There's always been several things about the "you should write because you love it/want to/for yourself, not for popularity/readers/kudos/comments/attention/praise/whatever!" talk that bothered me. It's not solely that it creates this weird implication that people who write with the intention of sharing it, and who want to share their work and interact with readers, are somehow "doing it wrong," though that's definitely one ridiculous element of it. However, I was never able to put my finger on what, exactly, struck me as so incredibly off.
And then it came to me, out of the blue, last week, as a flash of insight, and I can't believe I never realized it before.
"Creating a story" and "writing a story" are not the same activity, and the "you should write for yourself ~uwu~!" proselytizers in no way recognize that these two things are completely different.
Look, here's how it goes. I'm lying in bed, trying and failing to fall asleep, and I'm starting to get anxious about falling asleep, and the more anxious I get, the less likely I am to actually manage to sleep, so I have to come up with a way to distract myself pronto. When this first started happening to me 30+ years ago, I was at a loss, but now it's old hat, I know exactly what to do: envision a favorite character. They might be an OC. They might be from a table top RPG or LARP I've played. They might be from a favorite book, movie, show, etc. And, once I've picked that character, I think - okay, this is who I'm in the mood to think about right now. What kind of story do I want to tell? For me, I usually want an adventure with some romance, and I usually want queer, and I usually want some smut, and, and, and. The precise details depend on my mood, and how tired I am, and how long I'm lying there, and what my hormones are doing, and how my depression is, and who knows what else. Brains are fucking weird, I'm just along for the ride (and hoping I'll eventually maybe actually fall asleep).
Sometimes, I'll fall asleep before I come up with anything I really want to explore.
Sometimes, I'll fall asleep every night for a week before I come up with anything I really want to explore.
And then, when it comes, the pieces will fall together all at once, and I'll start to craft a story.
I'll imagine how the characters meet, what the conflict is, what brings them together, what tears them apart. I'll play out entire dialogs word for word with description and all. I'll imagine them falling in love, and falling apart, and falling and falling and falling until they finally rise, triumphant.
Sometimes, I can tell the entire story in one night. Sometimes, it takes me days, or weeks. The ones I like best I revisit months and years later, whenever I remember them and go, "oh yeah, I loved that one." I'll retell them over and over again, until I could recite to you the entire course of events.
And that activity? Is absolutely one I do solely for myself. It's epic, and it's empowering, and it makes me happy, and it helps me sleep, and it allows me to explore my emotions and picture other worlds and to tell a tale that's exactly what I want. All the best parts, with the happy ending close at hand.
You know what doing this isn't? It's not even close to writing a story.
Let's go to the next step of this process: I've got an idea and I really love it and I decide, "I want to write this down." I have absolutely no reason to do this just for myself. The story is already created. If I didn't want to share it, I literally never have to write it down. It's already in my head. It's already mine. Writing it down is done solely to share it with others - and it's an arduous, incredibly difficult slog. The story I can tell in a night or two or ten will take days, weeks, months, years to codify into elegant words suitable for consumption that communicate the images, ideas, emotions, and story that I've already created for myself. By the time I finish a novel or long fic, I've usually told the story to myself so many times that I'm fucking sick of it. The reason I never write codas and timestamps, even when I've said I would, is that seriously by the time I write "the end" I am so fucking over this garbage that I don't want to think of it again. Because my brain has told that story, to myself, and now to everyone else, and it took so flippin' long to tell it to someone else that I want to tell a new story. Heck, usually by the time I finish a long fic, I HAVE created stories, multiple stories, for myself, because I'm bored of the one I'm writing, so instead/as well, I craft a dozen others to keep myself entertained, ones I'll never write down and never share - stories that are just for me.
I truly think the vast majority of the people who are the hugest proponents of "write for YOU!" have never tried to write something long - something that takes months and months (how long that is, word count-wise, will be different for different people, of course).
I want to, and DO, create stories for myself. All the time. Constantly. Multiple times a day.
But turning the fantasy in my head into something readable? That's work, and it's work that I never have to do if the goal is just to "tell the stories I want to tell." I do that silently 24/7.
Putting it into words? That's about sharing.
And THAT is why "write for you, don't worry about readers!" has never spoken to me. And I can't believe I've been writing for almost 30 years and only JUST figured this out.
