Writing

Speak to an Audience of One

September 1, 2011

in Writing

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.

The Process

August 11, 2010

in Writing

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.