It's not a living, but could it be?

I recently read a book by an online marketer who has this whole system for supposedly making a living through writing. Definitely, like many writers of all sorts, I’ve got an interest in the idea, but I also have my doubts.

I’ve never tried to monetize any of my online work, and I’ve never had enough of an online following to make it seem worthwhile. I would consider the idea certainly if my content were a bit less eclectic, and that garnered a real following. I figure I would focus on writing about topics related to religion, as that’s my greatest area of interest, but is that marketable?

The idea of writing about religion and getting paid for it isn’t far-fetched; there are plenty of people who do that for a living, even on Substack. It seems like a lot of these people have some sort of formal training, however. I follow Father Nathan Monk, but I assume as a priest, he’s been to seminary. The sort of stuff that I would write about would probably be similar to a lot of what he writes about, and while I don’t believe he makes a living off of writing, he’s got a respectable following, at least.

Anyway, it seems like being more focused would be a plus in having a following. While I enjoy writing on a wide range of topics, and don’t think I’ll stop doing that here at least, I think someone who’s a paid subscriber wants some consistency. I know the few people that I have paid subscriptions for are consistently writing on specific topics I’m interested in. I do follow a few people who are more eclectic like me, but not with paid subscriptions.

So if anyone is still reading, what do you think? Is there an audience out there for an agnostic Christian writing about issues of faith and doubt?

"Process"

I now have over twenty subscribers to my Substack, and it's a bit of a mystery to me, because I believe all of my Substack posts combined have less than twenty likes. I suppose it's not like I've written any Pulitzer Prize worthy stuff, but I do wonder why the subscribers are there. What exactly are they subscribing for?

I thought I would talk about my writing process, because I think it's a little unusual, and that may be a big part of why my writing in general isn't better. Sometimes (I don't think it's happened since I joined Substack) I turn out something really extraordinarily good. When I was in college, I took a creative writing course, and the instructor told me my final piece was the only one out of the class that she thought was suitable for publishing. I was surprised, both because I didn't think it was that great, and because there were works by other students that I thought were quite extraordinary.

But this is the thing--well, two things--about that story. It was a story about caffeine addiction, and it was mostly autobiographical, which is to say, I didn't make much of it up. Secondly, my method of writing it was to drink four large cups of coffee and let myself loose on a ream of notepaper. The story just came out of me like I couldn't contain it.

That's not completely atypical of my writing process for most things I write, except for the caffeine. I don't plan it out, write an outline, make a rough draft, edit and revise. When I know what I intend to write about, it just comes out on paper, then I double check for typos. The advantage of this odd, very personal process is that my writing has a certain rawness to it that I like, and it's very cohesive, because it was something that I could hold in my head all at once. The drawback of this process is that I've never developed the discipline for the longer process of rough drafting and revising that would work for writing that could potentially be greater than what I could hold in my head all at once.

Like most writers, I'd love to write a book, but I could certainly never produce a novel, because I don't believe that I have the creativity to craft a plot of a story longer than twenty pages maximum. I could write a collection of essays, but it seems proper that they would be cohesive to a central topic, and really (obvious to anyone who has read much of my writing) my mind tends to be all over the place.

And then there's blogging and Substack. I don't know what, among the many things that I write about, really interests people. I get few likes and even less feedback, even though one of the main reasons I write is the hope that it will spark dialogue. It's not that I'm really writing for a target audience anyway, as I mostly just use it as an outlet to put what's in my head out there to see what others think. A lot of the time, what I'm about is not giving answers to what is going on in the world, but coming up with questions that I think need to be asked.

Is that really sufficiently good writing? Twenty-odd people may think so, or maybe people on Substack freely subscribe the way some people on Facebook make "friends" with 600 people. I don't know, I just keep writing. Give me feedback sometimes, though?

150! (What do I get?)

This being my 150th post (well, 151st if you count the post I took down a few years ago when I decided it was too personal, which is a shame since it was such a good post) I thought I ought to do something special. Of course it's exactly that sort of attitude of expecting "specialness" that's bound to give me a horrible case of writer's block, and as soon as I started thinking that way, my well of post ideas instantly dried up.

It's really a shame that Google seems to be doing some sort of search blocking, as I can't do one of my old posts where I'd talk about interesting search terms that brought people here. What I can tell you is that my most popular entries are on the 2006 Comic-Con and Milhouse as an internet meme. I guess that's good as the Milhouse one is one my personal favorites.

Maybe the thing to talk about though is that while I do seem to be getting a pretty good number of hits, I don't get a lot of comments. Most of the time, the thing that I'm thinking when I write blog posts (and this goes for my other blog as well) is, "What will my readers think about this?" Of course I have no idea what the answer to that is unless someone posts a comment.

