The World Owes You Nothing

Maybe we heard a voice in our heads, like a literary Kevin Costner character: Write it and they will read.

So we wrote our best thing. Poured our heart into it. Revealed our deepest and most vulnerable thoughts on the page and then sat back and waited for all the world to be moved (possibly even wowed but no, no, moved is enough) by our ability to transfer abstract ideas and intense feelings into words. And then . . .

nothing.

Surely, our profound writing left readers so entirely overwhelmed that they needed time to process. And so we waited.

Still nothing.

We sent out some tweets, posted a couple links on social media, reminded friends that we were writing stuff online.

One person pity clapped.

How could this be? We worked hard on that writing! We spent two whole hours of our Mary-Oliver-one-precious-life with butt in chair and fingers on keyboard. But it turned out only about twenty-three pairs of eyes and one single-eyed fellow even saw what we wrote, and of those twenty-three pairs plus one eye, only three bothered to actually read it.

After some quick calculations we realize that our blood sweat and tears (so many tears!) generated income of no more than one lousy cent.

A penny?!?

It was almost five-hundred years ago that English statesman Thomas More first (ahem) coined the phrase, A penny for your thoughts. Perhaps he was psychic and predicting the average income of online writers.

Actually a penny, when adjusted for five-hundred years of inflation, is too generous but fractions are difficult to calculate.

The minuscule amount of money our work generated online is an absolute insult! We told the world as much! We ranted! We raged! Strangers, equally angry that their own writing was getting so little attention, confirmed our outrage!

And because we like company, we wallowed together in our misery.

Eventually, we saw the writing on the wall or more accurately scrolled through a lot of stuff online and learned a crucial writers' life lesson: The world owes us nothing.

Yep. That hurts. But that is the honest truth.

It's like this: Say we played basketball pretty well. We're not delusional. We know we could never make the NBA, but every chance we get, we're shooting hoops. We win almost every pick-up. Do we yell at strangers who don't pause to watch us play on the corner court? Do we threaten to quit making baskets because no one appreciates our obvious skills?

That would be silly.

Yet, for some reason a lot of us writing online do just that.

Maybe because when we push the publish or submit or entry button, our writing appears professional. It looks similar in format to that glossy magazine thousands of people pay good money to read. This creates the illusion that we're producing professional pieces.

We're usually not.

More typically, what we're actually writing is more akin to blabbing in a diary we want everyone to read. Or allowing our imagination to run wild in a multiple genre mashup of fictional memoir with a smidge of sci-fi. Or exorcising our emotional demons through a keyboard for personal clarity and to let others know they are not alone.

We may write to educate, inspire, humor, comfort or touch someone's soul.

It is discouraging when our best and most precious posts disappear like a penny tossed into the roiling sea.

Meh. That is the nature of writing when everyone and their mother has easy access to self-publishing.

Be grateful that writing feeds our souls.

Just don't expect it to feed our bellies, too.