a writing dilemma

Post date: 2020-08-04 00:12:50

Should I write the thing that I love writing, or the thing that could get published?

Since I was a child, I've written fiction for myself. I started out drawing comics, but then I progressed to writing and I just kept doing it after that. I really love writing. I am never happier than when I am feeling smooth and productive and character motivations are making sense and the dialogue is flowing. Honestly, it feels what I was put on the world to do.

At the same time, I am really aware that nothing I write for my own enjoyment has any artistic or literary merit. I use writing as a way to get away from life stress and it's just a tool to make me happy. It's usually romance or fantasy. It never says anything big or important. Even though I am a POC, nothing I write has anything useful to say about race or society or anything like that. I don't write beautifully or poetically. It just feels to me like hanging out with people I like, except they happen to be characters I have created, not real people. It's not erotica or anything like that but it feels very personal - I'd be embarrassed if people I knew, knew that I thought like this.

I have never shared my personal work with anyone. As soon as I write for an audience, I feel like I am being inauthentic because I feel the need to move away from my own voice - even though people have tended to respond to that work reasonably positively. Also, being a POC, there is a whole other tension to grapple with about writing for an audience from my own culture versus filtering it for an imaginary Western reader, but I'm not even going to start on that. Just to point out that that is an additional issue about authenticity that I struggle with.

At the same time I have learned so much about writing and plotting and keeping motivated over the years. I feel like, I've gathered all this knowledge through doing this thing all my life, shouldn't I use it for something I feel proud to share with the world? What is the point of writing so much over the years if you never share it with anyone? What is the use of spending all your life learning how to do a thing if you don't use your skills to make something worthwhile?

I feel this weird tension between this being the thing I love doing more than anything else in the world and the knowledge that it is not useful and I am too ashamed to share it with anybody. I know I could probably write for public consumption if I wanted, I just know it wouldn't be authentic. The stupid stuff I love to write is the truest expression of me.

So I really struggle with knowing what I should be focusing on: work that could get shared or even published, or the work that really makes me happy, which I don't feel I would ever want to share. I realise only I can answer this question, but some perspective from AskMe would be really helpful and interesting.

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