On Writing, Platforms, and Your Gift to the World

A couple days ago I had a my-writing-life-is-a-failure kind of moment. It’s not actually a failure. But as an emotional writer, sometimes numbers get the better of me. There is this one word that makes my head spin. It’s the word many writers dread. It’s the word that feels like an endless blackhole. It’s the word that matters to many people more than craft, and clarity, more than structure and authenticity.

The word is, platform.

In today’s writing market if you don’t have a platform, you don’t have a deal.

It’s all just too much. We bleed onto the page, write our souls out in the clearest way possible, told in perfectly slanted truth, and then get shot down because our platforms are too small, or because it’s just not quite right for this very moody market.

Here’s what I have to remind myself, and what I want to remind anyone out there who dares to call herself a writer.

We are living in an incredibly fast age. It is the age of immediacy. We want everything asap. Everyone wants everything as quick as possible. But the good life does not come to us asap. The good life comes over time. All things that really matter are cultivated, they don’t just appear out of thin air. The same is true for the writing life. It’s not one book or one post that will make you a writer. It’s a life of words that makes you a writer. It’s the time you sit at your desk or in the coffee shop with journal and pen sweating over the right turn of phrase, and the exact sentence structure to express the thought that means so much to you.

The gift a writer gives any reader is only as good as what it took you to write it. If it doesn’t cost you to write your deep truth, it probably won’t resonate very deeply with your reader.

The writer’s life is a secret life. Very few will ever know how much time you spend working on one essay or one article, or one scene. Most people will never understand how much it cost you to write it all down. They are not meant to know. Those words are your gift to the world and good gifts don’t have price tags attached to them.

There are some who will read your work and realize how much it cost you to pen them. You will, no doubt, encounter readers who will comprehend the breadth of your work and will honor it, but they will be rare.

Once upon a time, before you ever heard the word platform, or even cared, you fell in love with the idea of writing because you fell in love with words. You liked how several words strung together in just the right way had power. Power to unlock your heart strings. Power to name feelings no one had ever named before. Power to tame the storm raging inside of you. And give you hope, make you feel less alone.

As a writer, you have see to your life with words as a way of life. You write and you write and you write and then you send the words out, and trust that over time, they will hit their mark.

I have written several novels. Right now, they are out of print. When I wrote them they were the truest things I knew how to write. I put my entire self onto those pages. They mattered. I sent them out. I sold them.

Recently, I heard from a reader. She tells me one of my novels is her favorite story and it changed her life. It made her see the world differently.

Is she enough platform for me?

We can’t control the market. We can’t tame the sea of critics, and we certainly can’t control how many people read our words. Not really. We do our best with those things, but at some point we have to let the words loose — send them out and release them into the world.

We have control of very few things in this life, particularly the writing life. There are two things I suggest you do if you want to be a writer in today’s market. One, go long. Think marathon not sprint. It’s your life as writer that will meet its mark.

And two, tell the truth. Your truths may change a little over the years, but make sure everything you write you actually believe at the time that you write it. Words matter much more than platform ever will. What good is it to gain the whole world and forfeit your soul? Don’t forfeit your integrity as a writer for the deal, or for quick numbers. At the end, all you have as a writer are your words. You live by them, so let them be true.

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