The Most Important Question to Ask Yourself as a Writer
You’re in a restaurant seated across from the person you’ve been dating for the past month or so.
About halfway through the meal, your date catches you off guard by saying:
“So, I Googled your name last night.”
“You did?”
“Yeah, to see if I could find any dirt on you.”
“And?”
“No dirt.”
“Well, that’s good…”
“I did find something, though.”
“Oh yeah? What’s that?”
“Your Medium profile.”
“Oh, right.”
“I actually spent like an hour reading some of your stuff.”
“Really?”
“Yeah. It’s quite good.”
“Thanks.”
“I had no idea you write online. When did that start?”
“Um, some time last year.”
“So, do you want to write a book or something?”
“Not really, no.”
“It’s just a hobby, then?”
“I…ugh…”
“I mean, it must take up a lot of your time, right? What are you hoping to get out of it?”
“Um…”
What’s It All For?
As a writing coach, I’m often asked questions like:
- What sorts of topics should I blog about?
- How much of my personal life should I put into my stories?
- Who should I try to target with my articles?
- How often should I publish?
- What style or voice should I use?
My response is always the same:
Before you can address any of these crucial questions, you first have to answer an even more fundamental question:
What, exactly, are you hoping to achieve by writing online?
What will becoming a successful blogger allow you to do that you can’t do (or do well) right now?
What will publishing on Medium, on your personal website, or elsewhere on the Internet help you to accomplish?
What, in short, is the goal of sharing your ideas with the world through your writing?
Coming up with a concrete, detailed, and specific account of why you want to write online is the only way you can possibly assess whether 1) you’re succeeding as a writer and 2) your time spent writing is time well spent.
You can’t effectively answer or take strategic action in response to questions about what, to whom, how often, in what style, and how personally you should write without first deciding on the purpose of your writing and then using that purpose to structure and guide every writing-related choice you make.
I take a very specific view when it comes to publishing content online:
Considered as a whole, blog posts should serve one or more particular functions, i.e., they should operate as a vehicle through which goals other than sharing ideas for their own sake can be pursued.
In short, your writing should be for something—something beyond itself.
Your job as a writer is to consciously decide what that thing is and to then write in a way that brings you ever closer to achieving it.
This might seem too obvious to waste time thinking about, but you’d be surprised by how many people start publishing articles without ever seriously asking themselves why they labour, day after day, creating endless blog posts.
Worse yet, some of these people then complain that they’re not ‘getting anywhere’ as writers, despite never having defined (even to themselves) what ‘getting somewhere’ would entail.
I want to suggest to you that every choice you make as somebody who publishes written content on the Internet should be grounded in and informed by one or more specific desires, goals, or needs you have, whether business, personal, professional, or other.
Even if your only objective is to write stuff that some people read some of the time, you should still be strategic in how you approach your writing.
Let me explain.
Why I Write Online
To be completely frank, I publish content online because I want to make money.
I write articles on Medium, publish blog posts on my personal website, and post status updates on LinkedIn as a way to directly or indirectly generate income.
Directly, I make (a bit of) money via the Medium Partner Program; indirectly, I make (much more) money via content marketing.
With every piece of content I create, I try to provide the reader with value by using my words to help, inspire, or teach something of importance.
I do this because writers who don’t provide value to their readers (or to their clients) don’t get paid for their work—plain and simple.
The odd time I’ll publish something—such as my 8000-word essay on the philosophy of science—that’s for me and me alone.
I write articles like that one, albeit only seldom, not to get the attention of others but rather to clarify my own thoughts on and understanding of the topic.
I’m not disappointed when I make little, if any, money from that kind of writing because income generation isn’t the function it’s meant to serve.
The vast majority of my writing, however, is explicitly intended to create more ones and zeros in my bank account.
Most of the articles I publish centre on the art, science, and marketing of writing.
With every writing-related piece I publish, my foundational goal—the one that leads me to create the content in the first place—is to demonstrate my expertise as a writer/editor so that I can land more paying clients.
The more I actively show that I have a decent understanding of the English language and of English written communication, the more readers come to trust me as an authority figure; and the more that trust develops, the more readers are willing to hire me to help them improve their writing.
