Writing to be Read

I have a friend who said something that blew my mind the other day. 

He said that he writes to be read, and if he's not going to be read, he has no interest in writing.  He said that he's not the kind of person who has a story that needs to be told, a story he needs to get out.  He said that he would never write just for himself.

I cannot understand this mindset.  I've tried to use my empathy and see where he's coming from, and I literally cannot do it.

I write because I can't sleep at night if I have too much story in my brain, so I need to tidy up in there.  The projects I have the most fun with are the ones that I assume no one will ever read.  They're just for me, so I don't have to do boring transitions or work too hard on continuity or grammar.  In fact, with some of the later Twenty Percent True Podcast seasons, I've gotten in my own head about it, because I know people will listen to it.  It makes it so I don't want to work on it.  Or maybe it makes it so I HAVE to work on it, and I get anxious about the quality of it, and I fight back against that anxiety by shouting, "You cant tell me what to work on!" and then procrastinating.

I will often go back and read my own unfinished writing.  "Oh.  This is fun," I say to myself, reading the first chapter of a novel from eight years that's only 15 pages long.

So the idea of "I'm going to write something because I want people to read it," just doesn't make sense to me from a philosophical standpoint.  But it also doesn't make sense from a publishing standpoint.  If you're going the traditional publishing route, you spend a year or more on a novel with no guarantee that it will be published.  You find that out at the end, after you've put in the work.  There are so many reasons outside your control for why a book could get canned, and there are a thousand reasons why it might not sell as much as it should. 

I understand why the thought that someone could read your book could be a motivator.  I find that feedback on an unfinished project can encourage me to keep going.  But if that was my only motivation, if I was pouring out my blood, sweat, and tears in hopes that a hypothetical stranger in the future will like it...that's dangerous.  You are not going to get enough out of it to keep you moving.  Every piece of negative feedback is going to hit you ten times harder, because you've basically failed in your single goal to have people like your work.  And, most importantly, you're putting your success and your enjoyment and your project's value entirely in someone else's hands. You're forcing a situation already out of your control even further out of your control.

As tired as the saying goes: Write for you.