The end of the content creator
Making things that spark my heart
One side effect of leaving social media that I wasn’t expecting is the lessening desire I have to “make content.”
There is a difference, I think, between writing and making content, between art and making content, between expression and making content, between sharing in an effort to connect and sharing in an effort to sell. Sometimes the differences between the two are hard to spot. Sometimes you hit a lucky chord and are able to do both. Sometimes you sit down trying to do one thing—write—and find yourself so worried about the other thing—making content—that you get stuck and end up with nothing but a twisting in the pit of your stomach that you’re on the wrong carousel and it’s too late to jump off.
Over the years, my writing has always benefited from a deep level of vulnerability, aloneness, and reckless, wild abandon, from believing the lie I tell myself that no one will ever read this—I write for myself and me and mine. And yes, this precious fragility is annoying to me too, but also, sometimes it’s better to work with who you are and what comes easiest than not work at all.
Now that I’ve been away from social media for a short amount of time, I’m starting to realize how much being there changed the way I thought about writing. I’ve received constant messaging over the years that in order to find success, to be a writer in today’s market, you have to also be an influencer, you have to tap dance across the internet and expose your life in ways that don’t feel entirely comfortable and make you question whether or not you should write this or that thing. If you write a character who is morally questionable, will you be cancelled? Set upon by bullies? If you write a book that challenges the reader emotionally, will anyone want to read it?
Making content for the internet requires a different part of my brain, one that requires me to ask, “what is trending?”, “what will get attention?”, “what will people like?”, “what will make people mad?”, “what has the biggest chance to go viral?”
I don’t ask myself those questions when I’m deep in the wilds, exploring a new story idea. I ask, “what is this making me feel?”, “what would happen if I did this instead?,” “what would be the most interesting character to put in this scene?”, “what is the weirdest direction this story could take?”, “what if and then and how about and what now?”
The sweet spot, of course, is to do both. To write what sparks your heart AND make it marketable. But for me, the cognitive dissonance is often too much and I end up spinning in circles, chasing my proverbial tail.
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Write for yourself, as long as you write to market.
Write what makes you happy, but only if it’s a trending trope.
Write something different that’s truly your own, but don’t subvert reader expectations.
Storytelling is a deeply human artform, so we’re teaching robots how to do it better.
It doesn’t matter if you don’t sell books, as long as you are proud of what you made, but also we won’t be buying anymore books from you because we only want books that can sell, we don’t care about what it meant or how it changed you.
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Not being on social media right now is allowing some of these voices to quiet down, allowing space for me to sit with myself and sort through what is true and what isn’t, what is innate and what I might be able to unlearn, what I truly believe and what I’ve been told I should believe.
We tell ourselves stories every day, narratives about who we are and how we fit into this world. And I think that’s one of the most beautiful ways humans survive, but I also think it’s okay to challenge those stories sometimes. Poke at them and see if the story is one we want to keep telling, or if it’s time for a new one, one that allows us to expand and take up more space and rediscover a part of ourselves that perhaps we lost in all the noise.
One way to reduce the noise, I’ve found, is to reduce as many obligations as possible. Or rather, the feeling of being obligated.
The feeling of obligation is one reason I deactivated my social media accounts. Because of the pressure that I “should” be posting something every day, making reels, attracting an audience, trying to stay relevant.
Take this newsletter, too. I like writing to you. But when I have a paid subscription option, I feel obligated to come up with content that is worth paying for. I feel like I can’t fumble and experiment and write words for the sake of words just to watch a blank space fill.
Don’t take this the wrong way. Your support, financial or otherwise, means the world to me! I am still stunned that people have connected with my words, my stories, my imagination. It is a feeling like no other to make something, send it into the world, and have someone respond with their own words. A beautiful connection, and I’m lucky to have had so many.
But right now, the world feels filled with too much shouting and honestly, with too many subscriptions. So I’m pausing mine. I’m stepping back. Not from writing you letters, but from the paid model.
As of this month, I’ve paused all paid subscriptions on Mountains and Marginalia. If you were supporting me this way, again, thank you, I am grateful! Please use this money to support another artist you love or give to a charity that helps make the world a kinder, more beautiful place.
But Valerie! We want to support you! We want to pay you for the work you do!
I appreciate that, I really do. And many of you, most of you, already do that (have done that) by buying books I’ve written and telling friends about those books. And in the future, I know you’ll be there again when I have something new and big and exciting to share!
But for now, until then, let’s just sit with a cup of tea and have a chat about this that and the other thing, and without any plans about how to tame the algorithm and go viral, let’s see where the conversation goes.