The loneliness of the content producer
It’s a common occurrence during the sizzling days of August, when birds sing in blissful ignorance, and the Edinburgh Fringe Festival is on, to come across tales of acts performing for pitiable audiences. Nobody thinks much of these recurrent stories, for such is the nature of the Fringe — take risks, risk being ignored. But this year, comedian Georgie Grier made the news when a lachrymose selfie she took after performing for just one person went viral. As a result of this sudden attention, she ended up performing for a packed audience the next day. This is a testament to the veracity of both the lunfardo saying, “el que no llora no mama” (no crying, no breastfeeding), and the proverbial expression that “persistence eventually pays off”, since reportedly she had put her tear glands to work the previous year, under very similar circumstances.
I can’t judge Ms Grier, no matter how calculated her tears might come across — I can’t because I’ve found myself in her shoes many times. And if unlike her, it has never crossed my mind to post a teary selfie after one of these woeful occasions, this is only because I’m too aware of being the bearer of a difficult face, a face that I avoid inflicting on people as much as possible. Perhaps I should care less about such considerations and start sobbing in public more often, documenting my tears in the hope that someone shoves a tit in my mouth1, or at least buys a copy of one of my books.
When I say I’ve been through the same I mean it. I’ve sat in literary festival panels, with more people in the panel than in the audience. I’ve read for a handful of acquaintances in venues across town, selling just about enough tickets to pay for my train fare. I’ve launched my work for an audience of tumbleweed, at an event organised by a publisher who forgot to bring copies of my book — thankfully no one tried to buy a copy anyway. Alas, I even traveled to Ireland to give a talk at a university, for an audience of two2 — an intimate and humiliating occasion with a terrible carbon footprint.
Ask any writer who’s been around long enough and they’ll recount very similar stories: being routinely humbled into acknowledging your irrelevance comes with the territory. If you can’t deal with this aspect of writing, then consider quitting, or write only for yourself. Otherwise you’ll waste your life away posting teary selfies, which unlike Ms Grier’s will get zero traction, since people find writers insufferable.
Still, in the face of how difficult it is to command some attention, I don’t think it’s senseless to ask “why bother with this writing thing at all?” In order to properly answer this question we need to recalibrate what writing and bothering with writing mean.
The tumbleweed in the room is the norm, not an exception
As a self-taught writer I’ve always wondered if people who pay to be schooled in this most anachronistic of crafts are given a full brief of what awaits them. Judging by the expectations with which the average MFA graduate enters the scene in 2023, it feels that as a rule they are kept in the dark about many if not most of the practicalities of writing. And then one day they collect their degree in an awards ceremony and they become someone else’s problem3.