DREAMLIKE #2: Is Social Media Making Us Bad Writers?
If you spend all your time creating or consuming content when you should be writing... you know where I'm going with this.
Dreamlike is this week’s series of posts. A collection of my inner thoughts on writing, art, poetry. One a day, June 10-June 17. A challenge to myself, a bizarre thought experiment on pretentiousness, an examination of why I do what I do (write like a madwoman). The first one was free. There will be one other available freely, but the rest will be locked up behind a paywall like a maiden guarded by a dragon in a dungeon… I don’t know, please ignore that simile. If you’d like to support my writing, consider upgrading to a paid subscription. Enjoy xx
Writer, poet… content creator?
Are these the “things” I would consider myself? Not really, no. The middle one makes me nervous, but I would hang onto it if only for the aesthetic (this is a joke; that will come up once more in this article… it is nearly the point of the entire thing). The last label, however, absolutely not. I do create content—any artist wanting to earn money from their art is mostly required to barring a giant publisher who is going to Donna Tartt (verb) you. But even though I find it necessary, I don’t particularly enjoy it (there are exceptions; I’ll discuss those too, including this Substack). I definitely don’t think I’m the best at it. I also find it extremely difficult to keep any cohesive branding or (this word again) aesthetic. While I certainly have a particular style, I also like a wide variety of things at any given moment… like most humans I know.
Reels interest me for brief bursts of time but I never have a desire (a gnawing, to borrow yesterday’s phrase) to make another. There are so many good ones out there that I know take time and effort and I’d rather spend all of that writing.
However. Whether or not I like the idea of being a “content creator,” [quick pause: this is a job and a damn good one. I follow content creators and I enjoy their content. Some of them are writers too, yes, but most of them are not. Regardless, the use of the term isn’t meant in condescension, it’s only to differentiate between writing as a job and creating content as a job] I am forced to become one.
This is, truly, nothing new. Artists needing to market themselves to make money is not a hell sentence or a novel concept. Some artists had patrons back in the day, and now we have Patreon. Even with those, there are connections needed and marketing oneself and one’s work was/is a necessity. It’s always been this way, merely existing in more archaic forms.
But things feel… different somehow. Of course tactics evolve and we now have the ability to reach more people than ever before which is an incredible thing and yet… And yet.
My trepidation with this new form of reach and marketing has less to do with getting the word out about our art and more to do with the fact that somewhere along the line, “getting the word out” started to replace the making of art altogether. What, I sometimes wonder, is the word even about anymore?
The indie book world moves fast.
I’d know. I’m an indie author.
The erratic year of 2020 I released about four books back-to-back—within a period of months—and I’m pretty proud of each of them. It’s what built my readership and allowed me to write full-time (still does in some ways).