Writing, marketing, and making sense
On the practise and the promise of producing this newsletter
A month or so ago, a reader wrote to me and asked how I was doing this: balancing work and writing. It seemed too much, he said.
I didn’t know what to answer, except that I do it.
I was thinking about that question when writer, critic, and entrepreneur Ranjani Krishnakumar asked me to contribute a short piece for a series on writing.
If she had asked me the same thing last year, I wouldn’t have sent in anything.
What did I have to show for as a writer - a few good essays here, a few good pieces there? I did not think I had the consistency or the discipline that a writer needs to have.
Until this year, that is, when I started writing this newsletter.
So when I sat down to write something for Ranjani’s blog, what arrived was about the why of this project, which I wanted you to read.
The most precious writing of my life is in a letter a girl wrote me. I read it once, when I had already fucked our relationship up beyond saving. I remember phrases from it, and I would give an arm to read it again. But I know I never will. She told me she wrote it to make sense of why she had fallen in love with me, not to send it to me.
I understood.
If that sounds like a tough way to understand things, it is. Sometimes that’s what it takes.
Because most of my writing is just that: a way to make sense of my own ideas, ambitions, and failings. I have never been unsure of that: That my writing is an attempt, mostly, to understand.
Over the last year, I have been able to write something consistently: A newsletter, constructed in essays, on marketing. Has it been successful? Within a circle, yes. Can it have a wider readership? Yes. Can I hustle to make that possible? Yes.
But that’s not why I’m writing what I’m writing. I’m writing because for a long time I was not sure of myself as a marketer. I got good at it gradually, building skills and momentum and confidence. And the newsletter is an attempt to articulate where I’ve come with my marketing. If you understand, I’m writing to understand.
And that’s exactly why I think it has become valuable for others. They recognise my writing as an attempt to make sense, and it attracts those like me - trying, thinking marketers - and they stay. And read.
So what I’m trying to say is this: Don’t write to make a point, to expound, to hold forth. Write to understand, to make sense, to assimilate, to categorise, to classify - even if all of this is just for yourself, especially if all of this is just for yourself.
And if sometimes that’s a love letter you never send, so be it.
Whoever it is for will understand.
You can read the original post here, and the rest of the series here.