Three basic questions every writer should ask themselves

Thursday 8/1/24

The three most basic questions every writer should ask themselves with anything they write or before writing anything:

Who is it for?

What is it for?

What is the point?

If you cannot provide real and honest answers to those questions, there is no reason to write what you're writing.

"Just because" isn't an answer to any of these questions, "To be a part of a community" isn't an answer, "To try and validate myself" isn't an answer, "Other MFA grads" isn't an answer, "Because I'm a trust fund tosser and my father was a writer" isn't an answer, "So I can identify a certain way" isn't answer, "Because I have a dream" isn't an answer, "Because the arts are important" isn't an answer.

I mean honest, real, specific answers that speak to value and utility. Or else you're doing it for the wrong reasons and it will be the same as if what you wrote didn't exist and you didn't do it, save you'll be one of millions of people doing what you're doing and contributing to why people don't read and don't have reason to.

When you have millions of people writing and calling themselves writers who cannot provide answers to these questions, you have no one reading and no one with cause to read--or pretend to have read--save, "I'm related to her," "This makes me one of the good ones," "The New York Times praised this book up the ass for reasons that have nothing to do with its quality and I just don't know that right now."

You also have no one coming up/along who can answer these questions when it comes to what they're writing and who write well, because the practices of those millions--and their systems, their networks, the deleterious spread of their practices--makes it all but impossible for someone to act and write as an individual, to grow their personal talent, if they have any, because that would mean always moving on their own, against resistance, and with no support.

No one has that in them. Very briefly, maybe. But this is the journey of one's lifetime. So things that might have been good, don't ever get a chance to happen. The writer who might have been a good writer with what they came into this world in terms of natural ability, isn't going to be that good writer now because they will not do all that they would need to do to be that writer.

That's what the millions of writers who can't provide real answers to these questions ultimately achieve, en masse. And really that's all any of them achieve, if you want to call it that.

The more viable answers one has to each of these three questions, the better.