Writers Post
Apple founder Steve Jobs has been quoted as having said, “Artists ship.” It was his response to the claim that programming is art and therefore takes an unpredictable amount of time. His retort: It is art, but for an artist, time is finite because the art must be shared to have meaning. Artists release their work. Artists ship—and the equivalent statement for writing might be: Writers post.
[About this piece: I am exploring 10 or so simple mottoes that have helped me as a writer. Here is the preceding post in this series.]
This rule might seem to be the opposite of another rule I have written about: The writer’s best friend is the trashcan. In fact, these two ideas are very near to being expressions of the same thing. The writer must make definite decisions about what is and is not in the work, and move on. And the writer must make definite decisions about whether to share a piece or discard it, and move on. Ending the work is as necessary as beginning it, and sharing the work with an audience (perhaps even according to a schedule someone else has determined) is the necessary step allowing the writing to find its completion by realizing its purpose.
(And “post” seems the most fitting word for this sharing. It is a word that encompasses a range of different ways the writing might be shared—a broader range than “publish.”)
Sharing the work with an audience is necessary even if no one in the audience reads it. Who reads it is not in the writer’s control; whether to put it out there is. Writing’s full arc requires the work to be released into the ownership of a reader, and that release is what is important. The one who puts off completing this arc is arguably failing in the work of writing, even if continuing to “write” by finessing sentences and recasting paragraphs is what fills the delay.
Of course there are shades of nuance all through this point. What about the diarist privately composing into a notebook that remains hidden in a desk drawer—isn’t this person “writing”? Certainly yes. In the sense of composition and giving order to thoughts, in much of the way that writing is thinking, yes. But in a different sense, the answer to the question “Is this writing?” might be no, and the different aims for journaling reveal this. Is the writer of the diary writing there with a sense in mind of a future reader, such as an archivist, historian, or a child yet to be grown? Is she writing to this person? If yes, she works to get the writing clear and true for this person, and she essentially “posts” into the diary for posterity. By comparison, the one penning lines into a notebook for the sake of his own literary practice and mental and emotional processing is doing work that might need to be done, but it is not fully “writing” in the same sense. The proof can be seen in the way those lines from the practice notebook would be revised, elaborated, and contextualized (probably turned into different lines altogether) if the idea they explore was ever developed into a post for a stranger to read.
Why is it so essential that posting is part of writing? Why must writers make the difficult and definite choice to post as a step in completing the work? I find various reasons, the first of which has to do with the transition just mentioned, preparing the work for a stranger:
1. Writing is service, and posting forces the work into providing that service. The reality that the work will be shared with another person disciplines the written lines. It means there will be no one present to either forgive the confusing phrasing of the writing or interpret the assertions when their point is not well made. My looking at my work through the stranger’s eye lets me see the passages (some of them at least) that are just me writing to myself without being clear. A house only gets really clean when guests are coming, and in the same way, the imminence of posting helps turn a piece into writing.
2. Posting saves us from our preciousness. This is particularly true if the piece has a set deadline. Saturday Night Live creator Lorne Michaels said of his show, “We don’t go on because we are ready; we go on because it’s Saturday at 11:30.” The writer’s version of this might be, “I don’t post because the piece is ready; I post because the newsletter has to send.” The condition of not quite ready might be ready enough, and the hard deadline cuts us off from the dangerous, difficult path of trying to make the piece perfect.
3. Posting saves us from our ignorance about the audience. Part of the reason the writer can misjudge the worth of his own work (overvaluing or undervaluing it) is because of the way we are tempted to falsely feel value in the extent of our effort. The piece that was easy to write feels like a lark, and the piece that was difficult feels like a weighty work of craft. But this is a false measure, because the reader can’t see this lift. The reader finds only what the post has to say. Posting helps reveal the truth either way: Perhaps the “lark” actually has a message that resonates with many—it needed to be shared. Meanwhile, the work of “craft” might actually be a slog for the reader as much as it was for the writer. That piece needed to be posted so the writer could proceed to more promising work. Writer and reader collaborate to find the full value and meaning of a work, and the reader will have her say.
Posting is an act of courage. The greater the writer, the greater the courage required. This is because the more astute and sensitive writer can anticipate all the potential structural areas in which weakness might be lurking, or all the different prisms of viewpoint through which the refraction of the piece might lead to misunderstanding. In this way, the capacity for great writing can actually confound the act of writing. At some definite point, the writer must end the work. And in doing so, the writer must trust the reader to have it.
Photo: “Set Free” by Nisreen and Modar