Eating the Elephant
The case for the audience is a good one, and I made it to myself for years.
An audience is proof. Applause tells you the thing is real. A number next to your name tells you where you stand. Nobody sensible picks an empty room when a full one is on offer.
So I measured my work by other people. Everything I made went out to be graded. When the grade was good, I lived on it for a day. When it was quiet, I decided the work had no value. I called myself an impostor. I told myself I was not good enough, and I said it so often it stopped sounding like an opinion.
This September I put a poem on my website. It was called Marietta, and it was about the creek outside where I lived as a child in Marietta, Georgia. I thought it was the best work I had done in a long time.
Nobody commented.
The old me would have taken that as the answer. This time I was proud of it, and I saw that mine was the only opinion that carried any weight. Nobody else needed to validate it. I knew it was good.
The audience gave me a thermometer I could not stop reading. The temperature was never mine.
Then I stepped back from social media, on the advice of another creator. The noise dropped, and my own ideas had room to form.
I work in a loop now. Write, edit, brainstorm, then all of it again. Nobody sees it.
I have been at my novel for two months, on and off. My wife and a few close friends read the first chapters. Two chapters are now out as an ebook, where strangers can read them. Two is a small number. It is two more than I ever had while I waited to be told I could start.
I used to be daunted by how long it would take. Eating the elephant one bite at a time sounds fine until you notice you never see the elephant shrink. The bites disappeared. I saw nothing, so I decided nothing was happening. Fear was doing my measuring.
Now I can look back, and it shows me how far I've come. That is the reward. Nobody had to hand it to me.
I plan to write at least three novels. I don't know who will read them, and I've stopped making that the first question.