Writing for you or writing for your numbers: The battle between yourself and your audience
Did you all see that SNL skit the other day, about a college student who changes his major from pre-med to creative writing and then ends up being a terrible poet? Yeah? Same.
Photo by Isaac Smith from Unsplash.
“Always make the audience suffer as much as possible.”
Haha, but no seriously, I felt called out after watching that skit, and I wondered if somehow, the pandemic has also made me a bad poet. Ever since I started posting my work online, I’ve noticed what people like and don’t like. On Instagram, people tend to like shorter, snappier works, especially of a certain, *ahem*, saucy nature. So, because I was getting likes and attention, I started posting things that were more like that. But as time went on, I was hopeful that people would also like my longer form, more serious work.
I was wrong.
This isn’t a shitpost - just an observation.
Different mediums have different preferences, and Instagram is a medium that prefers short-form, quick and dirty stuff. And succinctly speaking, that’s not me. So the question is, do I write for myself or for my audience when I post on there?
Well, both.
What’s lovely about Instagram is I have the ability to post however much of my writing as I want. I can post one sentence or 10 slides. I can also post little snippets or excerpts from my poem. Granted, I tend not to do this because I feel like I’m missing out, but the capability is there.
Instagram is also, unfortunately, a hustle. As I’ve covered in a previous post, Instagram isn’t just about the quality of your writing. Besides paying money to get followers and likes, you can also get clout by engaging with other accounts. Which, unfortunately, I’m not very good at.
Nor am I willing to spend money on it lol.
So, I continue to write like me. Genuinely. And I think I have a few people who continue to read because they like my length, angsty poetry. But regardless of how you want to do it, writing for you or for your numbers, both are fine, as long as we keep writing.
Here’s something I wrote this week (which unfortunately has been less productive since I had some negative side effects to a COVID vaccine - get vaccinated, everyone!)
Nowhere near your heart
Today is a day where I wish I understood human
anatomy. Would it be enough to search
the internet in a futile attempt to sound poetic while
also being accurate, & there are too many
things I don’t understand, like how my brittle bones
don’t crack under the strain of my aching,
or why my blood doesn’t seep through my pores in
an attempt to escape, why am I not always
seeing red, & I do not understand the way flowers
grow from my mouth, in butterfly petals
spread too thin, for the smallest bit of sunlight that
our windows let in, & all of me is a
metamorphosis, a metastasis of skin cells to make
soil out of sodium from which nothing will
bloom.
