Making for No One

Photo by Photo by Resat Kuleli on Unsplash

The print shop guy did not ask why I needed exactly one copy. I appreciated that about him. He had a beard that suggested he had seen things, creative things, desperate things, and he just handed me the box with my novel inside and said "heavy" and I said "yeah" and that was the whole interaction. Three years of work, one copy, cardboard box. I carried it to my car like it was a sleeping animal I did not want to wake up. Making things for no one, I was learning, has its own specific weight.

The novel went into a drawer. I want to be clear about this because people sometimes assume that putting something in a drawer is a euphemism for failure, for giving up, for the project that could not find its legs. But I finished it. That part matters. I finished it, and I printed it, and I put it somewhere I could touch it if I wanted to, which I almost never do, but the option exists. The option is the point.

For about a week after, I felt something I did not have a word for. Not pride exactly, though that was part of it. Not relief, though there was certainly that. It was more like the feeling of having kept a promise to someone who would never know you made it. A promise to yourself, maybe, but that sounds too self-helpy. It was more like a promise to the thing itself. The story that had been bothering me for years, living in the back of my head like a low-grade fever, finally given a body and a spine and pages that smelled like ink. The story did not care if anyone read it. The story just wanted to exist.

The creative process and its uncomfortable questions

People ask sometimes why I make things. I have tried to develop a sophisticated answer to this question because the unsophisticated answer makes me sound slightly unhinged. The unsophisticated answer is: not making them feels worse. That is it. That is the whole thing. I have dressed it up in language about expression and meaning and the human need to create, but when I am being honest, the engine is much simpler. There is a kind of pressure that builds when I am not working on something, and releasing it is the only thing that makes the pressure stop.

This is not, I should say, a particularly romantic way to describe art. There is nothing here about divine inspiration or the muse or being a vessel for something larger than yourself. Some days it feels more like having a persistent cough that can only be treated by sitting at a desk and moving words around until they stop fighting with each other. Some days the creative process feels less like channeling the universe and more like trying to assemble furniture without instructions while the furniture quietly judges you.

I read a study once about what researchers called the "need for creative expression" as distinct from the desire for recognition or reward. They found that people who scored high on this internal creative drive reported higher levels of wellbeing when they were making things, regardless of whether anyone saw the work. The external validation part, the audience part, that operated on a completely different track. You could be deeply satisfied by the making and deeply anxious about the showing. You could finish something and feel complete and also feel terrified. The study basically confirmed what every person who has ever hidden a sketchbook from dinner guests already knew: the making and the mattering are not the same thing.

Art without an audience

I had a piece go viral once. I am using the word "viral" loosely here, the way people do when they mean "more attention than I am used to" rather than "actually culturally significant." But the numbers climbed. I watched them climb. I refreshed and watched and refreshed and watched and felt, I have to be honest, increasingly hollow.

This was confusing because I had wanted this. I had wanted this for a long time. I had imagined this exact scenario, my work finding its audience, the validation of strangers, the proof that I was not just shouting into a void. And here it was, the thing I had wanted, and it felt like eating a meal that looked delicious but tasted like nothing. Not bad. Just nothing.

The hollow feeling lasted about a week. Then I made the next thing. This is always how it goes. The external stuff, the numbers and the comments and the sharing, it does something, but the something is not the thing I thought it would be. The thing I thought it would be was satisfaction. What it actually is, is more like a brief interruption. A pause in the regular programming of making things for the weird internal reasons I make things, a pause where I look up and notice that other people exist and some of them are paying attention, and then the pause ends and I go back to the desk.

"The only art I'll ever study is stuff that I can steal from," David Bowie said once, and I think about this a lot because it reframes the whole project. You are not making things for the audience. You are making things for the other makers. You are adding to the pile of stuff that someone else might need someday, might steal from, might use as a starting point for their own weird internal pressure.

