Writers Against Writing?

A smart line in an annoying advice piece by marketer Ryan Holiday on (not) becoming a writer:

Getting published is easy. Getting anyone to care? Well, that’s the hard part.

Truth, of course. Publish yourself or get published by a friend – not a big deal. But who’s gonna read it? Unfortunately, the author’s treatment of this riddle isn’t of help:

The problem is identifying as a writer. As though assembling words together is somehow its own activity. It isn’t. It’s a means to an end. […]

Deep down, you already know this. Take any good piece of writing, something that matters to you. Why is it good? Because of what it says. Because what the writer manages to communicate to you, their reader. It’s because of what’s within it, not how they wrote it.

Utter bullshit. Holiday elaborates his argument from an n=1 sample composed of people who do “interesting” things like assisting Tucker Max or “watching office politics” at American Apparel and later become a successful writer (id est, Ryan Holiday). I obviously agree on the former (do interesting things), but I disagree on the latter (this will easily make you a great writer). ((I also differ on Holiday’s definition of interestingness, but that’s just a matter of taste that needn’t be discussed.))

If you think about it for a second, form does matter. “Assembling words” is an activity on its own. Holiday knows this, of course. He devours a ton of books himself – and he uses his own writing skills when he hides a few facts, highlights others, and creates a catchy headline in order to advance a shallow argument. That may not make him a great writer yet, but probably a great marketer on his way to become one.

Unfortunately, for now, devious rhetorics can help you sell your book (or your Thought Catalog blog post); they may give you a lot of clicks and some recognition. But they won’t touch your reader’s heart and soul, not even when they generate interest. Those two, they care about more than our curiosity does. Having the skill to reach them means – for most of us mere mortals – some hard work. It’s something I don’t like to recognize either, but it’s hard to deny. ((It doesn’t really help that Holiday backpedals at the end. A more wholesome look at the problem would have been preferable, even though it might have generated less page views.))

[¶]

Along the same lines, Discouragement for Young Writers, by Freddie deBoers, who self-describes concisely as “some dude” and opens with a double-disclaimer:

A third of this is tongue in cheek. You’ll have to decide which third yourself.

And:

I’m not a writer; I’m just someone who reads and writes a lot. So you may take all of this in a “credit only to the man in the arena” sense, and I wouldn’t blame you.

DeBoers obviously understands there’s some higher higher value in writing:

None of this, by the way, means that I don’t think you should write. What else are you going to do? I can’t sleep at night, and I don’t like the drugs they prescribe. So I write.

But said writing just isn’t easily monetized. Overall, deBoers’ piece is funnier and more insightful. It helps that he doesn’t brag about his life “in the ghetto (briefly)” (Holiday). He explains why it sucks being a writer, especially when starting out (“They will eat you up with judgmental eyes if you fail, and you will almost certainly fail”). Consequently, deBoers argues, it might be better to just keep our aspirations to ourselves.

While that’s decent advice, it’s unfortunately merely as decent as other people’s recommendations of public commitment that holds you accountable for your decisions. There are many ways to Rome and it’s up to you to find the one that works for you: Be interesting, live first (and write later), practice your prose, connect with the right people, never give up, whatever. The world is full of rockstars and hermits, professors and beggars, teenagers and pensioners who have written bestsellers. Ryan Holiday did it. DeBoers, from all I can tell, did not: “10,000 hours of practice might be better spent playing Snood. That’s the gamble.”

Does this mean one is a better writer than the other? Or does it make it more or less likely that you’re gonna be one yourself? Nobody knows. If you want to make a living as a writer, both pieces provide solutions: Do stuff and market yourself ruthlessly (Holiday) or forget about any monetary expectations (deBoers). If you’re not into money but into writing, though, the solution I’d consider is this: Sit the fuck down and write.

Blog Beyond Rules

tl;dr: ((TL;DR stands for “too long; didn’t read” and is my executive summary of longer blog posts. I hope you’ll still make it through the text, but I want to give you some idea what’s it all about.)) Blogging is the most powerful publishing environment created in human history – anything goes! This is why we don’t seem to get it. Even more people would cherish blogging, though, if it wasn’t for the vanguard pundits and probloggers out there who try to force it into a corset. As a remedy, I’ll be eating my own (vegan) dogfood: Take blogging beyond rules, think in public, embrace dilettantism, build trust.

