Overthinking the process of sharing art online
Lately I've been tying myself in knots trying to figure out how to hold the act of creation and sharing more lightly—while also taking it seriously enough to carve out time for it. It's a conundrum...
A month ago I was sitting on the stairs in our little cottage in tears of frustration—not because I had just received a rejection letter for a new poem I was rather proud of (though I had), but because I was disgusted with myself for being disappointed.
I tell myself all the time that I’m writing poetry because I have to; this is my calling, the way I make sense of myself and the world around me. I’ve written poems ever since I was a child; when I was little and less self-conscious poems would flow out of me, generally platitudes about the beauty of a summer’s garden, but no matter how bad the poems were they were a deeply honest response to the world and how I saw it, received it, perceived it.
I admire that child, so pure in her intentions, writing from the heart without questioning it or wanting anything from her poems except to enjoy the process and perhaps make her parents smile with the gift in the form of wonky handwriting and grass-stained paper.
My poetry has always asked—demanded, even—to be shared. But as an adult, navigating the world of poetry competitions, submissions, and publication, how do we keep that purity of intention when we need the vital stamp of approval from the gatekeepers of our craft in order to achieve artistic “success”?
In the face of needing to pay the bills, and all the messy complexities that adult life presents us with, how can we both take our craft seriously enough to set aside time for it even if it’s not making us money (especially when it’s not making us money, actually), and also hold it lightly enough to release it into the world without worrying about how it’s received? I really really don’t want to care about how it’s received, you see.
Somehow, though, despite all of my most noble aspirations and instincts, I really do care. I tell myself beautiful, idealistic, half-true things like “If I felt like I came closer to the truth of life while I wrote, it was worthwhile. If a line in one of my poems moved even just one person, that’s a bonus.” But even that doesn’t take the sting away from a panel of judges not choosing your work. Why doesn’t it?
I want to be free from worldly measures of success, but the honest truth is that there’s a part of me that cares embarrassingly deeply, that still craves awards, praise from “experts”, a stamp of approval that will tell me this venture is worthy, and worthwhile.
The morning I found myself in tears on the stairs I was grappling with a nasty voice inside my head that was saying things like “Your poetry isn’t special or good or worthwhile. You’re an embarrassment. You’re wasting everyone’s time.” I felt sick with frustration that such a mean, materialistic, worldly voice existed within myself. I don’t accept those values as my own. I didn’t give that person permission to be in my head. So, who is she and what is she doing there?
When I’m my best self, the glow I get when I finish a poem and feel like I touched the heart of something real with my words—that’s everything. The process was enough. I was in conversation with the Divine; I lived out, no matter how briefly, my essence as a creator made in the image and likeness of the Creator.
But then there’s the instinct to share. I suppose that’s as natural as the instinct to create, given my belief that we were also created to be in relationship by a God who is Love itself. We were made for relationship, and can’t survive without it; even our art requires it.
And so I share my poem with a handful of loved ones, or perhaps even my Instagram community. Someone tells me they found themselves somewhere in the lines of my poem, that it made them feel seen, or helped them see the world anew. A dear friend who is a climate activist writes to say he had the poem in his pocket to read in police custody, and slipped a copy to a friend in similar straights.
This feedback is enough. It’s more than enough. On my best days it’s all I want. But then… then I dream about having a book of poetry published, and to do that, I need to perhaps win a competition or two to convince a publisher to take me on, and so the stakes get higher, and the restless weighing of the value of this work begins again. Before I know it, I’m looking to external forces to tell me if there’s any point continuing.
This is the tension inherent in making any kind of art: we create for the love of it, for the process, because it makes us feel more alive. But art also demands that we share it; it demands a response. Even if we’re not trying to make money from our art (and how to make a living as an artist, how to create the conditions in your life that can support your art-making—that’s a murky question for another time), it’s near impossible not to look to others and be either crushed or buoyed by their response.
