Looking Ahead to 2023

A brief outline of the direction my work will take

Photo by Anthony Roberts on Unsplash

I have been writing online for a few years now and 2022 was the year I made writing my sole source of income.

Currently, I don’t have any social media presence

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 and I’m not exactly a regular on the podcast circuit

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. I doubt if anyone outside the people reading this right now have ever heard of me or have encountered my work

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And that’s just fine.

I have no personal goals with any of this other than to continue to produce what I think is good and thoughtful work. The only goal here is to put out work that I am proud of and that was written to the best of my ability at the time. Although this is not as simple as it sounds. As today it can be relatively easy to phone it in, settling for good enough especially when there are plenty of examples of people who have become huge successes off the back of writing that is merely just good enough to keep us reading. The extra effort needed to excel is not generally incentivised.

But I do think there is a moral imperative to strive for excellence and I feel compelled to be a model for this approach. I feel a responsibility to always try to make art, rather than just creating content.

The challenge for me in 2023 will be to write more fiction in this spirit of creating art. Which will mean fewer essays. The essay is a wonderful and adaptive medium but I feel pulled to continue to focus my energy on developing my style within fiction.

Maybe this (probably unfashionable) move will lose me some readers and supporters alike, and maybe I’ll end up going back into the workforce to supplement this writing income. Such is life. But, the bigger picture here as far as I can see is in walking the walk. I hear people lament the state of society, culture, literature and the arts but I too seldom encounter people who are combatting this malaise by creating art without compromise and without being beholden to the metrics and the comments section. Creating to get likes is not the same as creating to get love.

There are great essayists and storytellers and artists and poets out there- The Soaring Twenties Social Club is ample proof of this- but we lack examples and encouragement. Which is what I am here for. To be the example for others that I wish I’d had when I was starting out

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There is a well known piece of writing advice that urges us to show, don’t tell.

Fiction is all about showing, far more so than essays (which, if left unchecked can easily turn into telling) fiction is all about letting the reader form their own perspectives

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. It’s about aesthetics and experience and empathy and the nature of the world and people as they are. This is the way forward for me, and this is what is calling me for 2023…

1. I had one twitter account that was banned and a second one that I have deactivated after not using it for ages. I don’t miss it. At all.

2. I record episodes of the Tragedies of Modernity podcast, but this is not exactly an exercise in brand building and reputation management!

3. There is something hugely freeing about accepting your own ordinariness, understanding it, working with it and letting go of the mimetically driven contemporary obsession with gaining fame and ‘clout’.

4. This is always a good focus for non fiction ‘write what your younger self needed to hear.’

5. This is why I always turn off the comments for the fiction I post. I am not afraid of feedback and criticism, but I think it is important to not have people’s own interpretation of the story be altered by reading other people’s takes on it. I will always respond to questions about my fiction within the Social Club. Comment sections are great for building community, but sometimes we need a sanctuary from them.