I constantly find myself caught between writing what I want to write about and writing about what will “sell” here. And how does that end for me, writing nothing.
Before steemit, I was actually writing pretty regularly and was progressing pretty well on the outline for my upcoming Nanowrimo novel. And for the first time, I was felling confident about being able to finish it. It will be the 4th one I started. But this time I took advantage of the the Nanowrimo rules and started doing everything except writing early.
I was enjoying fleshing out the novel and wanted to get started on it, so I started writing short stories, one every day or two. I have never had any fiction published because I have never tried to publish fiction. I wasn’t confident in my work. Twenty years ago or so, I gave it up. I read how writer’s, especially fiction writers, can’t make a living and I took another direction. I needed to make money. Eventually I did publish two nonfiction books about what I do for a living and many blog posts on my own and other blogs. But they were written because they would sell and would help my career.
It was good to have fiction back. To write because I enjoyed it, to be in the zone and know that what I was putting down had something. It may be rough but something was there and the 20 years helped. It made me patient. It made me trust myself and stop searching for what to write because I already knew.
But that all stopped when I started looking through steemit. I tried to come up with posts that would get votes by browsing through the hot stream. I did that for a few hours today. Until I realized this wasn’t going to work for me.
I couldn’t write the type of posts that were getting all the money. The topics didn’t really interest me. And I wasn’t going to write something that did until I stopped chasing the hot topics. So I will just write. I will make it a practice if I have to, to get back into shape. And not think of the outcome.