The thing that I really like about the internet is the opportunity for dialogue with people you might not otherwise have a chance to come into contact with. Currently, when I'm not online the only people I really get to talk with are a few old high school friends and people from my current church. Sure, these are all people I do want to have interaction with, but I hate limiting myself. I'm not even looking for agreement; some time ago there was a guy that read through a bunch of my posts and largely gave rather eloquent explanations of why he thinks I'm full of crap; I can easily and honestly say that that guy was one of my favorite commenters!

Maybe what I'm missing is more questions? Maybe if what I'm looking for is discussion, I should end each of my posts with a number of discussion questions. What do you think about the Second Amendment? Have you ever had a serious disagreement with a Facebook friend? Do you have an interesting perspective on the evolution/creation debate? Is this what I'm missing?

Then again, maybe as I suspect is sometimes the case, I may be missing the whole point of blogging. Maybe it's just about generating hits and doing so as simply and uncontroversially as possible. If it is, is that what I really want? Lately I've been playing around with redefining what success means in my life so that it becomes something realistic and yet achievable; how should I really define success in blogging?

You know, maybe one of the things that's especially frustrating for me is that I know a large number of friends and family are aware of the fact that I blog, and yet I get virtually no feedback from them. Maybe that's odd to say since that's sort of complaining the opposite of what I was complaining about three paragraphs ago. Still, why shouldn't I have feedback from IRL people as well? There's something maddening in the cycle of, "Oh, you blog?" "Yes, here's the address!" followed by apparent complete silence from those who feigned such intense interest. (I did have an old friend read my blog and give actual comments recently, and even though it was just a couple comments, it really felt good!)

Anyway, I don't know if I have anything of substance to add to this, so I'll just leave it off now with a few discussion questions in hope that it will spark something. How do you define success in blogging? Do you think that I should expect feedback or dialogue from my blogging efforts? What, if anything, do you like about my blog(s) and what would you suggest, if anything, would improve my blogging?

Writer's block party

It's funny, and I don't know in which sense of the word I mean "funny", but when I was in college, I took a number of creative writing courses, and something that haunts me to this day about them is that I had a large portion of my classmates tell me that I was the best writer in the class. It haunts me because, well, while I do recognize that I wrote a handful of really good short stories in the mid-'90s as I was taking these classes, I've really never written much of anything else since then, at least fiction-wise.

Yeah, I've been blogging, and some of it is probably pretty good, but when you think about being a "writer", don't you tend to think about someone who writes stuff that's more than just a handful of self-published random musings? What I'm saying is that I've always wished I could be a novelist, because it somehow always seemed like writing a novel is something a "real writer" would do. But even back in college when I was getting all this praise dumped on me, it always got to me that however good my writing might be, I'd never written a piece longer than about ten pages. Really, that's only a proper short story because unlike terms like "novel" or "novella", there's no minimum guideline for what qualifies as a "short story".

It's a kind of writer's block for me: I can think of stories, but generally only very, very short ones, and sometimes not even that. Where do stories come from, anyway? It boggles me that there are writers out there with dozens of novels to their names, people who just seem to be a wellspring of ideas that are worth committing to paper and distributing to thousands of readers. How do they do it?

I can barely get a blog post out.

Repeat, repeat, the sounding joy...

Strange how hard it's been to write lately. I don't know if it's that inner editor that always tells you that what you're writing isn't good enough or what, but something seems to have slowed me down.

I've made a few attempts, and some of them pretty good efforts. I had a column by Anna Quindlen making the standard comparison between same-sex marriage and miscegenation laws, which I went on at length about why I feel the comparison works in some ways, but not in most. (Actually, that was one of the times I had a real-life editor questioning the worth of the writing: a friend was looking over my shoulder as I wrote, commenting that if I published what I wrote, many would label me as both homophobic and racist, not that I worry too much about being controversial.) I had a blog meme that I wasn't tagged with, but considered running with it anyway just because it was interesting. I keep mulling over ideas for topics that I've hinted at writing about, but have been afraid of my inadequacy of treating properly. I wrote a half-hearted essay on why, despite the fact that I like Christmas, I have a strong dislike of Christmas carols. I was even attempting to put together a dissection of the comic book Watchmen before the movie comes out, and it was going pretty well, but I started to realize it was a bigger undertaking than I'd anticipated. I may still finish it, who knows?