By now, I guess my main mistake in attempting to make sense of blogging was attempting to make sense of blogging. But while many people have pondered and discussed this problem, the obvious solution somehow never got to me: Just blog beyond rules. ((How ironic to discover this 2+ years after writing a book of that title. D’oh.))

Let me elaborate.

At minimum level, a blog is a series of “posts” displayed in reverse chronological order. Beyond that? Pretty much anything you want it to be. Like a river, a blog can be fast or slow, deep or shallow, calm or fierce. Here are some approaches to blogging:

  • Link posts and list posts.
  • Science and fiction.
  • Rational and esoteric insights.
  • Jokes and product reviews and ramblings and short stories and advertorials and spam and instructionals and commentary and news pieces and rants.
  • Text and photos. And sound files. Music. Movies.
  • Pirated or self-made, curated and original, futuristic and conservative, monochrome and technicolor.
  • Speaking of color: Blogs come in any combination of them, ranging from text in black and white to pink on green (yikes!).
  • There are single-author and group blogs.
  • Most blogs allow comments, but some don’t.
  • Many allow trackbacks to other blogs that have linked to an article. (But, again, some don’t.)
  • Almost all blogs can be subscribed to by RSS or email – and you’ll get most updates for free!
  • Some blogs make money in a direct (advertising) or indirect way (drawing an audience to sell some sort of product or service).
  • Many don’t, and many don’t even want to.
  • A lot of blogs are personal and akin to public diaries (or work-logs).
  • Some are temporary and intend to cover “my year in Kyrgyzstan”, only to stop abruptly after the first three weeks of homesickness, when the writer notices it’s more fun drinking kumyz with the shepherds than posting updates for his mum and highschool friends.

Shall I keep going? ((As incomplete as it is, this list already gives some idea of how diverse blogging is nowadays. From it, I can identify several continua on which blogs seem to operate: There’s one continuum ranging from the quick thought in tweet-length to the elaborated essay with thousands of words. There’s another one ranging from any kind of true statement (e.g. a software review, a research report, a comment on current politics) to a completely invented story (e.g. a sci-fi short or a poem). A third continuum ranges from content that’s merely entertaining (a weird story from life, a comedy post, a good rant) to content that’s extremely actionable (e.g. a how-to).

There are certainly even more continua in play. For example, the difference between original content and curation/aggregation. Or the quality-quantity relationship: Some blogs aim to provide few but stellar posts, others publish “a constant stream of work in social media to ride atop the wave in viewers’ newsfeeds, or else become the wave itself, overwhelming them with material.”

For me personally, the most interesting blogs jump between these extremes: I like to see many shorter posts mixed up with the occasional longer essay, and I love to read an entertaining story from life that entails some sort of lesson for my mind and soul. More than anything, I like to see bloggers creating a narrative with their writing – a narrative that owes much to the truth of life, but that’s partly fictional nonetheless. (Here’s why.) This is something I try to do here on The Friendly Anarchist as well.))

Senseless Sensemaking

I’m in good company when it comes to flawed atempts of making sense of blogging. An army of self-proclaimed thought leaders still doesn’t get tired to either celebrate the publishing revolution we’re witnessing or to lament the downfall of printed journalism (and society as a whole). Probloggers continue to emerge who smell their opportunity and start selling “fail-proof formulas” to “grow your audience” and “make a six-figure side income”. ((I won’t link to these places here, but feel free to post some cringeworthy examples in the comments for our entertainment.))

Yet somehow, all these attempts to define blogging seem to reduce its potential rather than to augment it.

When Nassim Nicholas Taleb drops “the straightjacket of the 750-word op-ed” ((Quoting from his newest (and, so far, excellent) book, Antifragile. Interestingly, a web search for that phrase brings up a Counterpunch post from 2003. Tough being original in times of blogging.)) in favor of writing books, many of his readers might consider a blog to be an even worse outlet for your thoughts. But the opposite is true: A blog can be used just as well to archive your tweets as to publish your next novel. ((Sometimes, the former can even lead to the latter.)) It can be anything you want: A business, a braindump, a book, a blackmarket. It’s not that the platform isn’t able to do stuff, it’s that our imagination doesn’t catch up with its possibilities.

