Why You Should Write Even If Nobody Reads It

There is a cedar chest in my grandmother’s house that nobody opens but me. Inside are letters written by people whose names I have to sound out, postmarked from towns that no longer appear on road maps. They were not written for publication. They were written because someone was lonely, or owed money, or had seen a mule die in a way that seemed worth telling. I think about those letters when I sit down to write. The audience was one person, sometimes two. The writing still mattered. It still does.

This is an essay about writing when the readership is small, absent, or unknowable. It is not a pep talk. It is an argument grounded in the material culture of the Upper South, where I live and work, and in the long habit of people who wrote things down because the alternative was letting the record go silent. If you are a writer in Nashville, or anywhere, and you suspect that no one is reading, this is for you.

What We Mean When We Say Nobody Reads

Most writers who say nobody reads them are not being literal. They mean the metrics are flat. The comments are empty. The byline did not travel. But the phrase also carries an older, more useful meaning: writing that is not aimed at a market, a platform, or a performance. It is writing that exists because the writer needed to make sense of something.

In my work documenting pre-1960s domestic and agricultural artifacts, I keep running into this kind of writing. Farm ledgers with weather notes in the margins. Recipe cards with arguments about lard versus butter. A 1930s tenant farmer’s notebook listing every hog he butchered, with a single line at the bottom: Hard year. Still here. None of it was written for an audience. All of it now functions as a primary source.

The distinction matters. When you write for an audience you do not yet have, you are making a bet on the future. When you write to understand, you are making a record of the present. Both are legitimate. But the second one is available to you right now, today, with no permission and no platform.

The Archive of the Unread

Middle Tennessee is full of writing that was never meant to be read widely. County extension bulletins. Church minutes. Letters to the editor that were rejected. Diaries kept by farm women who wrote one sentence a day for forty years. These documents are not famous. They are not even particularly well preserved. But they are the reason we know anything at all about how people lived.

I once spent an afternoon at a small historical society in a town I will not name, going through a box of papers from a defunct grange hall. Inside was a handwritten constitution, a list of members, and a series of meeting minutes that devolved, over the course of a decade, into arguments about fence lines and a missing collection plate. The secretary who kept those minutes had no idea anyone would read them a century later. She was just doing the job. But her handwriting is now the only voice that room has.

This is the quiet argument for writing without an audience: you are building an archive. Not necessarily for posterity, though that can happen. You are building an archive for yourself, a record of what you noticed and what you thought about it. The value of that record does not depend on whether anyone else opens the box.

Writing as a Form of Attention

There is a particular kind of attention that only writing requires. Looking at a thing is not the same as describing it. Listening to a song is not the same as transcribing the lyrics and noting where the singer hesitates. The act of putting words on a page forces you to slow down, to notice details you would otherwise pass over.

This is why I write about vernacular music and old tools. A froe is not just a froe. It is a blade with a handle set at a right angle, used for splitting shingles from a bolt of wood. The word itself is old, possibly from the Old English frow, and it appears in estate inventories across the Upper South from the eighteenth century onward. Writing about a froe means learning its weight, its balance, the sound it makes when struck with a mallet. It means understanding that the person who used it was probably not thinking about etymology. They were thinking about the roof.

When you write about something, you are forced to know it better. That knowledge is its own reward. It does not require a reader to validate it.

The Ethics of Writing Without an Audience

There is a risk in romanticizing the unread writer. The image of the solitary genius scribbling in a garret is a myth, and it often erases the material conditions that made such solitude possible. Writing takes time. Time costs money. The people who wrote those farm ledgers were not writing for pleasure; they were keeping records because the bank or the landlord required it. The women who kept diaries were often doing so in the margins of a day that was already full of labor.

I want to be careful here. When I say you should write even if nobody reads it, I am not saying you should quit your job or abandon the hope of publication. I am saying that the writing itself has value, independent of its reception. That is a different claim, and a more honest one.

There is also a class dimension to this. The ability to write for an audience has always been unevenly distributed. Literacy, leisure, and access to publication are not equally available. The archive of the unread is full of people who wrote because they had no other way to be heard. That is not a romantic condition. It is a structural one. Acknowledging that does not diminish the value of their writing. It sharpens it.

What the Unread Writer Can Learn from Material Culture

My work as an essayist is grounded in objects. A butter mold. A hog scraper. A fiddle with a repaired neck. These things were not made to be displayed. They were made to be used, and their use left marks. The same is true of writing. The drafts you do not publish, the journals you do not share, the letters you write and never send—these are not failures. They are the wear marks of a mind at work.

Consider the fiddle. In the Upper South, a fiddle was often a working instrument, not a parlor decoration. It was played at dances, at funerals, at house parties. It was repaired with whatever was at hand. The repairs changed the sound. A fiddle that has been played for fifty years does not sound like a new one. It has a history in its wood.

Your writing has a history in it, too. The sentences you wrote when you were twenty are not wasted because nobody read them. They are the repairs that made the later sentences possible. You cannot get to the later work without passing through the earlier work. That is not a consolation. It is a fact of craft.

