It’s hard to be a writer when no one reads anymore.

The term “buggy whip” industry was coined when automobiles became more and more affordable and popular. People without horses and buggies didn’t need buggy whips anymore. A buggy whip industry is one that, for the most part, is slowly dying out. Real reading today is practiced by a shrinking and aging audience.

The paradox here, if you can call it one, is that as far as sheer numbers go, people are reading more than ever. Only they aren’t reading stories or literature anymore. There are a handful of people left who read the mass-marketed top-of-the-bestseller-list stuff – both fiction and non-fiction. And there are the folks, mostly growing older, who still buy books in their favorite genre.

Most people are reading, and they are reading all day long, but they are reading highly targeted and sculpted content on their devices. Short, updates and posts from friends and acquaintances are common, but the bulk of what the average Westerner reads today (I would say over 90%) consists of targeted marketing, propaganda pieces churned out by content creators, fallacious and stupid memes produced by meme mills, and narrow political advocacy hit pieces spewed by polemical sweatshops paid for by the billionaire oligarchs who control public thought.

Real reading is not really an option if you want to save civilization, but there isn’t much interest in that anymore. So why keep writing when no one reads? On that subject, not long ago, I wrote this rant. You like a good rant, don’t you?

A Writer’s Rant

There are an almost infinite number of ways to write horribly, but two ways to guarantee it:

• If your motivation or inner conviction is that you care what everyone thinks about what you write, or…
• If you say you don’t care what anyone thinks about it.

The former is guaranteed to produce the lowest common denominator, AI quality, commercial, soulless schlock. It may make money, but probably won’t since it is competing for eyeballs against a thousand-thousand other bland and soulless keyboard thumpers pumping out ChatGPT-level nonsense. That doesn’t mean it won’t make money. It may make millions. Commercial is commercial for a reason. But the chances are slim because the pool you’re swimming in is a mile wide and an inch deep.

Most of the world is incapable of knowing what is good, nor do they care to know. And most of them have no inkling that they are NPCs and that their likes and wants are manufactured for them. Consider that literally half the minds in the world fall below the average, and most of those are way below it, and there is the pool you are looking for to find validation. Writing for everyone is fine for the tiny sliver of a percentage of writers who succeed in walking between the raindrops, finding a niche, marketing well, capitalizing on a million other factors, and then getting rich on it. But it doesn’t make the writing good, and for most people, it’ll never work.

The latter thing (“I only write for myself”) is a myth. A fantasy. It’s something people say to please themselves and make themselves feel like they are producing something soulful. In fact, no one ever writes only for themselves no matter what they say. Even if they do the Vonnegut thing where they write something, read it, and then destroy it, they still have assumed some value in it for someone, even if it is the voices in their head they pretend are their audience. Writing it presupposes an audience, otherwise you’d just think it. Even if the audience is the specters and demons having a party inside the writer, they don’t write it down if it’s just for themselves.

Pretenders parrot this nonsense for a bunch of reasons. They believe, even subconsciously, that it removes any responsibility or expectations. If it is garbage, they can say “I didn’t write it for you, I wrote it for me.” This is the modern cult of self-love and narcissism where everyone tells you that you are great and then you give yourself a participation trophy as a form of mental self-pleasure. But no one, in actuality, writes for themselves only.

They write for the phantasms in their heads that they imagine represent the hordes of fans who would want to read their stuff if they only knew about it, or they write for a handful of real-life rubes and sycophants, family and friends, who don’t know good writing but appreciate anyone pretending to be an “artist.” Most are just bad writers who don’t want to do the hard work of learning, practicing, and seeking out valuable input and wisdom. They have already placed their own souls on the balance scale of history and found themselves worthy. Thus, the pronouncement. I am the best judge of my work, and I find it wonderful.

Or they write for a narrow sub-culture while pretending not to. This sub-culture could be a fanbase of degenerates or ne’er do wells who hold to the same degraded worldview. Even good writers, or those who could be good, fall for this. Some few, as I’ve said, find an audience in a particular time and place in the zeitgeist where this narcissistic cult solidifies around some basic degenerate ideas for a small window of time, and they become world famous. J.D. Salinger and Jack Kerouac come to mind. But even they weren’t writing for themselves.

Hemingway freed the language from pomp and circumstance and changed literature forever, but he didn’t write for himself no matter what he or his fans say. I have a complete volume of letters and articles from, to, and between Hemingway and his critics. He cared what people thought. Young Hemingway wanted more than anything in the world to be published, and once he was published, he wanted to be a novelist, and once he was a novelist he wanted acceptance by the great writers, critics, and the literati. He wrote to be true to what he believed writing should be, but he didn’t write for himself only. Not in any sense.

I guess the reason for writing this rant is that I have been at war for a few decades with this idea that good writing is pure talent, luck, or some other mystical product of chance. It isn’t. It is hard work. It’s not just typing. I want to encourage writers to write, even if they don’t publish – but without the fantasy self-pleasuring and mysticism of the anguished artist B.S.

A great writer isn’t just imbued magically or genetically with the skills that make writing great. Writing is one of the few fields of endeavor where the layman and the idiot both think it just exists without any know-how, work, or practice. I watched a documentary the other day about a card magician who was blind! Totally blind. And he practiced 16 or more hours a day. For most of his career, his audience didn’t know when he started his show that he was blind. But he worked hard at it, which you’d have to do to be a blind card magician. Being good takes hard work and learning. He’d be offended if someone said “You are just lucky that you are so talented,” or if some sighted hack with no skills was walking around pretending to be a magician and excusing his lack of skills by saying “I only do magic for myself.” (I mean… who does deception to the only person in the room who knows the trick?)

Bad writers want to push the idea that they are so mystically worthy in their souls that whatever they vomit out in written form is worthy. Most writing is junk. It’ll always be that way, and when we all carry typewriters in our pockets, a million-million typers fancy themselves as writers. But real writing is work. Writing for everyone is dumb and produces garbage. Lying to yourself and saying you are only writing for yourself also produces garbage.

So… isn’t this a meta-paradox? Why write when no one reads, and why write about no one reading that no one will read?

Well, the fact is that some of you. Some few of you. Some beautiful, wonderful, awesome few of you… still read. I’m stopped in town almost every day by people telling me that they read my columns. I still get emails from people when they read my books. There are a few of you left.

I write for you.

(And every time someone reads this far and then finds a way – social media, or email, or in person – to say “I read this,” an angel gets its wings.)

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Michael Bunker is a local columnist for BrownwoodNews.com whose columns appear on Wednesdays and Sundays on the website.