F. Scott Fitzgerald once said:
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say.”
It’s one of those observations that sounds simple until you consider it carefully and then it becomes rather profound. He was drawing a sharp line between writing that seeks attention and writing that seeks truth. He meant that real writing; lasting writing doesn’t come from the desire to be heard, praised, or published. It comes from a deeper urgency: a burden of observation or experience that won’t leave the writer alone until it’s been put into words.
In the current age of content calendars, posting schedules, and algorithmic pressure, that distinction matters more than ever.
The algorithm and the anxiety it creates #
Perhaps in this current era, Fitzgerald’s quote might be lightly tweaked:
“You don’t write because you want to say something, you write because you have something to say, even if the algorithm doesn’t reward you.”
That extra item is not cynical. It is liberating.
Because the anxiety that the algorithm generates in content creators: the constant checking of reach statistics, the second-guessing of posting times, the suspicion that the platform has quietly stopped showing your work to anyone, is largely a distraction from the actual work of writing. It places the emphasis on the wrong end of the process entirely. It makes the distribution the point, when the content is the point.
The writers and business owners who have built the most durable audiences over time are rarely those who cracked the algorithm. They are those who had something genuinely worth saying and said it consistently, for long enough that the people who needed to hear it eventually found them.
The algorithm is a distribution mechanism. It is not a quality arbiter. It does not know the difference between something written with genuine insight from twenty years of experience and something assembled from trending topics and borrowed frameworks. The reader does. And readers, found slowly and kept carefully, are worth considerably more than impressions generated quickly and forgotten immediately.
What we own #
When we release our written nuggets into the world; the ones that explain what it is we do, how we do it, why we do it, and whom we serve, something useful happens regardless of algorithmic outcome.
We get clearer.
The act of writing forces a precision that thinking alone rarely achieves. A vague instinct about how to approach a prospect, wrestled into a paragraph, becomes a principle you can return to and refine. An observation about client behaviour, committed to a post, becomes something you can test against future experience. The writing is not just communication. It is thinking made visible which means it serves the writer as much as it serves the reader.
Fitzgerald’s own life reflects this. His notebooks are full of observations, fragments, and half-formed ideas that only became usable when the act of writing forced them into shape. The published work is the visible surface. The writing process is where the real thinking happened. The outcome is what happens next.
On the subject of limericks #
Which brings me, with considerable apology, to the limerick.
There was once a lady called Jane
Whose new business development was a bit of a pain
One call to New Era made things a lot clearer
And now everything is as right as rain.
And yet, here is the thing about that limerick. It does, in its clunking way, exactly what Fitzgerald was describing. It has something to say. It says it. It uses a form that is inherently memorable, slightly ridiculous, and entirely human. Nobody would mistake it for AI-generated content, because no algorithm would choose to make itself look quite so vulnerable.
That vulnerability is not a weakness. It is the quality that makes a reader smile and feel, for a moment, that the person who wrote it is someone they might like. Which is, at the end of a long chain of marketing theory, the thing that eventually produces a phone call, a conversation, and a client relationship.
The release #
The Fitzgerald distinction, between wanting to say something and having something to say, is ultimately a distinction between performance and authenticity.
Performance writing asks: what will this do for me? What will it reach, what will it impress, how will the algorithm treat it?
Authentic writing asks: what is true here? What have I observed, learned, or experienced that is worth passing on?
The release that comes from authentic writing; the feeling of having said something real and let it go into the world, is its own reward, independent of outcome. It is also, paradoxically, the condition most likely to produce writing that reaches people, because readers are extraordinarily good at detecting the difference between the two.
Write because you have something to say. Release it with as much craft as you can manage. Then let it find its own way.
Even if the something is a limerick about Jane.
Good luck with all your endeavours.
Thank you for reading.
Author: Richard Bull-Domican, founder of New Era Financial Introductions, a B2B lead generation consultancy with over twenty years of experience. The perspectives shared here come from two decades in the field; not theory, but practice.
I create small, digestible guides on Gumroad for business owners who hate aggressive tactics and prefer relationship-led approaches. New resources are added regularly. For longer reads on lead generation and the human side of sales, follow me on Medium and join the daily conversation on LinkedIn.
Gumroad: https://richardbulldomican.gumroad.com/
Medium: https://medium.com/@richard-bulldomican
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/richardbulldomican/
