September 6, 2024

The Paradoxical Isolation of the Writer

An essay about the solitary life of the writer and how we might need to re-think the ways in which we try to find our audiences.

In "On Writing", Stephen King advocates writing with a desk turned towards the wall. This makes sense for an absolute machine like King and I can imagine how shutting off the real world can help a writer of fiction to bring their imagined world into greater focus. I also like the stark contrast between this method and the mentality of the writer's retreat –⁠ where participants pay a great deal of money to spend time with an eminent writer in a bucolic locale, away from the distractions of modern life. 

I have bristled against writer retreats in the past, but I wouldn't necessarily call them a rip off. If you see them as a kind of holiday where you can spend time with a writer you respect and work on your craft, then you get what you pay for. But retreats are often conceived as a way of attaining privileged knowledge, or for having a bit of the eminent writer's mojo brushing off onto the aspiring writers. Even if this does happen, the problem is that whatever vibes you've built up in the bucolic environment quickly dissipate on direct contact with the day-to-day that you retreated from (this is also true of meditation retreats). 

That said, one thing that retreats and similar initiatives offer is a chance to make connections with other writers. Many writers that do well professionally tend to have the social skills to network and find opportunities. This might be the real incentive for attending retreats.

I have, without a doubt, been more of an insular, online entity since the pandemic, but I have always been a bit of an introvert. My confident stage persona functions as a means of social control and for keeping people at arm's length. I have found online platforms to be an imperfect crutch for handling my needs to create, share my creations, but avoid social situations.

I want to be left alone to create work that I'm proud of but I also hope for people to like the work and for some of those people to throw a few quid my way. I am aware that there are many ways in which some of these aims work against each other.

I like writing because it is an art form that remains an insular, anti-social activity. It's not that I don't like people, I just find social contexts to be exhausting. If anything, a piece of writing is as much a form of communication as it is an act of isolation. I still maintain the naive belief that, with the internet, a good piece of writing can eventually find its ideal readership. 

I have previously shared this quote from Eric Barone, the developer of Stardew Valley (otherwise known as Concerned Ape), on the subject of audiences, creativity and introversion, but I think it's an important one:

"I think for me I have always been kind of a lonely guy, kind of a hermit. I keep to myself. I don't really have that many friends, I don't go out much. I'm an introvert. Art is a way to connect with other people. It's a way to communicate and for other people to see who I really am. I think everyone wants to feel like they belong or that they can connect with society in some way. This is just my way of doing that."

This probably represents the ideal working conditions for a lot of introverted and neurodivergent artists. But it's also worth remembering that this is a quote from the developer of Stardew Valley, a massively popular video game with plenty of broad appeal. Gritty prose poems with some zen flourishes don't tend to work as well as online trawler nets for prospective readers and patrons.

I mention this because writing is one the best ways of being alone. It's up there with reading a good book, meditating, walking or playing (single player) video games. With writing, you don't just spend a few hours with your thoughts and visions –⁠ you also end up with an actual thing to share with the world at the end of it. It really is miraculous. But like video games, it can also pull you into an insular world at the expense of interacting with the real world and all the amazing real people that populate it. 

That's the paradox to a certain degree. Many writers don't want to spend a lot of time in social situations but we want the works we create to find an audience. We care about what people think of the things that we create but we don't feel the same way about being in the company of a great mass of people.

It could be that the internet has increased the isolationist tendencies of the introverted writer. There was a point where you had to seek out an agent who might seek out a publisher; or seek out some sympathetic editors of literary journals; or schlep up onto a stage to convince a real crowd of living, breathing humans to buy your book and ask you to scribble your name in it.

The pandemic changed a lot of things, especially with regard to the live poetry scene. It proved that, in a strictly functional sense, you could do a lot of these things without leaving the house. But remaining housebound while facing a brick wall as you transcribe your inner visions is not as healthy an option as it might have once seemed.

One of the dangers of trusting the internet as a way of finding new audiences comes from placing too much faith in algorithms. Whilst many of us are more cognisant of the absurdity of writing for the algorithm (something that is never publicly defined and is prone to constant changes in what it looks for), there is still a seductive "message in a bottle" wish that our little digital screeds may one day wash ashore in a promised land, populated by a dedicated readership.

But algorithm-led platforms are not a sea. They are a factory where each message-carrying bottle rides along a conveyor-belt. There's a chance that one of the might be picked up by the robot arm of the algorithm but most end up dropping off the end of the conveyor into a landfill.

Oh look, that bleak, uncompromising image must be a sign that we must be nearing the end of the newsletter!

It's not really fair that I leave it there so let me round things off with a few notes of optimism, and how we wall-facing troglodytes might still find a way to the niche, selective audiences that mainly exist within our heads.

