meh, as usual my opinion is the opposite here. step one, don't become wrapped up in the ideal of being "a writer". find something useful to say, then say it fo

meh, as usual my opinion is the opposite here. step one, don't become wrapped up in the ideal of being "a writer". find something useful to say, then say it forcefully. or just churn out garbage to pay the bills. nobody else is looking at your work with the same perspective as you do. step two, don't lament that readers might not read what you wrote. if you build it, they will come, so long as your marketing team does their job right. step three, open palm slam any notions of "profundity" into the ground, immediately. profound things come in concise packages, and we call them data. i guess if you're interested in making some kind of flowery Literature, you might think that you could get a free pass out of this step, but no, you can't. you can make things sound pretty and contain real information without falling into the forced affectation of "Literature". it doesn't matter if you're telling a story about fantastical characters or telling a story about how there are four nitrogenous bases in DNA. don't aim for profound, aim for communication of insight. step four, if you're concerned that you're not impacting the world as a writer, you're writing about the wrong stuff, or to the wrong people. the author complains that swords beat pens. but that's a cop out. swords are merely the continuation of the work of pens by other means. (shout out to clausewitz, a guy who understood this principle very well) finally -- and this is really something that cannot be said enough -- history is a story of those who lived with both their feet on the ground and whose focus was on putting one foot in front of the other. the more you fixate on "living in the shadow of X" or "if only america valued Y, I'd Z" or "They don't understand Us because We're Enlightened" or "Our Generation Of Writers" the more you get lost in a fantasy world of thoughts which are disconnected from the physical reality of your fingers smashing the keys of your keyboard, which is the primary mode of productivity for writers. does any of the above stuff prevent you from smashing those keys? no, if you are sitting here and reading this, it does not. think about stuff all the time, yeah. but don't talk yourself in circles when it comes to things that you can't relate back to the physical world at the moment. mental walls become real, but that doesn't mean that they bear any weight. live in the here and now, and manipulate information which you can prove or at least correlate to a physical phenomenon.