Consumers Vs Creators
I was chatting with a friend recently, who had begun to paint again after a long absence from her art.
She explained she felt she had been consuming a lot—news, information, social media—and it was getting her down. “I didn’t want to consume anymore. I wanted to create.”
Isn’t that why we write? Yes, absolutely, we consume other people’s stories—as we hope they’ll do ours—but if our love of stories was only about consumption, well, then, we’d be solely readers, not writers.
And it’s the underlying fulfillment of creation that also struck me. It’s not that we can’t enjoy other people’s stories, but we feel, on some level, in some way, fulfilled by writing. By creating. By coming up with something that has never before seen the light of day. We’re weaving magic with our own imaginations—for us. Because, let’s face it, if it were strictly for the consumer—the reader—we’d pack up our pens in a heartbeat. Given the long odds of publishing, marketing, visibility and discoverability, few writers set out, as their only goal, to churn out a product to make money.
In the writing world where traction is hard to get, it’s heartening to remember that we’re not simply consumers, we’re creators.
That, to me, is worth picking up my pen.