Posts tagged always writing
Posts tagged always writing
In the last eight years I’ve written maybe a million words of content. That’s episodes of SciShow and Crash Course and blog posts and Vlogbrothers videos, and overly-wordy responses to really simple Tumblr asks. I’m not even counting emails, which would probably bump me up another million words.
In those eight years, I’ve tweeted over 10,000 tweets. With an average of 10 words per….I’ve written 100,000 words OF TWEETS!
The vast majority of those words were consumed by their intended audience within a week of them having been written. And that’s why I wrote them…because I wanted to elicit a response. I wanted to make something that people would enjoy or be moved or changed by. Very quickly after having written them I knew whether they’d had the affect I intended. Sometimes they did, sometimes they didn’t, but the important thing is I KNEW!
But a book…GOOD LORD…it’s like “write a hundred thousand words BUT OH NO! DON’T SHARE IT WITH ANYBODY!” It’s so opposite of how I’ve lived my life for the last eight years. I don’t have a solution to this problem because I think that not sharing a novel while you’re writing it is important. I don’t want to lock myself into a beginning when I’m not quite sure how the end is going to go, but it’s extremely frustrating.
Having a thing that I think people will like and then just letting it sit there on my hard drive totally weirds me out. It feels wrong. I’ve shared it with a couple people and I’ve gotten to talk about it with them, which has been really wonderful, but my brain has gotten used to a certain work/reward/obligation/work cycle and this really isn’t fitting into it. A book is more work/obligation/work/obligation/work/obligation/work/work/work/obligation/work/reward-if-you’re-lucky.
It’s just hard…every time I write something I like I think “Oh I wonder if other people will like this” and then I’m like “Well, I guess I’ll find out…in a FREAKING YEAR! MAYBE!” It’s just hard…so I’m complaining about it instead of doing something about it.
This. So very, very, much this. Except substitute “papers” and “thesis” for “book” in my case.
(Source: edwardspoonhands)