I'm resisting the urge to work and instead write. I tell myself I will write and then I don't. I don't want to write but that isn't important either. What is important is that I do this for ten minutes or 500 words or whatever. What is important is that I honor this committment to myself because I said I would write at 1PM and it is now 1:01 PM and my brain has been trying to convince me to get out of it and instead work on work.

This is because my brain tells me that the only real work is for my employer. It de-values writing. I have done a reasonable amount of real work for my employer for the day. I don't have to do anything else. But my brain whispers things like well you are at war with Sriram so you should do that <thing> that makes you look good relative to him. Because it's important to keep up on things. Positionally. With your enemies.

Then of course I hear the voice of rationality on the other side saying things like Sriram is not your enemy and you are being paranoid and besides, you can do that <thing> later today or tomorrow or Monday, who gives a fuck, it does not have to be done right now, the time you had set aside for writing.

I'm burning minutes. Burning minutes talking about nothing. Trying to keep the fingers moving.

Ann Lamott says in her book about writing Bird by Bird something along the lines of: If you keep writing eventually the good stuff will come out. You'll have no choice but to talk about something that's real to you. Something that hurts.

Here is something that hurts. For all of the words I have written, I have never produced something that other people might want to read.

There is a stubbornness inside of me – I want to write bleak and depressing stuff, nearly always. That is my view of the world most of the time and there isn't much I can do about it. I'm one of those people who feels flat often, and needs to retreat from the world to somehow regenerate myself in the silence. Writing for an audience means taking breaks in that bleakness. Which I suppose I grant to others already, when I am with them, socially. I make a lot of jokes in real life to help get me through the horrible reality of things like bills and parents with alzheimer's and the stories Penny tells me over and over again rote that make me feel like I am a trapped and unwilling audience member in the sitcom she is putting on. I engage no matter what, like a good trooper. Try to make the other person feel I'm around – even if I am actually on my phone asking chatgpt how to get lyrics to display on my car's dashboard when I'm listening to music.

Writing for an audience means – perhaps not censoring myself – but perhaps choosing to display different aspects of myself. It's a different kind of work. Maybe it's time I do this. Back when I ran a blog, I wrote as a financial superhero fake personality. I let parts of the real me shine through but ultimately I wanted people to take me seriously most of the time so I acted like a somewhat different person – the person I expected they would want me to be.

And I think that's what writing for an audience means. You have to sort of have an audience in mind – like writing for the types of people who like Star Trek, versus the types of people who like Gilmore Girls.

But it's more than that. The guy who wrote another book I just started called Story – which is about crafting stories people might actually give a shit about – says it's really the characters. The MIT nerd who likes Star Trek and a giggly California princess who likes Gilmore Girls are both attracted to the same thing: The characters.

Which means I sort of have to come to peace with the fact that I, as a character, am not that interesting. I'm not passive exactly but my activity takes place online and well – in my head. Like I was just talking about doing work that makes my position better relative to my co-worker Sriram. I can't write about that in a story, it's boring and ridiculous, all internal, no action. If the camera were on me when I was thinking these thoughts, I'd be inert, passive. There's nothing for the viewer to latch on to. Which made me think of all the shitty movies Penny and I watch – the super low grade movies, the Sub-B categories, the filth of filth. Bad ones have no story. Worse ones have absolutely unlikable or completely underdeveloped stock characters. When I am asking Penny and myself twenty minutes into the movie "Wait who am I supposed to give a shit about again? I can't fucking remember, these people are all the same." Plot is not character, and Story is not Plot, either. Plot is the winding path that you, the director and creator and editor, take through the story. Plot is the viewpoint into what is actually happening and chosen to be represented at the current morning. And your average audience cares much less about either of these things than they do about the characters.

And passive wishy washy characters are a chore to connect with for the average person. Even in a book. I read the Bell Jar by Sylvia Plath a few years ago and it was a terrific read, haunting and so on, but that's not what I want to talk about. No, I want to talk about how in the aftermath of reading that book – when I was analyzing it interally and wondering, as I often do, why she can write about depression and still carry the reader along, and I cannot, I realized that I had trouble making anything happen.

And the reason I had trouble making anything happen, I now understand, is that I didn't make the characters do anything.

In this fake story I'm working on – which I want to work on but can't seem to make myself sit down and start, even though I clearly have the time to do so – I am finally making the main character do things. Enough shit has happened to him that he has to take action, and he does. He's resourceful and persistent. And he will end up being the hero in the end, I've decided. It will work out.

Two days ago I was able to sit still for a few minutes which turned into a few hours somehow, spread out over a lazy afternoon, and I wrote the story on the ending. It's not the plot exactly. There's a lot of wiggle room over what I want to show and how I will show it. But it's good. I wrote it and there's guesswork on the part of the viewer as to – well, will THIS happen or will THAT happen – and I do it three times in succession – quick turns in what you think will happen, the standard twists that people seem to need. There's a fake, the character is dead, but then back, and for reasons that 100% make sense in the framework of the story. I would buy it if I was a reader.