The Practice of Writing for the Drawer

I keep a drawer in my desk for writing that is not meant to be read. It is not a metaphor. It is an actual drawer, with a handle that sticks and a bottom lined with old newspaper. Inside are drafts of essays that will never be published, notes on objects I have not yet figured out how to write about, and letters to people who are dead.

The drawer is not a secret. It is a practice. Writing for the drawer means giving yourself permission to write badly, to write incompletely, to write things that do not fit the shape of a publishable essay. It means treating writing as a daily act of attention, not a performance.

Here is what I have learned from the drawer: the writing I do there is often better than the writing I do for publication. Not because it is more polished, but because it is more honest. It is not trying to be anything. It is just trying to see.

How to Start a Drawer Practice

You do not need a literal drawer. You need a place where writing can happen without an audience. A notebook. A password-protected file. A voice memo. The form does not matter. The commitment does.

Start with fifteen minutes a day. Write about something you noticed. A sound. A smell. A conversation you overheard. Do not explain it. Do not justify it. Just describe it as precisely as you can. The precision is the point.

If you are a writer in the South, you might write about the way the light changes in October, or the sound of a screen door, or the particular silence of a country church on a Tuesday afternoon. You might write about the things you are not supposed to write about: the family stories that do not add up, the land that was taken, the money that was never discussed. The drawer can hold what the page cannot.

The Audience That Finds You Later

There is a strange thing that happens when you write without an audience for long enough. Eventually, an audience finds you. Not because you chased it, but because you built something worth finding. The archive you created for yourself becomes a resource for others. The questions you asked become the questions they were asking, too.

This is not a promise. It is a pattern. The writers I admire most—the ones whose work feels grounded and specific and true—are almost always writers who spent years writing for small audiences or no audience at all. They were not building a platform. They were building a practice. The platform came later, if it came at all.

I think about the people who wrote those letters in my grandmother’s cedar chest. They did not know I would read them. They did not know I would write about them. They wrote because they had something to say to one person, and they said it. That is enough. That has always been enough.

What Writing Does to the Writer

The most honest argument for writing without an audience is not about the writing. It is about the writer. The act of putting words on a page changes you. It makes you more attentive, more patient, more willing to sit with uncertainty. It teaches you that not every thought needs to be resolved, that not every question needs an answer.

This is especially true for writing about the South. The region is full of unresolved tensions—race, class, land, memory, the stories we tell ourselves about who we are. Writing about those tensions does not resolve them. But it does make them visible. And visibility is a kind of honesty.

When I write about a tenant farmer’s ledger, I am not just documenting an object. I am asking what it means to record a hard year in a single line. I am asking what it means to be the person who reads that line a century later. I am asking what I owe to the person who wrote it. These are not questions with easy answers. They are questions worth sitting with.

The Practical Case for Unread Writing

There is a practical case to be made, too. Writing without an audience builds skills that transfer to writing with one. You learn to finish things. You learn to revise. You learn to trust your own ear. You learn what you actually think, as opposed to what you think you should think.

These are not small things. Most writers fail not because they lack talent, but because they lack the habit of finishing. The drawer teaches you to finish. It teaches you that a draft is not a verdict, that a sentence can be fixed, that the only way to find the right word is to write the wrong one first.

If you are building a body of work—essays, stories, a blog about the material culture of your region—the unread writing is the foundation. It is the place where you learn to see. The published writing is the house. You cannot build the house without the foundation.

An Invitation, Not a Conclusion

I am not going to end this essay with a call to action. That is not the kind of writing I do. Instead, I will leave you with an image.

There is a barn on a back road in Cheatham County, not far from where I live. The barn is falling down. The roof is gone. The stalls are full of leaves. But on one wall, written in pencil, there is a list of dates and weights. A record of calves born and sold. The handwriting is careful, deliberate, the work of someone who wanted to get it right.

Nobody reads that wall. The farmer is dead. The calves are gone. The barn will fall in a few more years. But the record is there. It says: I was here. I kept track. This mattered.

Write like that. Write because you are here. Write because you kept track. Write because it mattered. The audience, if it comes, will be a gift. The writing is the work.

A person writing in a notebook at a wooden desk

Frequently Asked Questions

Is writing without an audience a waste of time?

No. Writing without an audience builds craft, attention, and a personal archive. Many of the most valuable historical documents from the Upper South—farm ledgers, diaries, letters—were written without any expectation of publication. Their value came from the act of recording, not from the size of the readership.

How do I stay motivated to write if no one is reading?

Shift the goal from reception to attention. Write to understand something specific: an object, a memory, a place, a question. The motivation comes from the act of seeing more clearly, not from metrics. A daily practice of fifteen minutes, focused on precise description, is more sustainable than waiting for validation.

What should I write about if I don’t have a topic?

Write about what you noticed today. A sound, a smell, a conversation, a change in the weather. Describe it as precisely as you can. If you live in the South, write about the material world around you: the tools, the buildings, the songs, the food. The topic is less important than the attention you bring to it.

Can unread writing ever become published writing?

Yes. The drawer is a place to develop material without pressure. Many published essays begin as private notes. The key is to separate the drafting stage from the publishing stage. Write first for yourself. Later, you can decide what, if anything, is ready to share.

An old wooden desk with handwritten letters and a fountain pen