When I was just getting started as a weblogger at Life Coaches Blog, a tip I read to improve my writing was to write as if I was speaking to a large audience. Now that I look back at my writing on LcB after five years of full-time writing experience, I can see that advice didn’t really work out for me. It was part of the reason that made my writing over at LcB diffused and vapid (the main reason was that I had to mature more as a person).
Thanks to articles like Merlin Mann’s Better (an inspirational building block for this weblog), when I moved to 21 Dragons I resolved to write differently. Instead of imagining myself speaking to a large, faceless audience while writing, I now imagine myself speaking to an audience of one; a good friend whom I love, and whose opinion I respect.
Someone I know who will appreciate good work if I do it, but will also kick my butt if I do other than my best. Someone to whom I can show my writing and not feel embarrassed. A real person to whom I can imagine an article having relevance, not an imaginary crowd with diverse imaginary needs. He or she isn’t a specific person I always imagine, but can be any number of the good friends I have in my life.
Sometimes the writing process is easy. Sometimes it feels like breaking bones.
I wrote a feature about Yahoo! last month. Once I figured out its spine – the central idea – the writing flowed smoothly after.
The feature I just finished about Steve Jobs was hell to write. I wrote and re-wrote multiple beginnings, none of which worked. I couldn’t find where the spine was and I felt my mind going dead on me every time I tried to write.
The deadline was closing in on me and I was forced to just start writing what I knew – what my fingers knew as my mind was a fog – and the middle of a story formed that I didn’t even know was there.
Once I had the middle down, the ending and the beginning came easily. And it turned out all the boring parts that I thought had to be in even though I had no idea how to include them didn’t need to be in at all (another bonus point for writing what you know first).
Some articles are like sipping a cold mojito while lounging on a warm sunny beach. Some articles you have to sweat buckets, sloughing through a muddy maze in the darkness, hoping against desperate hope to find a gem at the end.
It’s never been easier to start a blog. So why is it so hard to have a wildly successful one?
To cobble the bard; “the fault, dear reader, is not in our blogs, but in ourselves.” It’s easy to start a blog. It’s hard to develop a unique voice and remarkable insight (a phrase I learned from Seth Godin’s book Linchpin: Are You Indispensable?). Without either, you’re just another voice in the crowd. With both, you become indispensable.
To ask how to gain a unique voice and remarkable insight is missing the boat: If there was a step-by-step formula anyone could follow, the end result would be a crowd neither unique nor remarkable. To have both requires personal thought and experience at the very least, both of which you can neither skip the time and effort on to gain. Whichever your blog’s area of expertise, it’s as Apple CEO Steve Jobs said in the context of creativity:
Creativity is just connecting things. When you ask creative people how they did something, they feel a little guilty because they didn’t really do it, they just saw something. It seemed obvious to them after a while. That’s because they were able to connect experiences they’ve had and synthesize new things. And the reason they were able to do that was that they’ve had more experiences or they have thought more about their experiences than other people.
Or as Benjamin Franklin succinctly summed up: “Either write something worth reading or do something worth writing.”
Somewhere in our heads, if you listen hard enough, there is a voice that is the voice of Should. The voice of Should tells us how we should be doing things; how we should talk, how we should dress, how we should respond, how we should go along, how we should tolerate. And in my head, this voice tells me how I should write.
And every time we do, our real voice – our Soul’s voice – gets buried underneath sentences of sentences of what we should say, not what we want to say.
We die each time and we don’t know it.
A Writer’s Search for Meaning
And yet, in the quiet moments, our Soul’s voice finds sustenance. When we allow ourselves to simply speak our hearts – honestly, authentically – even if we break the rules of convention, our words find an audience. It is not the deft manipulation of words that resonate with us, but the touch of recognition one soul feels at listening to another soul’s voice, speaking over the voice of his shoulds. And we, when reading writing like that, aren’t as impressed by the message of the words as we are by its authenticity, because we too, yearn to express our souls like that.
This post is for a friend whom I know has great stuff to share and just needs to write it all down. I hope it helps. Get your book out already, dude!
1. The Ultimate Secret to Writing
The ultimate secret to writing is the one that most people don’t seem to want to hear. And it’s simply this: keep working your ass off.
Are there freak geniuses that wake up in the morning, eyes blazing with divine inspiration who knock out thousands of pages before breakfast? Maybe, but I’m not one of them. I have to sit my ass down and sweat words before they even look halfway decent, writing even when I don’t feel like writing and churning paragraphs of rubbish. It’s hard.
But then, some days it isn’t hard. It’s graceful pirouettes all the way instead of thundering tumbles. Them’s the crazy breaks of the creative life. But you have to work regardless, whether it’s beautiful ballerina day or clumsy hippo night. Just sit yourself down, and keep typing, keep typing, keep typing.
2. Be Okay with Sucking Horrendously
You are not the lovechild of Shakespeare, Einstein and Amelia Earhart. Do not expect your first draft to be anything but shit. The good news is that gorgeous isn’t what you’re aiming for when you’re doing the first draft, the first draft is what you’re aiming for when you’re doing the first draft.