I was going to finally put something together this week about how I felt vindicated once again due to the fact that I had come across another "professional" writer who was expressing sentiments that I had ranted on at length in the past. Sharon Begley writes (as published in this week's issue of Newsweek) that scientists don't like to change their minds, despite the fact that science is by its nature supposed to be ever-changing. Didn't I write that? Yeah, I did. I realized, though, that there's something ironic in writing such a piece. Not the first one, that was good; I mean writing a follow up piece in which I rehash old ideas and say, "See? I'm totally right!" The whole point (well, a major point) of the column is that people, even scientists, like to be right, and therefore will sometimes have a tendency to belabor old ideas, whether they have merit or not. What's the point in bragging about my own views and showing myself party to the same personality flaws as the scientists I'm criticising? Yes, I have those same flaws--it's human nature after all--but why not just admit it and move on, rather than indulge in non-self-aware irony?

Actually, the final paragraph of Begley's piece has a wonderful bit of irony. A psychologist whose pet theory was that people like to be able to change their minds ended up changing his mind about it! So he changed his mind and decided it was better to not change one's mind. Funny. And cute, as it turned out to lead him to propose to his girlfriend. He was happier making his relationship a more committed one. Maybe science can tell us something about abstract concepts like love after all?

But hey, I was talking about me, wasn't I? I think one of the hardest things for me as a writer is the idea that what I write might not be original. In college, in the middle of an otherwise very fun creative writing class, I wrote a story about a person writing a diary chronicling the collapse of his mental abilities. Upon sharing it with the class, my heart sunk when a classmate said, "This reminds me of Flowers for Algernon." I realized that I had essentially (without meaning to) written essentially a highly inferior version of that classic novel. I hate it when that happens, and unfortunately, it's not a particularly uncommon occurrence. Actually, there's an episode of South Park in which a running joke is that everything one particular character thinks to do is compared as, "Oh, yeah, that's just like that episode of The Simpsons!" The character gets annoyed, but at the end of the episode, somebody points out that after being around for nearly 20 years, doesn't it just make sense that The Simpsons have covered just about every conceivable topic?

The Bible says that "There is nothing new under the sun." (Eccl. 1:9) I think there's real truth to this. As I wrote before, I don't think the Internet is so much a new thing, but a different way of presenting much of the same old stuff the world has had since time out of mind. I have a strong desire to be original, yet I always suspect that I'm unable to write a single thing that has not been written about before. Many of the topics I cover (including this one) have probably been debated back and forth for centuries. How can a single individual manage to struggle to rise above thousands of years of written history and the competing voices of over six billion individuals?

It's funny, though, because when I put it that way, it sounds like a stronger bit of ambition than I in any way intend. I've never aspired to greatness; at least, not for fame and fortune, but only to be the best I can be personally. I don't want to be leader of the free world, but I do want to be an adequate leader of my family. I don't expect to ever win a Pulitzer Prize, but I would like to someday write a book that people will find entertaining. I'm not a great philosopher, but I'd like the things that I write about to be thought-provoking. Are any of these things possible for me?

Can a paragraph end without a question? Maybe.

Still every bit of ambition can potentially be quite daunting. We never really live up to our harshest critics, whoever they may be; of course they often are ourselves. There is a certain sense in which it doesn't matter, both from a pessimistic side and an optimistic side. As a pessimist, I might say, well, I am just one of six billion people, and a lot of them probably have much more interesting things to say, if they wished to say it, and so many more of them are sufficiently like me that my personal experience has nothing to say to them that they don't already know in their own hearts and minds. On the optimistic side, I can realize that with my voice being lost in a sea of voices, failure to truly stand out will simply make me fade into the background, but any moment of excellence that happens to sneak into my writing by accident at least has a chance to be recognized, simply because it's out there. Who cares if my writing makes no difference? To paraphrase the punch line of a Dilbert strip I saw years ago, it's not like we have a limited supply of ones and zeroes.

I suppose what we do have is a limited supply of time, and potentially, I am wasting plenty of mine. How many hours of my life do you suppose I've poured into writing that nobody will ever read? If I'm going to invest that time, I need good reason to think it does have meaning on some level. I think it does.

We all have our personal opinions, and as was said, we like to think that we're right. Am I going to corner some stranger on the street and force-feed them my opinions on current affairs? No, but isn't there some part of human nature that wants to, in a sense, stand up in a public place and say, "Hey, these are my views, and they matter!"? Hopefully, we're also consumed with the desire to follow up with, "...and what do you think about that?" earnestly looking for an honest answer with an open mind. No, the Internet isn't entirely new, but it's a medium by which such interaction can take place in a much easier fashion than ever before. Self-expression? Interchange of ideas? Why should I shy away from such an opportunity? I need to write, and if you needed to read and made it this far, thanks for your indulgence.