What Should I Write About?
Whenever I’m listening to another writer’s Q&A on writing, this question seems to pop-up every now and again. I never understood why it would be asked or what kind of answer was expected until I got stuck.
I would love to be a writer and I would love to be published so it’s important to me that I remember it’s not an impossible dream by listening to those who have done it. So I listen to their advice, I learn that I should know my target audience and my genre and if I want to be a writer I need to engage with writing communities and get my name out there.
GET YOUR NAME OUT THERE!
I’ve given this advice and I have taken it, now I wish I’d never heard it.
I’m an introvert and I also struggle with social anxiety so creating a social media page with my own work, life and personal struggles on it is something I’d always stay clear of. Personally, I’m quite happy living a quiet life with minimum social interaction. Right now I’m happy working in retail, even though it is a dead-end job. I like my space, I like that most of my time is spent in my room it’s got books, it’s green, it’s my school (since I study online) and it’s my gym (ever since I started Insanity).
I’ve heard from a lot of writers that I should break out of my comfort zone and join social media but when I was writing daily quotes for Instagram I didn’t love it. I hated what I was writing and I know it sucked. If I didn’t love taking pictures and designing the composition for each photo I would have quit a lot sooner. It’s such a small thing but I would get panicked over what I would do next, I felt like I had to do more and I always had to change to be better.
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It was stopping me from writing, I was getting stressed. I’d spend days lying in bed and not doing anything until I went to work and there I had a job and I could get distracted until the next day when the same thing happened. I stopped studying for my final exam, I got convinced my entire life was running into a brick wall and my life was screwed.
It seems unpopular advice but if broadcasting yourself doesn’t make you happy or you have to change what your writing for your audience or genre to something that you don’t like, don’t do it.
Deleting Youtube and my Instagram, putting Facebook in a separate folder on its own page on my iPhone so I don’t just look at it and jump right in all the time has made me so much happier. If I’m not writing for myself then I’ll be miserable and I won’t want to be writing at all but now writing has become fun again. I can only write about things I want to write about.
There’s so much advice to take on and things that I, as a writer, should be doing that it’s easy to forget self-care comes first. Even at the cost of your marketing. I’m a writer, my mind is kind of the core of my creativity, I should be thinking about that.
This guest post was contributed by Chloe-Anne Ross. Chloe-Anne is a student in Glasgow, a recovering coffee addict with a good imagination. Alternately titled “What Should I Write About?” and the Reason Behind My Writer’s Block.
A Writer's Path 
This is why I only write what comes to my heart and mind
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I love this post. I’ve done this to myself many times. Even sometimes with my blog. I worry that if what I’m writing about is interesting to other people, if it’s too dark or too funny or not funny enough. Worrying about what other people think can really hurt you as a writer. A friend once told me to write what I would read. “If you don’t want to reread it, you didn’t write it for you.”
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It’s important to write the way you want to write. That seems like a better path for attracting readers than being a social media butterfly.
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I like how you represented your ways of doing things and never afraid to get criticize.
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Chloe-Anne, I can really identify with your post today. I’m not comfortable with most social media. If I spend too much time and energy on social media, there’s no time or energy left for writing.
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Hi Chloe-Anne (beautiful name!),
Sure, self-care is numero uno on any to-do list. Because from that, all else follows. However, isolating yourself? Not a whole lot can come out of that, in terms of your goal of being a writer.
One of the best sources for writing is our experiences and our feelings around those experiences. But what you seem to have now instead are your feelings of anxiety and isolation.
I see that you’re also limiting your exposure to social media. Okay if that’s what you want, but…
I met a man on Twitter who struggled so hard for many years due to his severe OCD and ADHD, he even attempted to end his life. Now he has (gradually) come back from that and written two books about his experiences. He has over one million Twitter followers! His name is Jeff Emmerson – @IAmJeffEmmerson – in case you want to look him up. Very inspiring guy.
Anyway, you’re not me, I’m not you, I gotta remind myself!
I wish you the best of luck in whatever you can manage for yourself, Chloe-Anne. Take care. ❤
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Reblogged this on Nesie's Place.
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Reblogged this on anita dawes and jaye marie.
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Thanks for sharing!
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Writing should always be fun, else its not worth reading!
I will be thinking long and hard about my own writing future this week…
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Reblogged this on Kim's Author Support Blog.
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I love this post because I think some writing advice is too generic. I detest “Don’t take criticism personally,” as if I’m choosing to do so. I’m introverted, too, but pseudo-extroverted in terms of social media. Since I’m not forced to face people and I communicate better in writing it’s not as daunting; however, I hate any “Do this every day!” advice. It creates an obligation that leads to stress. I think comfort zones should be stepped out of when you’re ready, and you’re the one who’ll know when that is 😊
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Well said!