I'm proud of myself for writing it.

And I'm proud of myself for showing up to write yet another terrible and self indulgent journal entry.

Here is what I have finally come to understand. I've read twenty books on the writing process at this point. They all seem to be in agreement. You must write. Every day. You must find something that is true for you in the moment and write. This is to keep up your skill in writing things that are real and vital and true. It will keep you connected to expression and sequencing, the general logic and function of how we string words together coherently when we are forced to communicate the more complicated bits of our internals to others who might function quite differently than we do, and would appreciate the clear communication so they too can relate. Because if the reader cannot follow, they cannot relate. And if they cannot relate, surely they will put your stupid book or movie or screenplay down.

That part I've sort of intuitively understood forever. I can write all right when I give myself time and space. And I could write better if I wrote every day. Every time I go through an extended period where I am writing more often, I feel it does get a little better – a little easier to sit through the rough transitions and clearly show, step by step, how I arrived from point a to point b in the flow of ideas or scenes – it gets better and better – and then something happens and I stop writing. Maybe something at work, or a personal crisis, an upcoming wedding, a house move, contractors banging downstairs and inspectors from the town showing up. Something happens and I give it up for a while. When I return, it's impossible to write anything for a long time.

Anyway. Getting back to my so called epiphany. I went out to get my car inspected this morning and while I was waiting I read a few pages of Story by Matt Bird. He doesn't mention journaling or writing true at all. His advice is more practical. If you want someone to read what you are writing, then write something good, for an audience. By writing something good he means creating relatable characters.

And he reveals something important. Good characters are not good people. Good characters are relatable because we see bits of ourselves in them. We see their vulnerabilities and flaws, the things in their lives that were god given and the things in their lives they've worked for. And then, through the evolution of plot, we see how they fight.

It is in the fight that we connect with them, how they get through their day, how they respond to this dickhead or that shitpickle who is hassling them, whether or not they get their inspection done on time. The fight is my way to describe the behaviors these people adapt to get through their day, or to meet the challenges that the story is about to throw at them.

Characters moving through the story is how the plot is generated. The plot becomes almost auto-generated once you have a strong sense of the characters. You can just place them like wind-up dolls in the middle of the story and watch where they go.

But your brain has to do the winding. You still have to write the characters

So even though Bird, in his book, seems to not discuss writing every day or writing what's true, it doesn't mean that what he's saying is any different than what Lamott is saying.

You have to write every day, probably for yourself, in a place you can throw shit away and not worry about anyone looking at it, in a way that is completely unselfconscious.

And this isn't done to generate a word count or awaken a muse.

No. This is done purely to keep the translation machinery running in your head – the process that is constantly looking for ways to express your internal experiences and ultimately translate them into coherent writing.

So Lamott's right, you do have to write every day.

But my epiphany is that Bird is right too. I need to write for an audience and audiences need a different expression of my internal world. They need more relatable characters that move and act, that are resilient and resourceful as they move through their own fight.

So the trick becomes weaving your internal stuff – which is as real and true as it gets – into your characters in the book so that they're more sympathetic, interesting, dynamic, relatable, and likable.

And this doesn't mean selling out or surrendering yourself. It's a different way of expressing truth – you will still write characters that feel true to you. And you can do it if you are continuing to write every single day, for some period of time, absolutely for yourself with no thought of an editor.

I mean of course the rational part of me protests, thinking of all the additional time it means I have to spend writing if I am to create anything at all worth reading. Because now I can't just write for an hour a day to complete a novel. I have to write for an hour and fifteen minutes, maybe longer, because I also have to do the 500 or 750 or 1000 or in this case probably 2500 words that are required to keep that translator process humming.

Which seems like a load of shit – too much time necessary to produce anything of value.

But at the same time, it also feels – correct. Like it makes sense that you have to do both.

It's a little like when I realized that learning how to program was not the same as learning how to function in an enterprise. Programming is a skill and maybe the main reason you were hired, but in order to produce anything that you want other people to use, you need requirements. What kind of code do people actually want you to write? The business side tells you, and you deliver it.

If we're thinking that the audience is the analog for the business in this discussion, this means you have to, like I said, pick an audience and deliver what they want.

And what they want is some relatable characters that feel true – that's what makes the whole fantasy feel real.

So if you want to write, you can write. Do your personal writing exercises every day. Generate your truth.

But if you want to publish, you have to write for the audience, and that is not the same kind of writing, most of the time. You are now writing with requirements.

And the bridge between requirements and the deeply personal stuff is in the expression of your characters' truth – that's the integration that I, as a writer, need to perform.

Time's up.