I was in the seventh grade when I started sharing my writing. I wrote a Yu-GiOh! fanfiction. Tendershipping. I think it was only two chapters or something like that. It was a bit boring and incredibly melodramatic. I only got one anonymous comment: “go kill yourself.”

The thing is, I’ve been writing and sharing my writing as I learned how to write for more than a decade before anyone read any of it. I’m not sure but I don’t think that was true for writers who came of age before the internet. Before that, you grew your writing before you tried to share it and you tried to share it by getting it published or maybe just by posting a poem or two on the wall at the laundromat.

I write a lot. I write a lot more than you see here on this website. The stuff on this website is the writing that I do under what Jungians might call a persona or what astrologers might call midheaven related activities. I also journal. I have a shelf of old journals in storage. However, the bulk of my writing is still fanfiction.

I have fanfictions that I share on AO3. I have fanfictions, some spanning more than 15 chapters, in the notes app in my phone. I’ll never share some of these. Some of them don’t have story. It doesn’t matter how long they are—they don’t have any story in them. They have premises, characters and environments that are overly detailed because that’s where my attention was caught, but they don’t have story. They have obsessions and they have recurring emotional tropes that I use to comfort myself. They’re premises that I am not ready to end.

Stories are about change. I keep a lot of premises storyless because they are parts of myself that are only half animated. I am ready to describe them but I am not yet ready to change them.

So, I write around 10,000 words a day when I am really interested in something. This doesn’t happen all the time but it happens when I get possessed with an idea. I do this when I am possessed at great expense to myself, putting off work or bathing or cooking and cleaning to do so. I’ll share about ten percent of that, a statistic I came up with intuitively, in the way that you see here where something is posted under my own name for anyone to come and read.

I don’t write to get better at writing. I don’t think I’m really that interested in improving skill. I don’t write to get kudos. I wrote and shared writing for more than ten years getting around two readers per story chapter. Not to discount that readership—those two people turned into friendships and fulfilling role play opportunities. What I’m really trying to say is that I don’t write for attention from other people. If I did, I wouldn’t write for the yugioh fandom. The yugioh fandom, not the card playing part of it but the gay fanfiction part of it, died in 2006 (the card playing part of it is still alive and well and there are tournaments to this day).

The reason I write a lot is because I have a big ego.

Writing is attention that you give to yourself. It physiologically slows down your sense of time and thinking. There are thoughts that don’t surprise you until you stumble upon them in writing and then you sit there, charmed by your own genius. Erotic fantasies don’t turn me on unless I write them out. Only when I write porn do I feel that it is truly a form of self play and self kink. Thoughts aren’t good enough. Thoughts are easily discounted by feelings, tasks that I must get done, and the fear of what someone else might think if they were to read my thoughts. Thoughts are easily killed off.

I write a lot because I have a strong ego and I like to turn myself on. I like to give myself attention. I go insane when I don’t give myself attention. I’m an Aries Sun. I hope my ego hasn’t been burdensome to other people but, by god, is it incredibly large.

Oftentimes, I write the same premise over and over again. It never goes beyond a certain point. I like the part where the characters are enemies with sexual tension and I get bored by the time they fall in love and have to figure out what to do about that. I stop writing as soon as it stops being interesting for me and then I start it again, with different characters or with a slightly altered universe. It’s masturbatory.

I don’t think writing a lot is something that is heroic or even really worth celebrating. It’s masturbatory. It’s an enjoyable part of life. I think that you write a lot when you are interested in yourself. A lot of people write a lot right after a breakup for this reason. It’s a time when you become incredibly interested in yourself.

I think that everyone who writes is interested in themselves and, if they write a lot, then they are very interested in themselves. Representative politics tells us that we are supposed to be writing for an “audience” whatever that is. Whatever! C’mon. Writers are interested in ourselves. Writers with marginalized identities are pressured to perform those identities at the expense of their own self enjoyment. Explain yourselves! But make it cryptic and vulnerable enough so that people like you can relate to you! Then they are either idealized for being perfectly specific and yet vague or they are shat on for being too specific or too vague.

Writing is just the act of watching yourself piece together sentences over and over. If you enjoy watching yourself do that, then you like to write. If you like to see how other people do that, then you like to read. I like to do both but it is quite alright to only like one over the other.

Too much attention from other people can really kill the self enjoyment of writing. It doesn’t really matter whether that attention is good or bad. Writing is like masturbation. It’s self enjoyment and it’s almost an integral part of writing to also be embarrassed about it. The reason I share only about ten percent of all of the writing that I do isn’t because I don’t think it’s good enough or not up to some standard. I do feel that it is good, embarrassingly enough. I wouldn’t write it if I didn’t think it was good. I am also incredibly embarrassed that I am so fixated on certain things and that I enjoy some things over and over again. Most of my writing is embarrassing and psychologically revealing.

I think that you have to be willing to be in a state of embarrassment and cringe in order to write a lot. There is no other way. Self enjoyment is embarrassing.

The reason why I like to read is not because I’m looking for elegant writing or because I want to be impressed by craft really. I am not looking to be represented either. People who read don’t really want someone to tell our stories for us and, yet, we are obsessed with reading stories. The reason why we like to read is the same reason we like to snoop. We are able to intuit that sharing self enjoyment is incredibly embarrassing and this intuition enlivens our curiosity.

I think that embarrassment is incredibly important—we cannot really read if we only allow ourselves to read books that we think will make us into better people. We read because we like to snoop. The same goes for writing. We can only write if we allow ourselves to be villains, to have big egos, to be self indulgent, and to be careless. We will never write if we are trying to be good writers.

You will write a lot if you are interested in yourself, willing to be in a state of embarrassment, or if you have bad handwriting—if you are willing to be a villain, whatever that means for you. You may be willing to share that writing if you are willing to entertain us shameless snoops. You may not and that is quite alright as well. It is satisfying to reveal your psyche to yourself and only yourself, for your own pleasure. Writing, after all, is for your own pleasure and your own self satisfaction. If you’ve ever published anything to AO3 that you have no intention of ever ending and gasped in horror and humiliation upon realizing that your word count was way more than most serious novels, then you know what I’m talking about. Good for you.