This is the 52nd article I’m writing for Odyssey, which means I’ve officially been writing for Odyssey for a year. It’s an arbitrary amount of time, but a year is easy to assign significance to, so I figured that this article had to be especially significant as well. After a year-long journey of writing for Odyssey, I figured that that in and of itself was worth an article. This determination matters because it reveals the most important question us Odyssey creators have to ask ourselves: Is it worth an article?
That question is one that I’ve given a lot of thought to and one whose criteria have shifted over my past 51 articles. I went into Odyssey thinking of it as small-scale journalism, which meant that what made an article worthwhile was if my audience thought the topic was important or relevant before they clicked on my link. As a result, I only let myself write about things that had direct relevance on at least the level of my community. I wrote about events on campus, campus life, and on occasion, national news.
That was all fine and good, but then, probably out of necessity since I have to come up with something to write about every single week, I expanded my range of write-able topics and started writing about things a little more personal. In order to justify my new branch of articles, I decided that so long as there was a moral to the story or some sort of advice for the reader, that it was OK to discuss things a little more personal. I just had to ensure that the focus was still on the audience because if it wasn’t, then I didn’t think there was any point to publishing instead of just writing in a diary.
Ultimately, I completely threw that out the window. It felt forced to assign a moral to every story. Furthermore, making those morals explicit never sat quite right with me because I honestly do not have the authority or the ability to give reliable advice to anyone and everyone who comes across my article. I started purely writing about life experiences and interpretations, and that’s where I find myself now.
I stopped caring long ago about likes and page views and other statistics that used to tell me I had written a successful article, and instead began focusing on the pride I took in my work. Even still, I’m conscientious and have observed that as my writing has become more personal, and sometimes even something I’m more proud of, my statistics have gotten poorer and poorer. This makes sense because I stopped making the audience the main focus of my writing. As a result, my articles do not necessarily appeal to a broad number of people because I don’t write what I know will draw people in. My articles don’t necessarily seem significant until they are read, which means one has to be entirely self-motivated to click on my link. A gap opens up between myself, the writer, and my readers, whose role it is to bridge the gap.
I see my role as an Odyssey writer that I have something to say and I have the responsibility to do so in an eloquent way. As a result, my writing has certainly improved with practice. But even the most well-written of pieces can still give me pause as to whether what I feel I have to say is worth saying. It takes a bit of an ego to write for Odyssey the way I find myself writing for Odyssey, to validate that writing about things that may only seem significant to me are still worth being read by others. In the face of minimal extrinsic motivation in the form of likes and page views, I haven’t failed to believe that what I have to say is intrinsically valuable, and I want as many people as possible to have the opportunity to learn, grow, or at least be entertained by my perspective.
Even being intrinsically motivated does not preserve me from the worry that I’ll be producing bad content. I’ll be the first to admit that I’ve read bad Odyssey articles. I’ll also be the first to admit that a couple of my articles have probably missed the boat. The two errors I think an Odyssey article can make are being poorly written or lacking perspective. My emphasis on ensuring I don’t succumb to the latter is why I think that the turn my Odyssey career has taken is a good one.
I’m not so deluded that I think my articles are being read by thousands of people and making a broad impact, but I know that my articles are read by a handful of loyal fans and if anything I write can make sense to someone else, then I’ve written with perspective. I’ve taken the time to think something through and now someone else knows how I’ve thought something through. Perhaps that thought process can help them think something else through or understand how other people think something through. In other words, even though I’m focusing on myself when I write, I want my readers to focus on themselves when they read.
Despite finding my own personal articulation of what good content is - something I’ll carry throughout my writing career - I do not believe I’m merely using Odyssey as a publishing platform to do whatever I want, in essence turning Odyssey into a glorified blog, because I’m still very much in line with what Odyssey thinks good content is. Here’s Odyssey’s take: “Odyssey democratizes content, giving people the opportunity to share what’s most important to them and their communities, enriching everyone with broader, more honest perspectives on topics they care about.”
I agree that perspective matters, so as long as I’m writing with perspective, I’m going to keep writing. Here’s to the next 52 articles.