Lately, I’ve found myself struggling with the idea of growing an audience for my work at all (which is ironic, given that growing an audience for other people is part of what I do for a living). I find myself suddenly shy in spaces I never felt shy in before. I want to consume less, but produce more, but then feel guilty for adding to “the noise” when I don’t want there to be too much noise in the first place. Who do I think I am? Shouldn’t I listen—and engage with—everyone if I want anyone to listen to me?
Only I can’t. None of us can. Our attention is fracturing, splintering into a million tiny pieces the longer we spread it so wide. The internet is limitless, and we can only take in so much information before we start to lose ourselves.
“I’m a big advocate for making our digital worlds smaller,” said Dylan Marron to Nora McInerny. “I don’t think we were meant to see this many people and deal with this many people because there’s no way to actually get to know this many people.”
Yes, that, I think. I want a smaller digital world. I want to scroll less, write more, and when I do read, I want to read more long form content. I want to deep dive, rather than consuming quick bites of content that feel… like small talk at a party.
I want a smaller social circle, and to think of the writers I read and my own work that I share not as socialising, but as simply reading or writing, not necessarily always demanding a public two-way conversation. Isn’t that what it used to be, before social media re-wired my brain to consume content in these tiny bites with so much emphasis placed on comments and likes and followers? I don’t have to be friends with everyone whose work I read, or with everyone who reads my work. (This thought doesn’t come naturally to me, as someone who talks to strangers on the train and makes friends quickly, deeply, frequently, and with great delight.)
We shouldn’t have to micro manage or curate the reception of our work. We should write it carefully, thoughtfully, yes; and with the best interests of the people who might read it at heart. There are some public conversations that are exciting and helpful—vital, even. But are we perhaps overdoing public conversations these days?
Perhaps less immediate access to the response of whatever I create and share would help me to hold it all more lightly, to create more and let it go after the act of creating.
I suppose what I’m saying is, I crave the days when there was more of a separation between our social lives and our reading. Is that terrible of me? I don’t want to sound mean, like I don’t want to talk to anybody online; that’s not it at all. I’ve made some very close friends with people I’ve met online. It’s just all become so overwhelming. The need to respond to everything. To have a strong opinion—immediately—about everything. To be in the comments (to even see the comments), to answer the DMs. Could it be possible to have a smaller online world, but still have an expansive intellectual world? I think that would benefit me both as a reader and as a writer.
This past week I listened to a conversation between Kate Bowler and Elizabeth Gilbert on the Everything Happens podcast that shook some of this overthinking loose a little bit. Gilbert talks so passionately about the need to live in the tension of the fact that acts of creativity require both great seriousness and such a lightness of touch. It both matters greatly, and it also doesn’t matter at all. Just make the damn thing.
My father gave me a copy of Rilke’s Letters to a Young Poet when I was a young teenager, and so in a way I’ve been carrying the perfect answer to all of this over-thinking writer angst with me all these years, I just had to re-discover it:
“In the deepest hour of the night, confess to yourself that you would die if you were forbidden to write. And look deep into your heart where it spreads its roots, the answer, and ask yourself, must I write?”
At this question, my mind becomes still. Yes, yes I must write. Well then, I suppose I’d better get on with it.
Questions about how to make ends meet, how to manage your ego, how to share your work and handle the reception of it, how to hold it all lightly while also taking it seriously enough to stick with it and do the hard work of seeing an idea through to the end, how to both create and consume thoughtfully in the modern age, how to have a smaller and yet still expansive world—all of these questions and more remain.
But perhaps, after all, those questions, when lived rather than intellectualised, will answer themselves in time.
“Have patience with everything that remains unsolved in your heart. Try to love the questions themselves, like locked rooms and like books written in a foreign language. Do not now look for the answers. They cannot now be given to you because you could not live them. It is a question of experiencing everything. At present you need to live the question. Perhaps you will gradually, without even noticing it, find yourself experiencing the answer, some distant day.”
—Rilke, Letters to a Young Poet