If an idea falls onto the page and no one sees it, does it make a difference?
When great writing goes unnoticed in the digital wilderness
The phrase "If a tree falls in a forest and no one is around to hear it, does it make a sound?" is the story of every writer. I'm sure it's how all writers have felt - ever before 'online.'
For years, I've been growing ideas that have become a forest in my head.
Each idea is a tree, carefully tended until it's ready to be transformed into something useful. As a writer, I fell these trees one at a time, hoping they can be used to build my community and fortify my work. But my biggest fear is that they'll fall unheard, lying in waste on the forest floor.
I see it on Substack and Medium - powerful articles with ideas that branch out beautifully from their trunk, only to find zero comments, hearts, or claps below. From all I can tell, I'm the sole witness to their worth.
My own articles often share the same fate.
This captures a central challenge of creating: quality doesn't always equate to visibility. We nurture our ideas, hoping they'll contribute to the broader landscape, but in an overcrowded space, even the mightiest trees can fall without anyone noticing. It raises uncomfortable questions about how we measure the worth of an idea. Is it in the metrics – the likes, comments, and shares? Or does it lie in the potential impact on even a single reader?
Even if no one else witnesses the fall, the act of felling the tree – of writing – transforms the writer. Like a 3D printer turning a digital file into something tangible, writing allows us to hold our ideas, rotate them, and examine them from angles we never could before.
My journal spans decades and contains hundreds of thousands of words worth their weight in gold—first as they hit the page and again each time I revisit them. Every time we write, we transform fuzzy thoughts into clear understanding, build an archive of our intellectual journey, develop our voice and craftsmanship, process emotions, discover new aspects of ourselves, and prepare for when our words might find their audience.
Still, there's something bittersweet about watching our ideas lie dormant when they could be building something beautiful in someone else's mind.
The challenge isn't just to keep writing – it's to find ways to help the right readers discover our fallen trees before they fade into the forest floor.