This helps, actually. Thinking of it this way. The audience is not the people who will consume the work and move on. The audience is the person in twenty years who will find the thing and feel less alone. The audience is the person who needed exactly this sentence, this image, this particular arrangement of sounds, and would never have known they needed it until they found it.

The human story of finishing

I have abandoned projects that everyone asked about. There was a series I started that people actually wanted me to continue, and I stopped, and people asked why, and I did not have a good answer. The internal pressure had released. The thing had said what it needed to say, or at least what I was capable of making it say, and continuing felt like staying at a party after you were ready to leave. Polite, maybe. Expected. But wrong.

I have also finished projects that nobody saw. Projects I worked on for months that went directly into folders I have not opened since. Projects that exist only because I needed them to exist, that served no purpose except the purpose of being made, that have no audience and never will. I am not sure these are failures. I am not sure what they are.

The gap between the vision and the execution, this is the thing nobody warns you about. You have this idea, this perfect shimmering idea, and then you try to make it real and it comes out wrong. It comes out smaller than you imagined, or stranger, or just different in ways you cannot articulate. And you have to decide whether to keep going anyway, whether to finish the imperfect thing, whether to put your name on something that is not what you meant but is what you managed.

Most of the time I keep going. Most of the time I finish. Not because the imperfect thing is good enough, but because finishing is the only way to learn what the next thing should be. Every finished project is a lesson in what you could not do, what you did not know, what you will try differently next time. The unfinished projects, they just sit there. They do not teach you anything except avoidance.

Making things and the middle part

The middle of any project is a special kind of terrible. The beginning has energy. The ending has momentum. The middle has neither. The middle is just you, alone, with the growing suspicion that this was all a mistake and you have wasted your time and the thing is not going to work and also maybe you are fundamentally not talented enough to do what you are trying to do.

I have been in the middle of a project and genuinely believed I would never finish it. Genuinely believed that this time the well was dry, this time the thing was not going to come together, this time I had finally reached the limit of whatever small ability I had been given. And then something arrived. Sideways, from somewhere I was not looking. A sentence. An image. A connection I had not seen. It always does. I do not know why. I have stopped asking.

The expression of making things, this is what I have learned. It is not the grand gesture. It is not the finished product. It is the willingness to be in the middle, to stay in the middle, to keep working when the middle feels endless and the ending feels impossible. The willingness to trust that something will arrive even when you have no evidence that it will.

The drawer, revisited

I opened the drawer recently. The novel was still there, which I knew, but seeing it felt different than knowing it. The cardboard box was slightly dusty. The pages inside were the same pages I had printed years ago, the same words in the same order, the story unchanged.

I did not read it. I just looked at it. The physical fact of it. The three years compressed into paper and ink. The thing that had not existed and then did exist and I was the reason.

There is a specific kind of pride in this. Not pride in the work itself, which I am sure is flawed in ways I cannot see anymore because I am too close to it. Pride in the finishing. Pride in the stubborn act of completing something when no one asked you to, when the world did not require it, when you could have stopped at any point and no one would have noticed.

The print shop guy, I think about him sometimes. I wonder how many boxes like mine he has handed over. How many novels, how many collections, how many years of work condensed into single copies that went home and went into drawers and existed, quietly, for no one. I like to think he knows what he is part of. I like to think he sees us coming and understands.

The thing about making things for no one is that no one is still someone. No one is you, the version of you that needed to make the thing. No one is the person you will be in ten years who will open the drawer and remember. No one is the hypothetical stranger who might find it someday, or might not, but could.

I closed the drawer. I went back to the desk. There was a new thing waiting, a new pressure building, a new blank page with its cursor blinking like it had something personal against me. I sat down. I started.

This is the whole explanation. Not inspiration. Not motivation. Just the true thing, stated simply: making things for no one is still making things, and making things is still the only thing that makes the not-making feeling stop. The file is open. The cursor is blinking. The middle is waiting, terrible and necessary, and something will arrive. It always does.

Open the file again tomorrow. Not because you should. Because not opening it feels worse.