nixsight

I recently spoke to a group of students about writing fiction online. Because I’d been asked, I felt I should work out something to say about why someone might do it.

Course, I’d never really thought about why I do it myself, and, you know, I’m no expert, but once I’d come up with three things to say, I was actually pretty pleased with them. I share them here with you, so that you can either agree, or tell me I’m an idiot.

Fun!
The first best reason to write online, is if you find it fun. This might seem like a no-brainer, because it’s a good reason to do pretty much anything. But there it is. If you like writing, write. And if you’re going to write, you might as well do it online. The process of writing and sharing it, seeing how people respond to it, can be a lot of fun.

It’s also important that you enjoy what you’re producing, not just that you’re producing it. In this instance, you can swap out “fun” for “awesome”. If you write online in a bid to chase widespread success, you’re likely to be dissapointed, but if you write stuff that you’d like to read, regardless of audience, at least you and your friends will enjoy the content. That sounds like a simplistic point of view, but most creativity can’t be faked, so if you don’t think what you’re doing is awesome, it’s going to be tough to produce worthwhile stuff.

And, you know, awesome is it’s own reward.

Ego!
If you feel you’ve got something worth saying or sharing, that’s a pretty good reason to say and share it. Now, okay, your average egotist will get enough validation out of just talking loudly in a pub, but for some of us, that just doesn’t nearly cut it.

There’s nothing wrong with this motivation. Personally, I think it’s pretty healthy to work the stuff that’s going on in your head out, and putting yourself in a position where you might have an audience should, strictly speaking, help you be a bit more organised and balanced about it. Otherwise, you’ll probably just end up being an anonymous troll on a forum somewhere.

(This post, of course, taps into the second motive…)

Productivity!
Procrastination is a writer’s number one enemy. Deadlines and commitments make it easier to avoid procrastinating. But if you aren’t being paid to write, or being asked to write, the only commitment you have is to yourself, and that hardly counts as a commitment at all.

But putting that commitment out in public, on the net – regardless of whether or not you have any readers yet – feels a lot more real. Which makes it easier to stick to it.

And the more you write, the easier it is to write.

There’s another way that writing online helps with productivity. For a lot of writers, it’s easy to overthink an idea – actually, in some ways thinking about an idea at all can make that idea too big in the writer’s mind.

But of course, writing is only partly about the ideas – the author’s unique selling point is their voice. It’s the one thing that someone else will find difficult to replicate.

Putting your ideas out there, making the most of the immediacy of the web, makes the ideas less of a desperate commodity, and more of a pliable resource.