Reasons to write – what's your motivation?
Why do you write?
Of course, you might not.
While many Substack readers are also writers, it doesn’t follow that everyone is.
When I started writing on Substack, I set out my motivation for choosing this platform:
They were (and are) personal reasons but writing for me has always been public. The first thing I wrote was a magazine for my church choir, then the university newspaper, then articles for newspapers. Even essays had a reader. Someone was going to read what I had to say and get something from it.
That has always mattered to me. Did you enjoy it? Did it help? Did it spread the word about something important?
When I publish something selfish I still look for, ‘how can I turn this into something of value to somebody else?’
Last week’s article was absolutely personal. It was sparked by me watching a TV show and internally screaming, ‘NOOOOOO you can’t end it like that!’
Then I had to think of a reason for someone to read it even if they hadn’t watched the series. I got a bit stuck and ended up publishing this two days late:
‘It’s alright,’ I thought. ‘No-one will read it anyway.’
And my husband reminded me that Substack was there for personal writing and so it was fine that it was personal.
Then Mark Masters from You Are The Media picked it up for his weekly newsletter.
Mission accomplished, I guess. I’d come up with something someone else took value from and thought worth sharing. (Thanks Mark! Very much appreciated.)
But then Mark and I talked about reasons to write. Are we writing for others or writing for ourselves?
Writing for others was my instinctive response. Just as I was about to hit ‘reply’ I stopped and thought: what does that mean?
Are we always writing for others?
How does that shape our work?
Do things go unsaid if we only write for other people?
What ideas don’t get shared?
I explored the impact of algorithms on what we publish in a previous article:
But I hadn’t thought about what I’d write if there was no audience at all.
If you journal or keep a diary then you are not expecting anyone to read your thoughts. (I often wonder about how diarists, whose work is found after their death, feel about them being published. Equally, there are people who share edited highlights of their diaries. Does it affect what they write? How honest with themselves are they? Do they amend what they wrote? Or pretend they didn’t write it?)
But for those of us writing on a platform, whether it’s Substack, our own websites, in emails, or elsewhere, how does the need to deliver something for an audience shape our work?
What would happen if we ignored them?
When Richard Burton played Hamlet in 1964, he experimented with different portrayals of the character. Apparently he thought Hamlet could be played 100 different ways (Wikipedia). You could go on a different night and see an alternative variation.
Now that’s not writing and there was an audience, but it’s still an intriguing possibility.
What limits us is our own stories about what something should or could look like.
If we wrote without thinking about who could be reading (I have no idea who reads these articles apart from subscribers) what would we do?
Would we share more personal opinions?
Would we take off the mask of public persona?
Would we contradict ourselves? (I often think about that one. Am I sticking to a line?)
It’s also a question you don’t ask about other creative mediums so much. Why sculpt / draw / paint that? Because.
Because I wanted to.
Because that was what came to me.
Because I wondered if I could.
Because I like the activity.
Because I wanted to explore the process.
Whenever I worry about hitting publish, I ask, ‘what’s the worst that will happen?’ And tell myself people can unsubscribe (hopefully I wouldn’t write something that would actually get me into trouble).
So: why do you write?
