Stray Thought: When you commit to being a writer, designer, musician, actor–heck anyone who creates and puts their creations out there–you’re making a commitment to an audience that includes one often forgotten piece. You are in essence saying: I’m going to keep creating as long as you keep consuming. There are many reasons for this dynamic. We can get into the financial aspects of it in another blog, but I think it all boils down to that balance between consumer and creator. I think we are nourishing ourselves by nourishing the consumer. We get right by making them feel what we feel. We get high off the contact with our creations.
I still go into bookstores looking for that moment of ‘yessir’ when I see my work on the shelves. Honestly, it has nothing to do with them seeing my name (though me seeing my name is pretty fantastic). It is more about knowing that what I made is being consumed and (occasionally) enjoyed and at least talked about. Even as my novel slips into the 7,000s in Amazon Cyberpunk best sellers, even as people drop reviews that are sometimes good and sometimes bad, I know I created content that made people think for just a moment. I suppose youtube creators get this high a lot (though they don’t spend a lot of time creating each individual piece of content).
If writers are vampires it is the readers upon which we feast. We need them to stay alive.