Reblog: How to Keep Writing When No One Gives a Shit

I really liked this. The brutal reality is that not everyone can be wildly popular or successful in writing. Most of us labor in relative or utter obscurity. But that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t press on:

No one cares if I write.

No one’s waiting for me to publish my next essay. No one’s waiting for me to overcome my low self-esteem or manage my depression and anxiety or move through my fears or stop doubting myself or get a good night’s sleep and drink enough water and caffeinate sufficiently to sit down and write. No one was waiting for me to quit my day job when I did a few months ago, and stop putting off what I most love to do and make the time in my life to do it.

I don’t have an agent or an editor expecting the completion of my manuscript, no publishers are wooing me with six-figure advances for a book deal, and nothing I’ve written has ever gone viral. No one is compulsively refreshing my website, checking for my next blog post to be published. I don’t even have an article assignment or deadline at the moment.

I write pieces and send them out. Sometimes I will get rejections, which are usually very gentle and non-personal—it wasn’t right for them, and please submit again. Most of the time though, I never hear back at all. I just send and send and send into the void.

Occasionally something I pitch will get accepted (hooray!). But wait—when it’s published there are stats, an abundance of metrics to show me exactly how little everyone cares. How few people open my newsletter, how low my website traffic is, how small the engagement was for my latest Twitter or Facebook post. All the data there to prove just how much no one cares.

I’ve been writing for a long time and I’m not famous or hugely successful or even moderately well-known. Thirteen years ago I had my first article published—a music profile in Interview Magazine. I brought a copy of that issue to my chiropractor and she said, “I can just feel it, you’re about to take off, like a rocket ship!”

Read the rest: How to Keep Writing When No One Gives a Shit, by Jennifer Garam.