New Bloggers, Blogging and Life

I’ve thought about blogging for as long as I can remember, and this is the very thing that has kept me from posting anything, yet, for so long—this question: who am I writing for? I honestly can’t answer that question. I have tried overriding the usefulness of answering it (going by the Just do it line of thought), hoping that I would figure it out as I went along; but it has not been the case, not yet anyways. I have tried myself at short stories, on Instagram, gathered quite a number of likes, and even some positive comments; I have shown my writing to a few people in real life, people who’ve told me that did I not tell them the works were my own, they would think they were from a published author. This, of course, was very encouraging. But, what has dwindled my motivation was the fact that I received liked so quickly on my short stories (a phenomenon you’ve alluded to here), and not as many comments. To me, it translated in an almost instantaneous reaction to scrolling down your feed: you scroll, see a post, hit the double tap, doesn’t matter what you actually think of the content. It shot at my motivation, and I subsequently deleted all my short stories from Instagram. Then I tried myself at Snapchat, for a short while, before realizing that the medium (in a similar fashion to Instagram) wasn’t really conductive to my getting much fulfillment for my writing. It just wasn’t set up to allow for the sort of depth I aimed for.

This brought back into stark relief the question of, Who are you writing for? I wrote mainly, dare I say exclusively, for my peers; but, I realized my peers (the ones I focused on) weren’t the kind that liked reading, deep, engaging reading, as much as I would have liked them to. This is not to say they’re stupid, or anything like that: they just, literally, do not like reading.

This left me with only myself as an audience, and some people (my senior mainly) I didn’t have much interest in reaching. See, writing for me is almost a way to communicate with people, a way to find my footing in the world. As such, I envision the perfect reader to be one in their 20’s, who’d read, be touched by the writing, give their opinions, and spark a conversation–if not with me, then with other people that age bracket, so as to make me feel my writing had had some impact. Ofc, I can get much of the underlying fulfillment from readership a different age bracket, but it just isn’t the same, in the same manner that a movie whose protagonist is a 37 years old lawyer will not have the same impact on a young girl as Pocahontas. Both have artistic, and intellectual merits; they just don’t strike the same cords.

I am still in a state of contemplation, very much filled with desolation. As of now, I am still in search of who I will write for.

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