No-one asked for a magazine. I didn’t have an audience for it. But I wanted to make it and got a lot of pleasure out of the experience. I was pleased with the end result, even if any of my former subeditors would have looked critically at it and found things which weren’t professional. I’m not a designer and I wasn’t pretending to be. I just wanted to collate my work.

Re:writes is a personal blog and it breaks all of the blogging rules I tell other people. It doesn’t focus on a particular topic. It is topical, not evergreen so many of the posts aren’t relevant a week later, let alone a month later so resharing them regularly doesn’t make sense. I don’t write about trending topics, or on issues people are searching for. It’s eclectic. It’s purely an opportunity for self-expression and I hope people enjoy what I put out.

And periodically, like all creators, I ask myself what the point is.

Does it matter if only a few people read an article?

Or is the point purely to be creative?

So how do we get people on board with passion projects?

Phill, who hosts the Nudge podcast, which shares evidence-backed tips, said there is a 45% increase in click throughs when people see the effort you put into achieving something. He also said you make more sales if you share how much you enjoy what you create. How often do you talk about how much what you do brings joy to you?

Steve said having diversions can help with keeping going. This blog is a diversion of a sort. It has nothing to do with my business but it’s enjoyable and gives me the opportunity to write things I want to say that don’t fit anywhere else.

Is re:writes relevant?  I write to think so the writing benefits me, regardless of whether anyone reads it.

There are so many things I wouldn’t say if I didn’t have this as an outlet.

A couple of months ago I heard an interview with screenwriter Russell T Davies about Queer As Folk. He said: “It was missing. That’s your job as a writer, to look at what’s missing. What’s not on? No-one else here? Marvellous!”

It’s not a case of build it and they will come. You need to find your people. But if something matters to you, chances are, it matters to other people too. However, if that doesn’t happen, it doesn’t mean what you’re doing is any less valid.