Stopping the sort and shuffle

A curated garden of content means nothing if nobody gets to consume it. Who are you writing for anyway?

Another morning, another flick between the three current journals I have on the hop. I am looking for something to post, too aware the content is solid. I say too aware because I am flicking backwards and forwards, attracted to my own writing, yet pulled to hold that one back, and that one. Maybe that one too with a bit of an edit.

This is the curse of the writer. Our voluminous trunks of collected works in journals and hard drives everywhere are overflowing. And don’t even ask what’s contained in their bone buckets, for the fleshy folds of brain matter are stuffed full.

Words, concepts, ideas, all layered across each other. All as precious as the last or as boring as the next, depending on the mood.

I am of course one of the worst of them all. I gather like a hectic Womble every scrap and skerrick I can find. Like my overstuffed art room brimming with package-born artistic potential, I swim in lanes and lakes of content. It’s a quicksand. The ideas overwhelming as the itch to write, the insatiable urge to create something, anything, to stop the literary dogs bark, consumes me.

Past the garden of writerly poison bleats the light of scrutiny through the canopy.

“If you do write that, whose the intended audience meant to be?”

Some tart-mouthed middle class marketer inside of me has her arms folded again. She’s collected crib notes from all the naysayers and dissenters. She claims it is a focus group she conducts so I can avoid the inevitable critical pain. She is the manicured, casually dressed woman with her own ambitions and strong opinions. So strong in fact, she can blaze them in the dark chat or over the drinks table at some small bar quite effortlessly to her little posse. Yet oddly, despite the laughs, nodding heads, and knowing glances, has yet found the strength to say them in a useful place or with any useful qualities.

I’m sure she’ll bristle, just a little, when she sees this before she shrugs, takes a mental note and refolds her arms again.

Ever hard-nosed with writerly resolve, the only clique I care about is the clickety clack of the keyboard. Or so I tell myself. Yet, sometimes the loneliness lies cold and syrupy in my belly. But I write that off, as us word-weavers do, as more grist for the mill. So invested am I in getting something, anything out, that I’ve told my ailing arm to shut the hell up and let my head get some relief for a change. And I am swimming and swanning, flipping and failing, to find something to turn to text from pen.

“See?” she says, sipping on a decaf dandelion soy latte, the coffee shoppe equivalent of the ‘why bother’ no less, “If you don’t know who it’s meant to be for, it’s just pure self-indulgent drivel,” exasperated, she sighs loudly, “Why can’t you just write more like me?”

Triggered now and oddly turned on by the use of drivel instead of a far more common yet brutally inaccurate dribble, I find the courage. Or at least an opening line. If I can manage that, I am home and hosed. I’ve wrestled that little sucker and emptied her pockets in record time. Out of the gate, my middle finger is busy hitting the keys with indignation to drown the sounds of her out.

And yes, I know she knows I am meant to write about business. We both know this narrative non-fiction stuff is an acquired taste. She and several other opinionated writers with skin only on their own game have mused I could be stuffing bags of cash into a lorry somewhere south of Imagination Land if I would Just. Stick. To. The. Plan.

But they don’t understand the intense vibration I experience. Or the carping insistence.

They don’t understand that writing is both my most torturous mistress and my sweetest release.

I cannot help that my wordy children roll their eyes at cliches. Or make vomit sounds at some long bloggy six-point bough between a business epiphany and an Instagrammed ham sandwich. They don’t understand the desire to poke every dotted bullet point out of neat blog-shaped alignment. Or slice every sentence top off so it explodes like Gonzo from a cannon instead of waddle with self-assured perfectionism like some uptight English teacher’s fetish.

Not when my brain complains of reading stuff that makes the same impact as sucking on cardboard. When I have to walk away from pointed conversations about AI stealing work proffered by writers whose work is recycled concepts wrapped in conventions so routine, it’s indistinct. Or as I watch people pick and choose exactly where the grey of profitable plagiarism’s ooze becomes just that little too much.

Instead, I write for myself. Alone on this island that sometimes bears commercial fruit but otherwise produces mainly odd-shaped stuff that no bugger seems to be able to sell at the market, I at least pride myself on two things.

1. I wrote today

2. It felt fucking marvellous

It’s a brief reprieve before I am thumbing through tomorrow’s journal pile to do it all again.

Image: a bunch of journals on a shell with the words “who are you writing for anyway?” written on them.