I can see two particular ways how my writing has changed over time. I must clarify, though, that these needn’t be changes for the better. They’re based on the way I want to write, not the way everyone should write, so this isn’t about writing better.
Specificity
The first is specificity, meaning narrow, particular topics. The opposite of specificity, generality, is to write about a vast, broad topic, like love, or becoming rich, or being productive, or writing well. ‘How to Write Better’, ‘How to Get Your Dream Job’, ‘How to Become Rich / Attractive / Productive’ all belong here. In short, it’s most of what you’d see on LinkedIn or newspaper articles or social media. And that’s entirely natural, because a broad topic is one that will interest a lot of people – interest them enough to click on it, at least, which is what usually counts today. And when you fight for views and clicks, you probably do better if you put out ‘Learn Coding in 2 months’ than ‘A deep-dive into the differences of breadth-first and depth-first search’.
The ‘problem’ (perhaps my problem, as I can’t speak for anyone else) is that you can’t say much, if anything, new or interesting about something so general – at least, it’s extremely difficult to do so. It could simply be that it’s just me who can’t write anything original on something general, but given how rare it is to read anything of this sort, I’d guess it’s difficult for others as well.
And that makes sense too, when you consider how all the low hanging fruit have been plucked long back, pushed into banality and the realm of platitudes. Marcus Aurelius could write about the stoic way and not being harmed if you chose not to be, but today, regurgitate the same content and though you might win some plaudits (after all, the market is huge), you can’t, with a straight face, call yourself original, or even interesting. There’s no harm in being derivative, of course, and you can always claim that the market validates content – if it sells, it passes. If there’s a reader, or buyer, then the stuff is good, no matter what critics or snobbish gatekeepers think.
Generality is, in a sense, the attempt to play for market share, to reach the greatest number, though penetrate each person very shallowly. To make or write something that a lot of people like a little bit. The advantage being that if a million people see your stuff, people being what they are, at least a few hundred will surely like it, or at least not dislike it much.
Specificity, is the opposite, to make something for only a few, to play in a niche. Only a few people will like it, but they might like it a lot, perhaps even love it. That’s made all the more probable by the very specificity of the thing. If someone plods through a tome on the cultural implications of tattooing practices among Polynesian islanders, for example, or travels thirty miles to some back beyond to eat at a particular restaurant, you know they really care.
What you get with specificity by sacrificing breadth is some sort of depth. It’s easier to be original, or at least interesting, if you’re writing about something niche. Firstly, it’s much less likely that that topic has not been done to death already. And it’s easier to think deeper and push further when you’re concentrating on a tiny point than on a huge mass, the way you can exert far greater pressure with the same force when it’s focused on a small area.
None of this is to say that writers should strive for specificity and shun generality. As always, it comes down to what it is that you value, why you write. If reaching a large audience is what you want from your writing – most personal branding or marketing usually falls here – you probably want generality. I write just in the hope, unfulfilled though it may be, of thinking something interesting, which I realized was unlikely without specificity.
Audience-less
The second change is writing without an audience in mind. Specificity and audience-less writing are closely intertwined; the more specific you are, the smaller the audience, if any, you typically have in mind (and who’ll actually make the effort to read you). And the smaller the audience you write for, the more specific you can be, if you wish to.
Writing without an audience, depending on how you spin it, can be a ‘good’ or ‘bad’ thing. Again, it comes down to what you want from your writing.
When you write with an audience in mind, you might be clear and even, perhaps, interesting – at least to other people. You tend towards clarity because you approach your writing not just as an author, but also as a reader. If you find it verbose, or uninteresting, then there’s a fair chance others might too, and because you write for them, you think of what they’d like to read, and give them that. That – the thought of an audience going through your content, ever ready to abandon it should their interest wane – is what should, ideally, compel you to be interesting.
On the other hand, when writing for myself, without any hypothetical audience in mind, I might drone on about an oddly specific pet topic – like specificity, as I have here – even if it interests no one else. In a way, purging the audience allows you to indulge in specificity if you choose. But at its worst, this is the written equivalent of the boring old geezer who rambles on, oblivious to the fact that no one’s listening. Without an intended audience, I might lose sight of coherence and simplicity. A subject that seems simple enough to me, because of my familiarity with it, could be abstruse to another reader. Or I might express myself in language that pleases me, even if it’s difficult for anyone else to comprehend.
Nevertheless, I find writing without an intended reader – that is, writing for no one (except myself) – gives me greater happiness. You can think and write about what you want, without worrying if anyone else would care enough to read it. You don’t abandon a line of inquiry that interests you if it becomes too involved. And you can think about what to write, and the best way to write it, without also having to think about what others would think about it, and how to make it interest them.
What does it mean to write for an audience? The first and foremost aspect of it is why you write. Building a personal or company’s brand, churning out content to gain visibility or a following, obviously implies writing for an audience. A book too, unless it’s a personal diary (think Marcus Aurelius’ Meditations) or something not intended to be published (Kafka’s ‘scribblings’, apparently intended to be burnt), is written for others to read, with that thought in mind, just as are newspapers and magazines..
Merely writing for an audience doesn’t tarnish writing, otherwise nearly all books would be damned, and that clearly isn’t the case. Sometimes, though, what you write about, and how you write, are also determined by an audience – especially today – and that, I think, does make it much harder to write well, when you don’t much feel anything about your writing, but approach it like baiting fish.
Apart from that, the choice of medium too tells a lot. At one end, a social media platform, a newspaper, a magazine, by their very nature imply anything written there is meant to be read by others. At the other end, a private diary or document on a local device is probably not meant for other eyes. Writing on an obscure website (as I do) falls somewhere in between. Where exactly in between, I guess, depends on the particular case.
In my case, I’ve realized that even a notification, like a mail, to inform an audience of a new essay, hampers my writing, by pushing the thought of an imaginary reader to the front of my mind, never allowing me to forget him or her. Abandoning notifications also creates a good test for whether someone really wants to read you, if they do so without any prompting.
The question remains though – why write on a website at all, if you don’t want an audience? The only ‘defence’ I have to that ‘charge’, if you can call such things by such names as defences and charges, is that in some way the act of committing something to a place it can be seen by others (even if it isn’t) compels a discipline and attention to detail that might otherwise be lacking. And too, that if it does interest or even benefit anyone, then that is a net increase in at least someone’s happiness, even if only a fleeting one, and this, I think, is not valueless. If instead, it repels someone, strongly enough to point out any shortcomings, then too there might lie an opportunity to learn and improve. And finally, there is always serendipity, that if you put something of yourself out there, send a signal so to speak, you make it possible for people of a similar wavelength to reach out to you.
In its purest form, though, I think writing without an audience is akin to a tree bearing fruits. A tree bears fruits not for anyone else, neither as a gift for select friends and family, nor as a strategy to win followers and likes, but simply because it’s its nature to, and it can’t be any other way. I’m aware though, that I’m biased in the matter, as is everything I’ve written here; I couldn’t and wouldn’t have written this if I wasn’t.