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Writing into the void
Finding freedom when the views are bad
So far, two of my articles on Medium have gone entirely unread. One was a quick write, so I don’t care too much, but the other was a more laborious creation. Of course, this is largely my own fault — I should be doing more to promote my articles. Even sharing to my personal Facebook tends to pull in a handful of reads, moving that dial up from zero.
But some pieces of writing I don’t want to share with my personal circle for a whatever reason, so they tend to sit at zero for a while. I’m sure that someday they’ll be read — perhaps one of them might even take off and get popular in some nebulous future.
Until then, however, they are pieces that I’ve written into the void.
While on the one hand seeing that zero in your stats is a depressing feeling, there’s a freedom in it that I find it’s good to embrace. When you’re writing into the void you can write anything. Considerations of popularity or matching trends are irrelevant. All that matters is that you write.
And that unbeatable pro of writing into the void. You write a thing and every thing that you write propels you forwards. It’s not being read that’s most important — it’s the writing itself. Seeing a big old zero in your stats means that you wrote something, you published it. The zero is nothing compared to the existence of the piece.
Because really, every piece you write is written for the void. Most crawl — or leap — right out of there. Some stay for a while, or forever. but if you write knowing that you write for the void, you are wholly, entirely free.
