Write for Yourself First

I have been writing consistently here for a year now. You can go back a year and find one essay published every single day without fail. I have broken a lot of the writing advice that gets thrown around on social media, except for one piece of advice—and that is something I didn’t learn from social media. Social media is filled with advice about maintaining a swipe file of ideas. They tell you to keep track of trending topics. Write about subjects that are most likely to go viral. Write on platforms that promote your content. Write for the algorithm. Write in a particular way so the user keeps reading. I have broken all of that advice. I chose a platform that was completely different from what was recommended. Instead of writing to bait the reader into reading more, I wrote as if I were talking to a friend at 2 a.m. in a bar over a whisky. There are essays buried here where I have confessed my heart out—confessions that I have never made to a single living soul on the planet. I…