When I started this word vomit project, I didn’t have any particular audience in mind. A part of me told myself that I was writing “for myself”. Which is a partial truth. Almost everything I write is for myself. I’ve written for pay before, but even in that, I often make decisions shaped by my taste. But there’s a whole other side to that, which is what I want to explore in this vomit.
The word vomit project was started partially in response to my frustration with my experience blogging in 2012, 2013. I felt like I had boxed myself in, that my writing had become something formulaic. I was particularly writing a lot of ‘sociopolitical commentary’ – writing about local news, writing about local politics. How did I end up doing that? Maybe let’s start at the beginning.
I think I can say that my first website was “well and truly for myself”, in the sense that it didn’t even really occur to me to think about what an audience was, or who I was making things for, or who I was trying to reach. I just wanted to have a website because websites were cool. I wrote out my favorite jokes because… they were my favorite jokes. I was proud to share my website with anybody who was interested, but I didn’t particularly have any sort of “marketing effort” in mind. I did participate in online forums – mostly about video games, sometimes about things like martial arts. But it didn’t occur to me that I could… write things with the intent of sharing them with an existing audience somewhere else.
When I was in around 10 years old, I discovered that some of my schoolmates had blogs. It seemed very natural for me to start one too and redirect my writing there. My blog from that titme, visakanv.diary-x.com, was lost in a server crash – which is very upsetting for me, because there was a lot of stuff there and I can’t remember what it was about. I can look for little snippets of it in archive.org – it looks like I was writing about my day-to-day life, what I was doing, what I was thinking. Things like “Winamp is better than Windows Media Player”, “I’m thinking of waking up early and going for a run before school starts”, and how I loved Radiohead. I had links to my friends’ blogs in the sidebar, so I think this was sort of like an early proto-Facebook – a way for us to update each other on what was going on with our lives. It was very personal and intimate, a sort of writing I think that not many people do publicly any more, because social media has become such a panopticon. I suppose it’s what people do on their private instagrams and over texts with friends and so on.
When I was on Livejournal, I stumbled upon a local livejournal community called “sg_ljrs” – and I submitted a post about how I wished Singaporeans were more gracious and kind to each other. It received like 15 comments from strangers, which was exhilarating for me. It made me want to do more of it. One thing led to another, and I found myself writing the “sociopolitical commentary” I talked about earlier.
I also remember – when I was doing my National Service as a military conscript – I was eager to “become a blogger”. I was motivated by people like Tim Ferriss and other professional-seeming bloggers who had large followings and seemed to make a living from writing. I wanted that. I remember for one of my birthdays – 20th or 21st – my friends chipped in to buy me a Starbucks gift card, so that I could take my laptop to Starbucks and get some writing done there. I was so grateful for it, it felt like a sign from the universe that that was what I was supposed to be doing. A while after that I would get invited to the Istana to meet Singapore’s Prime Minister, along with a handful of other bloggers. It was a case of being in the right place at the right time, maybe – PM wanted to get a better sense of what was going on with ‘the blogosphere’, and I happened to be around. But it felt like something. It was feedback from the world, and it seemed to be telling me that this was what I was supposed to be doing. (Another blogger quoted this bit from my blogpost and pointed out that that’s how the establishment gets ya, they bribe you with status and recognition. And… that’s true, I have to admit. Seeing)
At some point I started to post answers on Quora, and for some reason I managed to get some upvotes and popularity. They rewarded me with the status of “Quora Top Writer” – which was a very big deal to me then. It felt like international recognition and support. It expanded my concept of who I was as a writer, and who my audience was. I was writing for everybody now – where “everybody” in this case is still, well. Quora users. People who liked clever, intelligent-sounding things.
Eventually Quora started to kinda get not-so-fun. Blogging about local politics became less interesting and important, particularly now that you could expect pretty good commentary on Facebook. I’ve written a few Facebook essays here and there, but I haven’t felt a strong impulse to do that in quite some time. Somehow, I’ve become a heavy Twitter user. I have lots of good and interesting threads. My Twitter following was growing slowly and steadily in the 100s over the first few years – I remember when I started work, my company Twitter had fewer followers than I did – something like 400-600, and I had about 600-800. I grew that company Twitter to have more followers than I did, over 2,400 or so. I don’t remember when my personal Twitter crossed 1,000 followers – seems like around September 2014 – and now it’s at over 6,500. Twitter is now my favorite “thing to do”, my favorite way to pass the time – asking people questions, getting answers, thinking out loud in real time.