Questions about audience, degree of personal storytelling, style, topic, and so on are all filtered through my intention to use my writing to convert readers into clients who pay me for my coaching, editing, or ghostwriting services.
For example, any personal details I provide in my articles on writing relate to, unsurprisingly, writing as such or to the business/marketing side of writing.
So, I’ll write about my experiences working as a ghostwriter, studying philosophy to improve my writing, struggling to write clearly when I don’t get enough sleep, and writing to and for my readers rather than to and for myself, but I won’t include other kinds of personal details because they’re simply not relevant to what I’m trying to achieve.
Similarly, I deliberately use formal language whenever I write articles on the craft of writing; because I want to convince the reader that I practice what I preach, I avoid using colloquial prose, as doing so would be counterintuitive to my goal.
None of this cheapens the value of the content I publish; the ideas explored in my articles aren’t tarnished by the fact that, for me, the ultimate purpose of such articles is financial gain.
You don’t have to work with me to find my writing-related pieces helpful or worthy of your time.
Indeed, most people who read my articles never hire me.
All the same, each time I set out to publish something, I ask myself, “Will this article support or hinder my main goal of bringing in more income?”
Most of the time, if I’m considering writing something that I don’t believe will facilitate my content marketing objectives, I abandon the piece and then try to create a more relevant post.
What matters, in my eyes, is that I know what my online writing is for; and that recognition structures every choice I make about the specificities of my content (what topics to cover, who to target, etc.)
My humble suggestion is that you, too, should explicitly frame each of your writing-related decisions through the filter of your primary objective(s).
Putting It All Together
Perhaps the easiest way to make use of the ideas I’ve discussed herein is to apply the ‘why?’ test to your own writing.
The ‘why?’ test involves asking ‘why?’ again and again, until you finally uncover one or more concrete objectives associated with writing online.
Example 1:
- Why do you want to publish articles on Medium? Because I want to build an audience and an email list.
- Why? Because I want to do more to help change people’s lives for the better than I can do right now.
- Why? Because I read various articles last year that helped me finally find my way out of depression, and I feel obligated to try to do the same for others.
Character and foci of writing: personal stories of struggles with, and triumphs over, mental health challenges expressed via a vulnerable, first-person voice, and/or research-backed articles on the science of mental health expressed via a formal, third-person voice; posting as often as is practical; emphasis on quality over quantity; goal to share accurate, helpful information with readers and to provide support for readers where appropriate.
Example 2:
- Why do you want to publish articles on Medium? Because I want to make a living as a paid writer via the Medium Partner Program.
- Why? Because it’s always been my dream to transform my love of writing into a full-time, paid gig.
- Why? Because I can’t see myself being truly happy doing anything else in life.
Character and foci of writing: stories on topics that receive the most attention and circulation on Medium (entrepreneurship, life lessons, mental health, psychology, self-improvement, tech, etc.); personal stories with a vulnerable, first-person voice, and/or research-backed articles with a formal, third-person voice; posting every day, if not multiple times per day; focus on quantity over quality during the audience-building stage; goal to help, inspire, or teach readers on a consistent basis.
Example 3:
- Why do you want to publish articles on Medium? Because I want to build an audience and an email list.
- Why? Because I’m producing a new film, and I want to be able to market the film to my audience when it hits theatres Q3 of next year.
- Why? Because I want the film to be commercially successful so that I can produce another one the following year.
Character and foci of writing: stories on film-related (or media- or storytelling-related) topics; personal stories with a vulnerable, first-person voice about experiences working in the film industry and/or efforts to raise money for current or past projects; technical articles on film production; entertaining and insightful analyses of films; posting as often as is practical; focus on quality over quantity; goal to create an emotional bond with readers (film fanatics).
As these examples suggest, the point is to be logical and methodical in your thinking as a writer:
In order to achieve x, y, and z [major goals], I have do a, b, and c with my writing [posting frequency, topic, voice, etc.]
Unless you have no concern whatsoever with what happens to your articles after you publish them, you should be strategic by using your ultimate objective(s) to structure the practical writing-related decisions you make on a daily basis.
In short, if you want your writing to lead to something specific, you have to take action to make it happen.
One last thing: Get more stories like this one here.
