Surely, things work better when people do read your writing. For some of you, your writing would be pointless if no one read it. But I’m asking you to consider that it doesn’t have to be this way. After all, if writing was written just to be read, diaries and journals wouldn’t exist. People even pair up and create alliances to ensure that if one of them dies, the other will burn all of the diaries.

Private diaries are just one example of why you might write something that you don’t want anyone to read. The process of writing forces you to articulate your thoughts in a more clear, explicit manner than you typically bother to do when you’re just swirling them around inside your head. Even when you speak to other people, you can get away with letting your tongue flap freely (maybe not all of the time). But when you type words onto a computer screen, you get to see what you just said. You have to think about your words in a whole new way just to get them out of your fingers in the first place.

The writing process helps to crystallize your thoughts in a concrete form. It also helps you to put your lingering ideas to rest. Writing them down forces that nagging voice inside your head to either put up or shut up. When you make a decision to either move forward with something, or put it on the back burner, you’ll find that it tends to distract you a lot less. One of the best ways to accomplish this is to simply write down what the nagging thought is. You may even surprise yourself; you may realize that you’re not thinking what you thought you were thinking.

The point is simple: don’t worry about writing for an audience, and just write what there is to write. That’s when you’ll write the stuff that your audience will be most interested to read.