Why write a book or essay rather than make videos, reels etc?

A note to myself on a question I often return to. Crossposted from: michaelnotebook.com/ong…

It's a good question. Videos and reels are a marvellous media form, powerful and powerfully interesting. Indeed, you can take a moderately interesting script and layer in some fairly generic visuals and audio and it becomes far more interesting than the script alone to most people (including me). We enjoy and get a lot out of the texture. And videos and reels have far better distribution, so the likelihood of being seen by millions of people is much higher.

What then is the right role for writing?

Writing is in some ways a better medium for thinking in. If I want to develop good or original creative ideas, writing is extraordinarily helpful. Video and reels can also be used this way, but my understanding is that it's slower and more challenging. If distribution is a goal then you may use channels other than writing eventually, but if the principal goal is to have something worth saying (rather than Mr. Beast), writing is an excellent medium. It's not the only way, of course, but you do need grounding in some deep activity in the world, not just social media for social media's sake. (Alternately, you can view drive.google.com/file/d… as the deep activity. But it seems unsatisfying to me.) Put a different way: serious writing is a great way of changing you into a person with ideas and understanding worth sharing.

Distribution and engagement for their own sake are default goals many people adopt, encouraged both by social factors, and by design decisions made by the platforms. But they're often a damaging path toward audience capture, and losing sight of your own goals. The question is: what do you want to achieve? How firmly committed are you? For some goals, distribution and engagement are highly desirable; for others, they are much less important, and may even be damaging.

For me, an important goal right now is to build a small community of people who are intensely engaged with creative projects overlapping my own. I haven't been putting enough effort into that. It means messaging people directly, it means organizing workshops, retreats, and so on. It means working much harder on fostering good comments on my work. It'll be done one person at a time. It's the Inklings as a model for creative work, not the Beatles. All around the question: who is a likely friend of the project? Who do I want to support in turn? Doing this may eventually create the conditions for broader distribution. But it's not the thing to focus on right now. And so writing is a good primary focus, with things like podcasts supporting it, even if they get more distribution more easily.