Write for Yourself First
I have been writing consistently here for a year now. You can go back a year and find one essay published every single day without fail. I have broken a lot of the writing advice that gets thrown around on social media, except for one piece of advice—and that is something I didn’t learn from social media.
Social media is filled with advice about maintaining a swipe file of ideas. They tell you to keep track of trending topics. Write about subjects that are most likely to go viral. Write on platforms that promote your content. Write for the algorithm. Write in a particular way so the user keeps reading.
I have broken all of that advice. I chose a platform that was completely different from what was recommended. Instead of writing to bait the reader into reading more, I wrote as if I were talking to a friend at 2 a.m. in a bar over a whisky. There are essays buried here where I have confessed my heart out—confessions that I have never made to a single living soul on the planet.
I befriended the paper. I wrote all my thoughts in the way I processed them. I found those thoughts loosely rhyming with psychology and philosophy, but the greater realisation was that I had discovered them on my own. I turned my pain, my observations, and my outlook towards the world into legitimate content. I wrote as I thought.
That is the most honest advice I would want to give you. I might have given this advice sometime in the past, and I will continue to give it in the future as well. Write for yourself. Explain it to yourself the way you would explain it to a friend. You don’t need any writing advice for that. You already know how.
The only advice I would give you as a fellow writer, as someone who has written hundreds of pages and thousands of words, is that the only way to become a writer is by writing. There are no shortcuts. You have to keep writing every day. It will look bad at first, but trust me, it gets better. Writing is one of the few fields where you cannot get worse if you keep doing it every day.
Write for yourself first. The audience will come.
I have written about almost every topic you could think of—or, I should say, every topic that I could think of, that I have experienced in my life and continue to experience. I don’t have a swipe file. All I have is a Notes app on my phone where I dump my thoughts in a single line, to expand upon them later. I write as the thoughts emerge.
I have no writing tips for you because I have followed none. I wrote with my heart. I wrote for that friend who would read something and feel that he wasn’t alone, that there was somebody else who had gone through the same thing. That is the whole point of writing. The fact that it makes your thinking sharper is another benefit, but you don’t write for that. You write for yourself.
Thinking isn’t writing. Reading about writing isn’t writing. There is only one way you can excel at writing, and that is by doing it. You have enough content in your head. Observe the world. Think about what’s going on. And befriend that blank page.