Why Do You Write?

Tell me it’s not about appeasing algorithms and making millions.

Nov 23, 2024

We write love letters to algorithms. We write to appease, placate, and conform — our words are music for the masses. We use little words, compose simple sentences — we write a story so palatable even a child could eat it.

We copy and paste what’s fashionable and perhaps change a few words. We are search engine optimizers and title testers. We write what self-proclaimed “gurus” tell us to write without realizing they make money peddling fiction. They’re deft marketers, not artists. They’re a copy of a copy, and for the low low price of $289 we can aspire to be unoriginal too.

Are we writing for a person or every single person because there exists a difference.

We write pietas and throw pity parties about how we’re writing and writing but we’re not making money instead of asking has my work gotten any better? Have we wrenched our reader’s still-beating heart out of their chest? Have we informed or entertained them in a way that’s wholly our own, wholly in our voice? Do we follow a formula? Are we hitching one-night-stands with AI whores and their sullied wares with their promises of we’ll make you smarter, better, richer!

But what they’ve actually done is dulled our edges. Satiated our hunger, our urge to read, write, and write again. Why bother doing the work when the work can be done for us? Why bother thinking when the thinking can be done for us? Why bother leaving a comment when a robot can spit out canned summaries which we then use to feign connection? Not realizing the code for those words were stolen from people who did the work. People who read, wrote, thought. People who believe words matter.

Because there’s a price for simple. Outsourcing our creative heart bears a cost we’ve yet to compute.

I wake every morning terrified that we’re slowly losing something that cannot be regained. And that something is so large, sweeping, and complex we’ve yet to define its shape. Everyone cares about being famous for their writing instead of being good at it. Are we devolving into noise-makers instead of artisans and truth-tellers?

Do we only care about money because there’s never enough of it?

The first words I published were a haiku likening my mother’s voice to thunder. I was in the second grade. In my house my mother was the loudest sound and I spent my childhood swallowing my voice. Writing was an escape, a safe place where I could be loud and bombastic. A space where I could oscillate between anger and hurt without consequence. I was a recluse as a child, spending years in my own head. I preferred solitude, the cleanness of quiet.

Everything I wrote until my early thirties was me trying to navigate the terrain that was my mother. Because no one gives you a roadmap when you’re born. No one teaches you have to read road signs and dodge landmines. How to bear the burden of your mother’s weight as you’re carrying her down six flights of stairs to a taxi to an emergency room where you will sit for hours watching an overhead television play static. All because your mother loved her cocaine more than you.

After she died in 2015, I regretted not asking her this: how did you love and hate me so much? Or, why wasn’t my love ever enough? Or, did you know what you did? Did you ever know?

I retreated to type as a means to make sense of the world as a quiet child who grew into an awkward teenager who would become a complicated, messy adult. At first, I wrote to exorcise and then, after many years, I wrote to bind myself to others. I went from living through this to reflection. I traveled from chaos to calm.

Through that journey, I marveled over the arrangement of words and how those words could transform into sentences to tell stories that put a reader’s heart on pause. I devoured books for writers were my teachers. I re-wrote their sentences, pulled them apart, studied them, and re-wrote them in a way that felt like me. My voice, which had evolved over decades of work.

I knew the kind of stories I wrote alienated people. My style wasn’t mass market. Unlike friends — journalists, editors, freelance writers — who made writing their main source of income (and my main source of envy because I can’t seem to do it), I built a whole career using words to sell things to people. My stories were always this little thing on the side. My books were a hobby because they paid out so little. I had hardcovers and traditional publishers and respectable reviews but I didn’t have fame or bestsellers. I will not be known beyond the grave.

But please, bury my books with me because they’re the one true thing I’ve done.

After decades working in marketing, I retired from it last year. I no longer applied for jobs. I stopped pitching for projects. I ceased writing how-to articles about building brands and businesses because it finally occurred to me, forty years into my life, that marketing was meaningless to me. It was only a means to fund what I loved — writing.

It’s a strange thing to not be tethered to your title or work achievements. To see the people who you mentored surpass you professionally. It took me a long time to realize the cost of retirement. The uncertain income. The lack of a professional community. The awards and accolades. The cringe LinkedIn posts. The realization that the people who once reported to me are buying houses and I haven’t filed my taxes this year because I couldn’t afford my accountant. A woman who once earned a healthy six-figures traded it in for some semblance of peace.

And while the anxiety of bearing the weight of living under capitalism consumes me, at least the sacrifice was worth it. At least I have more time to write at the expense of everything else. But it hurts that I live in a world where the choices are commonplace. Where art is always sacrificed for commerce. Especially if your art is strange and small and doesn’t earn you handsome book deals and essays that garner thousands in income.

I wrote when I was small to save myself from my mother. Now, as an adult, I write to save myself from the encroaching greed of the world. I write to save myself from myself.

Every day someone writes in response to one of my essays: great article, read mine, without realizing there exists a difference between an article and an essay. Without acknowledging a reader’s time and attention are earned, not given. I’ve earned my readership writing eleven years on this platform. I’ve earned my confidence from writing and publishing for decades. No one gives it to you — you have to work for it.

And even then — I’m not a known commodity in the world. I don’t trot out income reports and hock writing courses and my third book has been that project that eludes me. I resigned my agent in 2017 and no one’s clamoring at my feet to represent me. Few people care other than to drop comments promoting their work. Believe me when I say these aren’t complaints — they’re truths, but still I write. Because the results of the work don’t mean as much to me as the work itself and the real connections it cultivates.

I’m awkward and have a hard time writing long comments but I read every single one of them. I get excited when I see the same faces and how they react to my work even if I’m not good with praise but give thanks nonetheless. Because those same faces mean something to me — even if they are strangers because they show up, they’ve decided that my work is worth five or ten minutes of their time. I don’t need legions, I can do with a handful. I don’t need millions, just enough to provide me food and shelter.

Writing is what gets me out of bed even on the days when daylight is an assault. When I hurt because people like me don’t quite fit in with the world and we spend our lives looking for the spaces where we do fit. I write because this one talent of mine gives me joy to hone it, improve on it, work it, watch it grow and transform and change shape.