Writing and You: Motivations

I’m not shallow, you’re shallow.

What drives people to post their work online? Better, what drives you to post your work online?

If your first thought is “I want to gain an audience”, then I suggest you stop writing now. Now, there’s nothing wrong with wanting to gain an audience. Having an audience can seem like a useful metric for how well you’re doing as an author. But when you go into writing with the goal of seeing the number rise, then what does it mean when you only have a hundred or so views on every story you write? What if it’s less than that? What if your first story is a major splash, you get the number you crave, and every subsequent tale afterwards gets less?

Pure and simple: it hurts, and it destroys your drive to create. You feel like you’re doing wrong, and the worst part is that you don’t even know where you need to improve.

Your primary motivation, before anything else, should be to make stories that you enjoy. As long as you feel okay with what you’ve made then you’re on the right track.

The saying goes “if you construct it, then people will arrive”. Maybe. Were there baseballs? I feel like baseball was involved in some way. Did you know that for legal reasons you can’t quote song lyrics, song titles, or band names in American literature? Honest! You have to get express written permission from the rights holder to use them in an official printed publication! Parodies are okay though, which is part of why Jojo’s Bizarre Adventure has such amazing localizations like turning Limp Bizkit into Flaccid Pancake. Point is, if people are still reading a manga 40 years later in spite of awkward localization, then your stories will find an audience on their own merits.