Tonight, after a whirlwind long weekend in New York City, I will fly back to Colorado. What will I carry back with me? A trip this short can only offer validation rather than transformation, right? So what have I seen in the mirror New York holds up in front of me?
I’ll tell you when I figure it out. In the meantime, I can promise this: it will be good to be home.
I woke this morning, far too early by society’s clock and earlier still by the one that ticks within me, near or in New York City. I flew in on the red-eye. I’m pretty sure I’ve never before taken a red-eye on anything shorter than a trans-oceanic flight and I don’t intend to make a habit of it. Odds are good that I slept horribly, my legs folded uncomfortably into the tight confines of coach seating, my neck stiff from never quite relaxing, as though that little ten-degree tilt the seat allows offers any relief.
There are many aspects to this trip that are new to me. I’m here with my mom and my sister–I can’t remember the last time we traveled together. We’re here for a long weekend, and we’re here as tourists. We will do New York things the way actual New Yorkers mostly do not: we will go to a couple of museums, have meals at destination restaurants. Perhaps we will walk across the Brooklyn Bridge on our way to the Brooklyn Botanic Gardens.
Also: these days, I wear no rings on my fingers.
I’m writing this beforehand, of course. My expectations for this trip exist only in broad contours. I expect to enjoy myself. I expect it to feel different from the last time I was here–back then, I still wore rings on my fingers.
Things are different now. How will New York choose to reflect that back to me?
As creators, we are not alone in this. We seek the help of others, others who choose to hear us when we speak. We want them, need them, and, yes, ask them to say to others, “This person, listen to what he is saying. It will touch you.”
The creation of an audience, then, is collaborative, a growing relationship built on trust.
(Yes, I used “he” to pronoun the gender-neutral “[t]his person” from earlier in that sentence. I acknowledge that while I’m speaking partly in the abstract, I am also pointing at myself, and I identify as male. If you’d like that sentence to point at you as well, feel free to substitute whatever pronoun fits you best.)
(And then yes, in that first parenthetical I used “pronoun” as a verb. Sometimes I do things like that.)
We have to make our own magic. That does not mean we are alone in this. Far from it. Indeed, the very thing that guides us into the arts in the first place, whether as creators or as audience, is that art helps shatter the persistent illusion of the physical world, that we are discrete entities, separate from what surrounds us.
And it is an illusion. With a little bit of practice, it’s possible to apprehend this truth directly and consistently. It becomes undeniable.
But even if you are not ready for that kind of practice–and it will shake up your world, I promise you–we can get a glimpse of that truth, every time we look at a painting, read a novel, listen to music; we feel within us that deep stirring and know that we have shared &hellip something across space and time.
If developing an audience is in fact a skill–and so far, I continue to think that it is–then how does one practice it?
Honestly, I don’t exactly know–if I did I’d be doing it already. But my best guess is to follow every idea and see what works.
This is bound to be a little tiring. But surely it is better than the alternative, that is, toiling away in obscurity, waiting for magic to occur so that you get discovered, until eventually and inevitably you succumb to bitterness because it doesn’t work that way.
It just doesn’t work that way. We have to make our own magic.
In reading over Friday’s introduction to the subject of audience and audience-building, I was struck by something I said: “Learning to develop an audience is every bit as necessary a skill as learning to adeptly put the words on the page in the first place.”
Given that part of the reason we write is to figure out what we actually think about something, I’m struck in particular by the word “skill.” Developing an audience is a skill? Do I really think so? I won’t say I’ve reached a firm conclusion, but as I’ve examined the idea so far, I’m inclined to say yes. And if it is indeed a skill, then it is something one can practice, and it is something at which one can improve.
Let’s start this discussion here:
It’s not weakness, I don’t think, to admit that some part of me wants to believe that being skillful at the craft of writing should be enough, that good work alone should be sufficient to bring an audience.
But I recognize that it just doesn’t work that way. Writing well may be necessary but it’s clearly not sufficient. If truly being a working writer means having an audience to write for, then learning to develop that audience is every bit as necessary a skill as learning to adeptly put the words on the page in the first place.
The overarching goals in my writing work right now are:
To reorganize and reformat Free Refills so that it communicates that I have built/am building something of lasting value here. I spoke about this on Monday.
To develop an audience. The bigger the better, of course, but I’ve seen it said that even 1,000 true fans is enough for any creator to make a living. That sounds lovely, but even 100 regular readers would be a huge shift, and could be all it takes to start to make FR into a community. I’ll aim to talk about this at greater length tomorrow.
To work on longer-form writing. I aim to say more about my plans on this front early next week.
Earlier today, while doing the dishes, I ran the garbage disposal, and up from the pipes arose the foulest stench I have ever encountered. It mixed the foul miasma of death, the rawest of sewage, and the black ooze that courses through the dank tubes of Donald Trump’s so-called heart.
After the initial disgust and horror abated, I was left with the deepest sense of betrayal. I thought I’d never been anything but good to that disposal. How could it do this to me?
I stated yesterday that I finally had the insight necessary to bring my vision of Free Refills to fruition. I’ve been thinking about that today. It’s taken me almost two-and-a-half years of steady work to get to this point. Should it someday prove to be the case that what I’m trying to do here really is an insightful, forward-looking approach to dealing with the question of earning income through writing in the digital age, will I look at these two-and-a-half years as a long time? Will I remember all the uncertainty? That what kept me going forward was ten percent the faith that the solution would reveal itself and ninety percent the dumb stubbornness that I just wasn’t going to quit, goddamn it, that I’d spent enough years not writing and not publishing and that I was never, ever going back to that? Or am I going to forget all of that and act like it was always inevitable?