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Reblogged this on HIP TO BE SNARK and commented:
Very good post about writing and putting yourself out there when you have social anxiety.
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Thanks for sharing!
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I’ve found it’s important to keep checking with yourself after reading advice on how to be a writer. Everyone has their own reasons for writing, and their own measures of what constitutes success, so those “rules” don’t always apply and sometimes do harm if accepted uncritically. I notice you mentioned advice to know your target audience. I’ve always disliked that one, because many of us start writing from a creative impulse, without any particular audience in mind. We may develop an audience in time, but otherwise, that advice may be useless, or worse.
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Reblogged this on .
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It has always seemed daft to me that writers are advised to spend so much time on social media and ‘getting their name out there’ that there is so little time left to actually write!
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Fantastic post–I’m seeing a lot of writers in wordpress and elsewhere getting fed up with social media and starting to disconnect. I only have Facebook because it’s the easiest way for my workplace and best friend to get in touch with me if they need to (and they can send blanket announcements and see who saw the posts–which makes it useful). Otherwise I am so tired of it I am barely on more than 5 minutes a week. I never did twitter, instagram, snapchat, any of that, and I don’t care to. I don’t think we’re missing as much as we think we are, and our pressure to speak and announce ourselves doesn’t help in the long run if we have nothing to say…then it waters down the good stuff we could be saying if we really want to say it.
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It’s so easy to see someone else and want to “be like them”, but in the process we forget who we are. There are many paths, and often it’s because someone walks a different path that their results feel new and interesting to others. “Sameness” is rarely the way, despite how frequently societies encourage it.
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I just read an expression of myself… Totally with you on this 💪🏼 have an inspiring year to come 🌸
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Completely agree! I tried to be everywhere at once because that’s the advice I got. All I got out of it was stress and the feeling that nothing was any good. Make your own way – that’s the best way ❤️
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Loved this post, thanks for sharing a bit of yourself with us.
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I am also at the point of only keeping FB active. We have been advised to get our name out there by posting everywhere, that takes us away from writing, which is what we LOVE to do. To be honest, I am not very good, okay real honesty, most of it is way above my head and can only have minimal success with posting ads on any media. So I am going to focus on writing and will only do FB, blog, and Quora.
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What I’ve found much of the writing advice works for other people. When I try to do stuff that’s not “me”, it always works out poorly. I”ve also learned to look beyond the advice at what it means in practice. For example, if one post advised to do XYZ to become noticed and most followed that advice, then no one would stand apart from anyone else. Everyone would look the same XYZ. It seems the writers who have been successful did so by finding ways to break the molds. And once others started copying what those writers did, those became the new molds.
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Reblogged this on WILDsound Writing and Film Festival Review.
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I do think there’s a lot of toxicity to building an ‘authors platform’ in general, not just for us introverts. Thinking of doing a post on it myself.
Thank you for sharing your experience. Hope things are better for you now 😊
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That’s valid. If it sucks the joy out of writing, skip it. I enjoy reading your blog and I feel like the blogging community is special in a way because it’s timeless. It’s not the most tech-savy thing to do. You’re taking time and putting thought into your words and expressing what I’d important to you. You’re not missing anything. One thing I don’t think I could do is have a YouTube or TikTok channel. I’ve heard they help drive traffic, but I don’t want my face anywhere on camera.
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I don’t go looking for a story. It comes to me. It comes in the form of characters who haunt my waking hours. And they won’t leave until I tell their stories, their lives. I was describing a scene from one of my books to an editor once when she said, “You talk as if they are real people.” I told her they were. They come to me fully developed and won’t allow me to change anything about them. And neither will they let me stop writing until they are satisfied.
I know their story from beginning to end before I type a word. Then it’s like ‘retelling,’ like having watched a movie in my head and sharing it with my friends.
I don’t believe creative writing can be taught. You can know the in’s and out’s of writing and produce a flawless story but unless it has a heartbeat, it is lifeless – ‘perfectly’ lifeless.
I don’t count words or worry over my mistakes. I just write. And I do it for myself because I love the character, and I love their stories.
Have I ever had Writer’s block? Yes, and it is a miserable feeling. My story vault feels empty, and the characters have gone silent. It doesn’t work to force an idea onto paper. Every word is empty and lifeless. So I read and wait until the day the door to my imagination opens, and there stands a character, bags in hand. It steps in and makes itself at home and the process starts again….
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