#54 Who is it for?
On writing for an audience vs. writing for yourself
One of the things I’ve discovered from writing this newsletter is I have absolutely no clue how to predict what will resonate with a large swath of you, and what will fall flat. Some of the pieces I’ve loved the most have been met with relative silence, some that I hated were, by objective measure, the most successful.
For example: This piece on being The worst horse was one of the most hateful things, according to me, I ever wrote. It was also the thing I got the most feedback on from my friends. SO MANY PEOPLE I RESPECT texted WOW! and More like that please! and it made me irrationally angry, like how I get when my mom tells me my hair looks best when I know it’s the most unflattering it’s ever, ever looked.
Other pieces I have loved with my whole heart, like this one, often enough (from my unreliable experience over here looking at likes and waiting for confirmation) are met with crickets.
It just goes to show we can be terrible judges of our own work or how people are going to enga…