With blogs, we’re taking publishing where Paul Feyerabend was heading with scientific methods:

Anything goes.

And no matter how many snake oil salesmen want to sell us their potions and insights, we’ve barely even touched the surface of what’s possible, both in terms of form and content. Millions of bloggers are pushing the boundaries as you read this.

Thinking in Public = Dilettante Media = Trust

It’s true, of course: Some approaches have indeed been “proven” (in so far as they help to achieve certain results) – but I’m personally much more interested in exploring unknown shores over copying the latest “blogging success strategy” that gets hyped on Twitter. Today’s successful experiment will be the hype of the next season.

The pity is that I forget about this stuff. I forget eating my own (vegan) dogfood, especially as it’s so meta that it easily falls into oblivion. I tend to lock myself into my own “proven” ways to blog. In the transition, I’d like to end this and reclaim The Friendly Anarchist in three ways: By thinking in public, leveraging the power of dilettantism, and deepening the trustful relationship with my readers.

Thinking in public is where it all begins. It’s central in so far as it helps me to avoid dead-end streets in my thought process, as Clive Thompson explains:

For years, this blog helped me avoid getting stuck in precisely these sorts of intellectual culs-de-sac. I’d find an interesting scientific paper or report, get an idea, and start blogging about it. Then — yipes — during the process of writing the ideas would move in a surprising new direction, and I’d figure out what I was really trying to say. […] It scarcely matters whether two or ten or a thousand people are going to read the blog post; the transition from nonpublic and public is nonlinear and powerful.

I’ve had my fair share of “intellectual culs-de-sac” over the years. There was a good reason not to think in public, of course: I was hesistant in putting fresh ideas out there not so much because I fear copycats, but because I wanted to avoid being half-assed and stealing your time. And still – at some point, we have to ship. The only thing worse than a half-assed intellectual dinghy in your blogging river is the half-finished genius battleship that never leaves the dockyard.

Thinking in public means to further embrace experiment as method. Which entails the occasional failure. Experimentation in the public sphere will always be scary and somewhat dangerous. It provides the proverbial look in the kitchen, and that’s not always pretty. But it comes with a reward for readers and publishers alike. Here’s Seth Godin’s take:

Amateur media tends to be a lot more personal, unpredictable and interesting.

Interestingness and unpredictability are the rewards for seeking dilettantism as a reader. I have reaped these rewards for years now as an avid reader myself. And I find myself moving more and more towards personal blogs. Professional blogs become boring over time (mostly due to repetition and marketing bullshit), while personal blogs often get more interesting (because, if the author keeps up with it, she’ll get better and better over time).

But there’s also a reward for the writer. Quoting Seth Godin again:

…those three things [personality, unpredictability and interestingness] make it far more likely that you will earn attention, connection and trust, which of course makes it more likely you’ll earn a living.

This is confirmed by CJ Chilvers:

It’s taken me years, but I’ve finally gotten my blogging mind on straight. I take in just about all content I care about now from individuals I trust, not collectives of any kind. So, it’s about time I build that trust with readers as well.

Trust is crucial to my friendly anarchistic life philosophy, and the trust generated through a one-man dilettante shop is the core of my business ethics. It is this relationship between public thinking, dilettantism and trust that I want to deepen here on the site. That means leveraging the power of my individual approach to writing, blogging and connecting. It also means forgetting about “success strategies” and “proven formulas” once and for all – and taking blogging back to where it belongs: Beyond rules.

Good Bye! (I’m Gonna Miss You)

At this moment, there are still a few hundred readers who receive blog updates from The Friendly Anarchist through Google Reader. Unfortunately, Google is closing this product down. If you’re still using it, you won’t get any blog updates from July 1 onwards.

