In a new post, Tiffany Yates Martin encourages writers to write for the person who needs our story, especially during these troubling times. “How do we keep believing that what we want matters and that we have the wherewithal and ability and the voice to pursue it, in a time where so much of the messaging we may be seeing tells us otherwise?” she asks.
Good question. The short answer is that it isn’t easy. Writers may hear that we are too old or don’t have the right background or education or connections. We hear that we’ll never break through the cacophony of internet “content” to find readers, and even if we can, it doesn’t matter because AI will replace us.
But there are counter-stories too. There are writers who succeed, even though they look like you, don’t have connections, didn’t get a prestigious MFA, and are competing with the same 10,000,000 nonsense makers clogging the internet. We have their example and we have their stories.
Stories matter. “One of my best friends is a gay man who told me he grew up thinking there was something wrong with him all his life because he never saw himself reflected in any books or movies or any other cultural messaging, except as the butt of a joke,” Yates Martin says. “But then there was Rita Mae Brown and Gore Vidal and E. M. Forster and Alice Walker and Audre Lorde.”
“It might feel easy to despair as an artist that there’s still a market for your message, the kinds of stories you want to tell about the kinds of people and lives that speak to you,” she adds “Not only can you, but you must…Somewhere there is someone who desperately needs to see themselves in your work. To believe in something better than what they may have been told they can have.”
So, write. Write the story that only you can, about the people and ideas that matter to you, with the full weight of your inspirations and passions.
