The Fear That You Will Make Art and No One Will Care

On vulnerability and apathy

A year ago, a friend posed the following question to me:

“Assuming your financial needs were completely taken care of for the rest of your life, would you be willing to forego any audience for your writing?”

It was an interesting question, and one to which I would have responded with a hearty, “Hell no” just a year or two before. But I’d arrived at a strange point in my life that actually had me thinking about this question.

“Yes,” I said, which shocked my friend.

“You’re kidding,” they pressed. “No one would ever read a word you wrote and you’d keep writing anyway?”

How noble of me, right? But you’d have me wrong, reader: I have, from practically the moment I first realized I’d spend my life doing the scary, ego-leveling thing of putting creative work out in the world, wanted scads of positive attention applied to it. I may be even more prone to this kind of wanting by virtue of being born in 1989 and growing up a girl with access to LiveJournal and a digital camera for taking moody self-portraits.¹

But by 2024, my life had changed in usual ways. I knew what it was like to be scrutinized and dissected, willfully misunderstood, poorly received. These things were happening due to the changing nature of my writing and literary life, but in small group settings in a single rural town instead of, say, sold-out auditoriums across a selection of major cities. In other words, I’d experienced some of the most stressful outcomes of visibility without any of the actual benefits of visibility.

My evolution as a writer had, until the age of 34, resembled a lot of people’s:

• Age 6: Began writing as a joyful compulsion

• Ages 6-17: Disappeared into creative worlds as a way to relax

• Age 18: Became aware that, if I went to a Good Graduate Program, I might have a chance at growing up to be like one of the successful authors I loved/valorized

• Ages 18-33: Went to the Good Graduate Program, learned that I’d need to be popular among readers in order to be guaranteed a career, tried hard to make this happen even as the definition of “popular” kept moving and the gulf between me and it kept widening.

And then things took an abrupt left turn:

• Age 34: Exhausted/addicted/defrauded, abandoned markers of traditional success and entered into a state of free-fall.

American Beauty (1999)

And it was in this state of free-fall that I remembered how pleasant it had been to write as a joyful compulsion, and read because I was thrilled to be reading, and pretend that the characters in the books I read were real and the people who wrote them were characters instead of strivers just like myself. I realized that, all things equal, I would write and write and keep on writing because there was no other way to be alive and me without writing.

So I answered my friend’s question the way I did and then went off and embarked on a full-time freelance career. Which is a polite way of saying that I began scrambling to feed my family via my fiction and nonfiction alone.

Becoming a writer-only (as opposed to a writer-professor or a writer-editor, etc.), jogged my memory about why positive attention — or any attention, really — feels so vital for the art-maker: safety, some modicum of approval. The promise that you can continue with your joyful compulsion.

Less than six months after telling my friend what this really all boils down to for me — the ability to keep on writing ad infinitum — I was back navigating the attention economy, gritting my teeth over the intricacies of audience management. Was I irrelevant? Was I opening myself up to unnecessary criticism? Was I naïve? Was I about to be horribly misunderstood, and then ignored?

Don’t get me wrong, reader: I love writing to you. I love the smart and nuance-inclined audience I’ve built. I have yet to write a single book that sells more than a few thousand copies, but I’m thrilled that you’ve been buying them!

But as I’m contending with my latest project, the most autofictional thing I’ve ever written, I’ve also been contending with the realities of my situation — I get to continue my joyful compulsion as a profession, and that means growing an audience that can sustain me. Which means I want attention (approval preferably). There is no “financial needs taken care of.” The thing I’m doing needs to get noticed. Indifference is my anathema.

Both protagonists of my work-in-progress feel their integrity as artists depends not just upon others’ ongoing approval but how much their art is noticed. Others’ noticing somehow dignifies the art as a real thing-in-the-world. In my first months as a full-time freelancer, I learned that a mentor of mine had notice-me ambitions towards his writing as febrile and desperate as my own. (My essay about that mentor is forthcoming here on 12/15.)

It’s a human thing, to want to be seen. But nowadays, I’m not entirely sure we need to be seen at, say, the expense of our sanity or creative integrity. When I think about things like an “ideologically diverse community” or a “core readership,” I feel great. But when I think about “becoming more popular so I can be allowed to follow my joyful compulsion,” I feel annoyed. I’ve been here before. I’m literally writing a whole novel about how I’ve been here before. And I don’t think it needs to be the same panicked grasping for relevance. I think that maybe the stakes have been made out to be higher than they actually are.²

Do I have faith in myself now that I didn’t before? Yes. On days like today, maybe less so, but broadly yes. I accept that I’ll always have a love-hate relationship with visibility in any degree. I’m elated that I have a core readership excited to engage with the thing I feel compelled to do, day after day. I’m a realist about how vulnerable the thing I and all writers do is, and how it really would be easier just to write for an audience of myself alone.

But here we are, and have been for as long as books have been commodifiable objects. So I’m going to own that it feels scary and messy — scarier and messier than it needs to feel — and remind myself that with a readership comes things my mind alone could never provide me. Bridges built, minds changed, hands shaken at signing tables. That’s not nothing. The grind of audience-building aside, that may even be preferable to the alternative.

Like what you just read? Want to read about literary ambition and approval-seeking gone haywire? Then you might enjoy this:

1. Suffice to say I was never going to write JR or achieve a modicum of visibility only to disappear into Pynchonian obscurity!

2. Is the bad sales track more like the negative performance review than an actual indicator of an author’s ability to speak to a potential audience? I think so.