A reader left a comment on the blog this week that I’ve now read more times than I’d like to admit.
They’d read the Poirot post, the one about a daft line on a stormy night, and instead of just nodding along they did the homework. They found the real dialogue from the episode. They compared the idea to Columbo, the scruffy detective who is far sharper than he looks, and then, for good measure, to The Fool on the Hill. And they finished by saying they’d never watched Poirot, but now wanted to track an episode down.
I sat there grinning like an idiot. A reader had taken a half-formed thought of mine, handed it back improved, and told me it made them want to go and watch something.
I should explain why that hit so hard. Most of what I do, I do on my own. The designing, the writing, the packing, the posting, all of it. When you work like that, putting something out into the world can feel a bit like talking in an empty room. You get used to it. You stop expecting an answer. A couple of weeks ago I wrote that nobody is coming, and on the hard days that’s still true, because nobody else is going to do the work for you.
What I didn’t mention is that sometimes somebody turns up anyway. Unannounced, with a Columbo reference and a Beatles song, and they hand your own idea back in better shape than you sent it out. That doesn’t pay any bills. It does something else that’s worth more on a grey Sunday morning. It tells you the thing you made reached a person.
I think I know why it did. For a long time I published a post every single day, because that’s what everyone says you should do. Somewhere along the way the posts started to feel like homework, written to fill a slot rather than because I had something to say. So this autumn I eased off to two or three a week. It felt like a risk, because everything in the marketing world says go faster and never go quiet. But the posts that came out of the slower pace were ones I meant, and I’ve come to believe a reader can tell the difference. I can’t prove that, and I won’t pretend I’ve cracked anything. I just know which version of me got that comment, and it wasn’t the one racing to publish before midnight.
So here’s a nudge, for what it’s worth, from someone who has tried it both ways. Make the thing you actually mean, even if it’s small, even if it feels as though nobody’s looking. Leave out the version you only made to fill a gap. Somebody might turn up.
Leave a Reply