Writing is not just lists.
I needed to remember that.
The other day I received a notification that Opemipo Omosa had added my writing, Ack! The Internet’s Bothering Me to one of her lists. Shocked that anyone was actually reading the things I wrote and left here to rot, I quickly looked into who she was…
This short lap around the internet pool lead to a deeper dive in which I found this short read, Writers barely write anymore by PenZeus, which made me smile and nod my head. Because PenZeus gets it.
I started blogging years ago in the early aughts when not everyone was doing it. Way back when there were affiliate links, adding pictures took days and data you didn’t have, and there were no rules. The best part (besides all the things I just listed) was that you could write about anything at all. So you mostly wrote about how you felt.
You simply wrote about the “human experience of it all.” Even if the experience of it all was just how crappy the commute was or the fact that the cute boy two lockets down didn’t like you. Those were the days!
Not the not liking you part and the commute part — those did and still do — suck. No! It was the part where you didn’t have to make everything into a listicle or a how-to-manual. The part where you just got to write and some unknown person on the otherside of the interwebs would randomly come across it and maybe drop a note to say, ‘Hey! I totally get that!’
When I first started I wrote just to write. Short stories about how songs made me feel, rantings about people trying to stay alive forever, descriptions of a childhood memory. It didn’t matter. If I wanted to write about it I just did. Like Nike told me to.
And then…
And then I stopped writing.
If you are one of the few people who have followed my meager writings and sporadic starts and stops I can assure you, it didn’t used to be this way. Yet somehow over the years my writing just stuttered. I would be trying something new and thinking ‘This is it! This is what kind of writer I will be!’ And I would write a blurb or two, maybe make it 3 months of turning out one article in a row before I would go silent.
As much as I would like to blame life for getting in the way deep down I know that’s not the reason. It wasn’t a job or illness or winning the lottery that caused a continual abrupt stop in my writing. It was that social media got on a roll and everything just changed.
You weren’t ranking your friends, posting unfiltered random pictures on the gram and writing about the tuna sandwich Dude Bro had for lunch anymore. Suddenly you had to have a theme and a look and a hashtag. This morphed and specialized and regimented out to where we are now: you need a brand, a specialized niche, and a SEO plan. You need to be a product and you need to sell something to someone to make them feel better about themself and their life.
It’s just so…boring.
So now that’s what everyone does — just writes the lists and dictates the steps and tells you what to do. There is so often no soul to writing anymore. PenZeus gets it.
There’s a lot going on in my life right now, like a lot a lot. Back in the day when I was but a wee lass I would write to the interwebs about it. I didn’t care if anyone cared. The clicks and views and likes didn’t matter. I just wanted to write like a person who was living.
I’m going back to that now. That’s what this space was supposed to be the entire time. It’s in my bio for crying out loud in the car during traffic:
Bills fan, traveler, rebel, science nerd, educator. I write what I want — Don’t box me in.
And I spent the first few years on here unknowingly trying to box myself in. Trying “to find my audience” to meet “their unique needs” and “answer their driving question”. It’s why my writing habit never stuck, because I was trying to make myself fit into a niche I didn’t really want.
I forgot that my audience was just plain old people, their needs were to just read something real, and their question was different each day. But I bet usually is was something akin to, ‘What’s interesting out there to get lost in?’
It’s time for me to go back to the aughts of my youth and write what I want, when I want, to whoever wants to read it. Not to answer any great question or fix any great need — like I have the answers anyway, what a load of crap. No, I’m going to write with one real purpose; to show I’m alive and exist, for me. And if anyone wants to read it, that’s awesome.
Who knows maybe I’ll be the Opemipo Omosa to someone else, leading them to their PenZues and finally get the sense knocked back into them. Sometimes you need the wisdom of some random people on the interwebs to remind you why you’re here in the first place.