With the live poetry and open mic scene not entirely recovered to their pre-pandemic heights and with the algorithmic feeds not being the AI literary agents and publicists that they promise to be –⁠ there are ways we can allow the reach of our work to expand at a somewhat modest level.

• Websites and web rings - I've banged on about this before, but the only place where you'll ever really control your own content is on your own site. Not only do you have control over what you post but you also have control over how you link out to other sites too. The ways in which you can make a site are also breaking away from the usual Wordpress of website builder molds. I am currently making my own digital garden from an Obsidian vault hosted on github pages. If none of that makes sense then just imagine a website of poems, notes and essays but rather than it being a typical chronological blog feed, it's lots of posts that are linked together in lots of criss-crossing, tangled paths where the reader is encouraged to find their own way around. It's actually live right now but I'm not going to share it until its had the chance to bed in for a bit longer. But the bigger project that springs from this would be a good old fashioned web-ring. That way, we wall-facing troglodytes can share our readerships with other wall-facing troglodytes. If you identify as one and have a little corner of the internet that isn't supplied by a platform and is semi-regularly updated, please holler back at me.

• Finding spaces that aren't dependent on profit-making exercises or arts bodies and institutions –⁠ This one's a lot trickier for me in a number of ways. I ran Poetry Unplugged every week for fifteen of its twenty-four years before the pandemic shut the doors of the Poetry Cafe. Four years later, the Poetry Cafe still isn't open for regular events (bar the odd private hire and Poetry Review launch). As far as I can understand, this is because some of the members of the board are against it, citing finances as the main reason. This point is not made because I want to start a beef, but rather to acknowledge that we promoters and hosts can't continue to rely on the beneficence of arts organisations and the whims of their boards. One thing that's kept me from running Unplugged upstairs at a pub has also been the issue of inclusivity. I'd rather the venue was accessible to disabled or Muslim poets, for instance. Instead I'm thinking that there could be more gatherings at private addresses, public parks and other civic spaces. I also have an idea for something that involves a fair bit of walking but can be joined and decamped from at a number of points along the way. Again, I want to keep this close to my chest but I've been thinking about his thing for years and might finally pull the trigger next year. It won't involve having anyone round my gaff.

In short, we can all carry on facing the wall as we want to but we need to begin to think in different ways about how we reach our audiences, both on and offline. This involves using private and public spaces (or commercial spaces of a more independent and less institutional nature) as a means of connection and congregation. With the internet, we can remind ourselves that there is still space, and the means, to build our own online platforms as we once did before the social networks hooked us in with their unfulfillable promises.

To torture my previous metaphor, it doesn't have to be a choice between lobbing one’s message-in-a-bottle into the sea or dropping it onto a conveyor-belt with algorithmic robot arms. We might just be able to hand our bottles to each other while saying "There's a message in this that I put a lot of work into and I think you might like it."

Come to think of it, we might not even need the bottle at all.

Thanks for reading this!

It's perfectly fine that nobody's noticed that I've been a bit quiet on the interweb for the past few weeks. I've been on a digital declutter, following on from Cal Newport's advice in his book, Digital Minimalism. While I've still used digital devices, I've been staying off social media and YouTube (to varying degrees of success) and keeping my news intake limited to one half-hour news programme a day with an online catch up afterwards if I feel I need more information on a particular development.

There are no social apps on my phone and no shortcuts to my browser, which I have to access through settings if I need to look something up. I also carry a camera and an e-reader and notebook in my sling bag which keeps me from reaching for my phone (I often find myself taking a picture with my phone but immediately embark on a good doomscroll afterwards).

While my original plan involved me making a little time for video games, I got so deeply sucked into one particular game a few days into the declutter that I realised I was in danger of spending the whole thirty days gaming instead. My motivation was to make more time for writing, reading and family and so I added gaming to the list of banned activities.

I'm nineteen days in at the time of writing this and I'm beginning to feel the benefits. I have been able to sit on trains or at a playground without feeling the urge to take out my phone. I've paid more attention to the skies, the sounds of the cities and the antics of the stupid animals. It's been good, to the degree that I might just keep going like this come the end of the thirty days (though the gaming will probably resume at a less regular rate).

Another reason was to get back on track with these essays. I got very stuck and found it hard to get back into the routine I established earlier this year, where the words and ideas seemed to be part of an endless flow. I really appreciate the subs and hope that you can allow me the opportunity to call my August radio silence a slightly extended holiday. I think it's important to keep the gears of creativity chugging and for me to deliver on my flaky promises but it's also important to acknowledge that I am a human being and not a machine and can only create when I feel well and rested enough to do so. I think I'm almost there.

In the meantime, I've also been tending to the digital garden and can't wait to share it (it’s not Niall’s Notes by the way, that was my previous attempt). I hope that it will be a place where people who enjoy my writing can find plenty to explore, even during my fallow periods.

Cheers

Niall

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