[paulcole]

>I'm just frightened of producing something that I pretend is profound and everyone else thinks is obvious. That's a totally different fear

Yes and my point is that what you produce won't be profound and people will think it's obvious. Write it anyway. Or don't.

[HWR_14]

Thanks for the encouragement. In person people are far more likely to tell me not to bother, and I'm not going to pretend it doesn't affect me. I think everyone reacts to their real-life friends' expectations and assumptions.

[paulcole]

I don’t know if you’re being sarcastic or not, but this really is meant to encourage you.

Most people will never write anything and even fewer people will write something good. Nobody who doesn’t write will ever write anything good. If you can get yourself into the group of people who have written something, that’s like buying a lottery ticket where the prize is writing something good. Maybe you’ll buy a bunch of tickets and shorten your odds a bit.

Maybe you’ll just have a bunch of losing tickets at the end of the day. But most people won’t even have those and those kinds of people really like to sneer at people who do play the lottery.

Maybe this is an awful analogy. But if you want to write, that’s your reason to write. I hope you have some fun and find some meaning in it.

[HWR_14]

I wasn't being sarcastic.

It's been easy to be encouraged to write about things I am credentialed in, but I want to write about things I'm not. And I hadn't been getting much encouragement in real life that the writing without an appeal to authority would be taken seriously or stand on its own.