Writing to Influence: Understanding the writer’s responsibility to the reader

In 2009, sitting at a table for two in a downtown Columbia coffee shop, I started a blog. Even for the time, blogs weren’t new, but I was a 20-year-old about to finish my Bachelor’s in English and felt that a blog would get my writing ambitions off the ground. I was going to start sharing some of my thoughts and stir up attention from an anonymous audience spread across the world. If only it was that easy, or that simple.

Needless to say, it didn’t take off for a number of reasons. Today, I’m happy it didn’t. I think about that moment and wonder: What was my motivation? Did I have anything to say? And, most importantly, did I have the credibility to say it? Or did I even know what credibility was? The experience has made me question a lot of things as they pertain to writing and writers over the years, but one of the most potent is this: With the accessibility of publishing — where immediately sharing thoughts with hundreds of people is possible — do we as writers recognize the difference in motivation between writing for attention and writing to influence?

I’ve become obsessed with this question and have thought about it from many different angles, one of which is the influence technology has had on the way we think about writing and ourselves as writers.

I grew up alongside technology. I had a first generation iPod, created an AIM account at12 and had my own laptop at 14. A lot of what I know since I was in my single digits has come from my interactions on and with the internet.

On the other hand, I also learned how to write in cursive before learning how to type. I can still remember a time where my parents didn’t have cell phones, and the single TV in my house was only for playing VHS tapes. I remember the long hours reading books on my bed, couch, back deck, and the inspiration gathered from their pages.

Today, I read a lot of unpublished work and talk to a lot of writers and readers, and what I see in them and even myself is a sort of callousness towards writing. Working as a Copywriter at a creative agency I hear time and time again that “no one reads.” They say it with a chuckle, as if I am a relic of an age where people took the time to read the words on a page before scanning to the next headline. They have point, though. Fewer people are taking the time to read the words on a page — especially on the internet. This can certainly be attributed to how readers interact with writing today and the enormous amounts of published content in the world.

However, blaming the reader in this case is cheap. It’s true that we as writers can’t control the outside influences that pull them away from our writing, but blaming them exclusively deflects the responsibility that we have to write something worthwhile and validate it before putting it out into the world. We can’t control those outside influences, but we can control what we decide to put in front of them, which in turn builds the credibility that we need to earn their time. With so much to read, people have less time for cheap thoughts, but in so many ways the grand proliferation of “content” has brought just that: so many words that say so little.

That first blog post I wrote in 2009 put more words into the world that said nothing. I published it without validating the thoughts or allowing them to sit with me over time. As a result, I had published and shared mediocre thoughts in a mediocre way that wasn’t going to influence anyone (or even earn attention). I stopped blogging. Not because anyone told me to stop — because frankly, no one cared whether that blog had another post — but because I found that I cared less about what I was saying than my very small number of readers. And that was enough.

These thoughts are not meant to discourage anyone from writing or publishing, but they do ask us to step back and evaluate what we’re choosing to share with a reader. Are we looking for likes and shares (the attention that comes with posting), or are we offering work that will influence the reader on a certain topic? If so, how do we approach that topic? How does that inform what we’re going to say and how we’ll say it? In the end, we have a responsibility to give the reader something valuable.  

A rule that I’ve come to adopt is that if my writing doesn’t serve me and/or the reader in a real tangible way, then it doesn’t have the depth it needs to be published — and should be worked on some more. While I don’t always approach my writing with an intention in mind (see Teri Youmans Grimm’s excellent piece “Intention”), I do want it to have a purpose when it comes to deciding whether it should go out into the world. This rule causes me to share and publish less, but the hope is that each piece is then more valuable, more worth a reader’s time, and influences them in some way.

This is what writing to influence means. It brings with it the true power of words and much of the motivation that stands behind pouring our souls out onto the page for the benefit of others. It’s not fame, it’s not notoriety, and unless we’re writing a Buzzfeed article titled “15 Cat Memes that will Melt Your Heart,” it’s not for attention either. Writing for influence carries a much stronger impact. It looks to make a difference. It doesn’t care if it is heard by the masses, but listens to the few and writes for them. It may not be that big, it may not get the pageviews or eyeballs, but it intends to mean something and that intention sets it a part from all others.

This is what I was missing early on and what I believe that so many of us are starting to miss today. We write to be heard, but in focusing on that, we forget that our responsibility as a writer is to step back, see the world from different perspectives and write in order to influence it.

Jared Rypkema is a writer and community builder. He is the founder and executive director of Bridge Eight, Inc., a non-profit publishing company based in Jacksonville, FL. A New Jersey native and graduate of the University of South Carolina, he has developed a love for the Southern landscape and the people who live in it. Today, he lives in Downtown Jacksonville, where the city lights — and all they represent — shine through his windows.