What’s interesting is – when I started out on Twitter, it was similar to blogging – my handful of followers were mostly people who I knew from real life, and we were mostly tweeting about our day to day lives, and occasionally talking about the news, things like that. I find it interesting that my early Twitter was particularly “Singaporean’. My Singaporean followers are now probably the smallest bloc in my Twitter audience. Most of them are American. I have some followers from Africa (Kenya, Nigeria), some from Mexico, quite a few from India, some from around Europe. This is what I really want to talk about: this interesting, diverse following has made me rethink, re-examine and re-conceptualize my “audience”. And by extension, it’s changing how I’m thinking about what I’m writing, and who I’m writing it for. I could say simplistically “I’m writing for my Twitter”… but that itself is something that has changed in meaning over time.
I suppose the final desired end state might be something like “I’m just writing whatever I feel like”, “I’m writing for me”, “I’m writing for everyone”. But that doesn’t say anything and it isn’t very interesting. Getting to that state requires identifying a path from here to there. And “here” is – I’m writing for the people who are currently subscribed to my feed, currently following me. Interestingly I have like 90 people following my @1000wordvomits account, and 116 people following my Tinyletter. None of them are paying me for it yet.
I say that because that’s another constraint to consider. I want to be able to make a living with my writing, and/or not have to worry about money. I’m currently living on my savings from 5.5 years of work, and… I’d like to not have to work another 5.5 years just to earn another 6 months or so of free time to write. That sounds like an exhausting and limited life. I’ve been coasting for 3 months, resting and recooperating, and it’s time for me to start writing heavily and finding ways to make money from my writing. I may have to get a job at some point, and I am okay with that – but part of the long game here is that I want my writing to be valuable in the marketplace. It could be that I might have to make my money from selling some sort of products or ideas or productized ideas of some sort. I’m okay with that, too. I don’t have a super precise idea of what’s next, or exactly how I want to make my money. But these are the sort of broad guidelines.
So… I’m here now. What’s the game? What’s the audience I’m going to define for myself, and work on? I’ve been thinking of writing about diaspora issues. One of the interesting things about Twitter has been finding diaspora Indians all around the world. I feel like we’re this loosely knit global community, with our own issues, our own perspectives, our own complicated caught-in-between culture, and there’s a lot of work that we need done to help us figure out our place in the world, our identities. I’m thinking of writing books about this, I have a couple of novel ideas. That’s one front I’d have to articulate and define.
I feel like I’ve said a lot of things in this vomit but I haven’t gotten very much closer to my goal – which is to define my audience. Conceptualize my audience.
I suppose there are a few moving parts:
- people who are interested in reading what I have to say
- people who will share my work with others
- people who will pay for my work
If I optimized relentlessly for just the second, I could end up becoming a sort of one-man clickbait factory. Which I have some experience doing, with local Singaporean issues.
Oh, a thought I wanted to include – it’s funny and interesting how I have sort of become the “if you go to Singapore, you should visit @visakanv” guy on the… rational/intellectual twitterweb. I don’t know if there’s a proper name, but there’s a community. I think I discovered them via ribbonfarm – this group of 100 or so people who have similar-ish interests and have interesting discussions with one another. A lot of them seem to be based in California, which is why I’m considering paying a visit to get to know them better. But I would I like to be a significant member of that community? Not particularly. It’s better than the arbitrary set of people I call friends – ie the people who I grew up with – but it’s not who I’d want to end with. I really have to define my audience. And I have to be careful what I wish for, because… it’s possible to have an audience limit and pigeonhole you. Or you do it yourself, when granted one. I don’t want to do that. When I tweeted a string of pics from /r/aboringdystopia, I got over 3,000 new twitter followers almost overnight. And I’m pretty glad with myself for how I handled it – I very determinedly did NOT want to become “The Boring Dystopia Guy”. But so… what am I?
I’ve been asking around on Twitter, and I’ve gotten responses like…
“you are one of the go to people on twitter for me as a pio in diaspora trying to understand their colonized self and express through fog of modernity”
“a nerdy excited perspective of the world”
“you make me think, and you make me laugh. you’re unpretentious imho”
“somewhere close to ribbonfarm, but with topics that have more to do with actions people can take”
“love seeing your twitter threads – something for every mood”
“you entertain so well too. I’ve spent hours going over your Twitter timeline. since you also make me think, it’s not just killing time and feels like edutainment”
“good storyteller – there’s a progression throughout your twitter threads that’s more than just aggregating relevant tweets”
“For me, your best work is when youre challenging the idea of “normal” – which is really a bunch of concepts and constructs defined by WASPs in the 20th century that we are all just now collectively waking up to. Not in an antagonistic way (“WASPs are evil”) but in the much more productive, “hey there are many awesome perspectives and we should all learn to appreciate them because doing so makes us all better off””
I’m thinking now about what else I’ve said that are guiding principles for how I tweet, and how there would be overlaps between that and how I write. I tweet wanting to make friends, not enemies. I want to reach out to people and demonstrate that there is “a better way”. I am now very sleepy and going to publish this.