I’m probably alone with this, but I think this is great news for several reasons:

  1. Google is creepy. As are most bigger tech companies. The less we depend on them, the better.
  2. By closing Reader down, Google creates great incentives for smaller companies to develop an alternative. My own preferred RSS reader, NetNewsWire, just saw its first update in about 200 billion years.
  3. It puts you back in the driving seat. How many blogs are you still subscribed to that you don’t really read or that don’t  deliver any value for you? The end of Google Reader may be the perfect opportunity to reassess your reading habits.

That said, if you still use Reader, you’ll want to move my feed to a new reader before Google pulls the plug. Here’s what I suggest you to do:

  1. Get a new reader now. I don’t need anything fancy, so I use NetNewsWire, but if you want something special (with sync and all) here’s a look at most of the alternatives.
  2. Don’t import your old feeds. There are probably too many to keep up with, anyway. Just copy those you really care about by hand… like, The Friendly Anarchist (I hope). Subscribe to my new feed here: http://www.friendlyanarchist.com/feed/
  3. No third step required. But if you’re really into friendly anarchism, you might also want to sign up for my newsletter here. I will start sending blog updates to that list from next week on, plus you’ll get extra content that doesn’t show up on the blog. Deal?

If you decide not to stay on board or to ditch RSS altogether or to leave the internet and move into a cabin in the woods, though, that is also perfectly fine. You probably can’t stand seeing people whine about this stuff anymore, either. I live 20% of my life online, so it’s not a choice for me, but it’s probably not the worst choice to make, anyway. In that case: Thanks for being here. It was a pleasure to have you and I’m sure we’ll meet again. ((Please don’t shoot any people wearing The Friendly Anarchist t-shirts if they’re trespassing your forest grounds. I probably just got lost!)) Have a great day!

 

Mountain Shores #5: Summer (Un)Productivity

I’m admittedly late with this, but our most recent episode of Mountain Shores went live last week!

Leveraging our proverbial discipline, we gathered with the wonderful Michael Nobbs on one of the warmest days of the year (so far!) to chat about summer productivity, social media sabbaticals, schedules, sleep patterns and self-depletion.

We talked about repetition versus reiteration in writing, using Mad Men to kickstart your day, and the wonders of the Start Here page. Featuring police cars and chirping birds, the show ends with an incredible opportunity to grab free ice-cream during Summer on a tiny island in the North Sea.

Go listen in and get the show notes here!

Also, if you don’t want to wait for my slow-moving blog updates, be sure to subscribe to get the latest episodes directly into iTunes or Stitcher.

Few Try

There are two caveats when it comes to going beyond rules in your work and building an interesting life that suits you:

  1. Failure is under-reported. A success is a great story and will be covered in the news, shared in books and speeches far and wide. A failure won’t get any coverage at all, unless you’re talking to your best friend (or your counselor). Learning almost exclusively about success makes you biased towards trying, putting the availability heuristic into play – which gives you an inflated expectation of success.
  2. Here’s the flipside, though: Few try. Despite the availability heuristic, almost nobody actually stops doing what she’s expected to do and starts doing what she wants to do instead. Almost nobody even considers going beyond rules; even less pull through with it.

One more thing: While the availability heuristic does indeed matter, it entails another dimension: It is biased towards the superstars.

It’s extremely memorable to see how Paul Potts goes from mobile phone salesman to opera singer after a remarkable presentation on a horrible TV show, cashing in several million bucks. But you seldom see people who took a leap of faith years ago and are “merely” doing fine. They may not be rich, beautiful and famous. But they are making a living. They love their life. They have found meaning in it, and they live up to it. ((To prove my point, who does know what Paul Potts is doing right now? That TV show happened about six years ago. I hope he’s still happy!))

If this kind of people are introverts, they might never tell anyone outside their immediate families. They might just not think of it as a big deal. If you live in a little town or operate within a smaller peer group, chances are you’ll never hear about any of them – even though there are, indeed, millions!

So how about your specific area, your very own dream? Your plan to revolutionize the modern art scene with putty and polaroids? Won’t that be impossible?

Think about this: Even if you’d have to be “one in a million” to make it, that would still mean that there is a place for more than 7.000 people in this world doing that exact thing.

Few actually try to do it. How about you?