You have spent most of your life being a good person, and that is nice.  Me too.  I used to be (ahem) clergy, so I know what it means to be impressively good (at least, as far as anyone else knows).

Every writer fights her internal editor.  My internal editor is Sybil.  He has at least 57 distinct personalities, all of them very upright and well-dressed.  Many of them suffer from male pattern baldness, but that is beside the point.  My IE takes on the look and attitude of real people I know and says to me: “If you write that what will these other upstanding citizens in your head think of you?  They’ll probably think you’re dirty or some sort of scoundrel.  Write something pretty.”

Am I alone here?

I wrote myself a note in the fancy-fancy notebook as a warm-up exercise.  It is to me, but I’ll share it with those of you who are denizens of decency by day and writers by night:

“Within the first book of the bible there is murder, incest, rape, polygamy, drunken debauchery, war, oppression, sodomy, racism, greed, arrogance, and piles of men who are described as having “known his wife.”

There are enough Christian books about some beautiful Amish prude, whose husband is tender, sexless and hard-working, whose beard feels bristly across her makeupless-face.  There are enough Christian paintings of churches in dark vales lit with an interior incandescent bulb providing light for the rest of nature, which must include a deer who is panteth-ing for water.

God is not in the business of redeeming the ideal.  Redeem a rape, something horrible.  Maybe it’s as simple as living to tell about it.  That is a God universally believable.  All of this other perfectionism is an expression of the wild religious ego; a false, impenitent self, hiding behind knit-together fig leaves.  In your work, give God a moment where he must forsake Christ on the cross because of the sin of your characters, otherwise you are not an artist, and probably not a Christian.

Don’t write a Christian story.  Write a good story instead.”

In the dreamy moments where does your mind wander?  There is a choice.  Do you prefer to go back to a better time, or do you dare attempt to fashion the unknown future?

Faith used to describe those who dared to imagine a heaven-inspired future.  In an ironic culture, faith has become a synonym for fear.

Faith perspective

The world was created good, then derailed.  There was a moment of bliss, followed by endless generations of inherited blight.  We want the bliss, but the blight is between our teeth.

Moving forward is painful and filled with trepidation.  But do not be deceived: there is no going back. 

I wish I started RoP incognito, writing as Corduroy T. Brandt, an expatriot, English freegan who blogs from a dumpster behind the Aurora Starbucks.  I should have.  That guy has a terrible mouth and outlandish opinions.  I don’t.  Or at least I am afraid to write them.

I met K.B. Lawrence on twitter a few weeks back.  Presumably she is a female with some kids and a husband.  She writes in five minute increments, and frequently blogs about those 5 minutes.  Other than these few tidbits, she (or maybe she’s a he) is a mystery.  I asked why.  This is what she said:

The Real Me, and Why She Doesn’t Have a Blog

a guest-post by K.B. Lawrence

My mom has never read my blog.  She doesn’t even know I have one.  Neither does my best friend.  My husband knows I have one, but he’s never read it.  (Unless he’s sneeked a peek at the office, and if he has, he’s smart enough to keep it to himself.)

I write on the sly, but not for the reasons people assume when they think about blogging under a pseudonym.  I’m not hiding from you (or my mom) -

I’m hiding from me.

Well…from the other me.

The Messy Truth

There’s a very cautious girl sharing my head, and I need to crawl under her radar to get something honest on the page.

When it’s time to work, writers have to be willing to get messy.  We have to revel in the stuff that’s life and throw it through the bars of the cage.  There’s no room for caution.

If you write about how to strip and stain decks, you need to write about the mistakes you’ve made, the brands you hate, the August afternoon you spent beating a power washer into submission.

If you write about being in the slow-moving line of moms that walked hip-touching-hip through the shallows until one stepped on the body of the boy who’d slipped under, you’d better make your reader smell sunscreen.

Good writing (vibrant, feel-the-splinters, smell-the-sunscreen writing) comes from a gut that has been cut open and slapped onto the page (or screen, whatever, we’re not picky here).

The other girl in my head keeps her guts intact and inside where guts belong.  She follows rules and says nice things to people and tries not to scare the other moms.  She stands in the corner at parties (She definitely hides in the bathroom during the karaoke!), and tells the neighbors that her dog is a mutt but yes he does sort of look like a pit bull (Ceaser loves her anyway, good doggy).  That girl knows how to behave herself.

She writes some boring stuff.

So I got rid of her – at least for the writing.

The Partnership

I, KB, write what I want, when I want. I slip out of that other girl’s cage and smear all kinds of unseemly things on the page (or silly things or stupid things or inappropriate things).  It doesn’t matter because I’M NOT REAL. And that other girl let’s me do it because no one sees it.  At least, no one she knows.

She’s no good at the writing, but she watches, she listens, and she rarely judges (never ever out loud, no sir).  People will tell her anything.  People will forget she’s there and start acting like their really real selves.  Then she takes notes.

So I protect her.  She needs me, because junk piles up inside of people who can’t speak. And I need her, because she stands in the corners, observing.

We all have something we can’t bear to put down on paper.  (Especially where someone might see it. Eek.) It’s too embarrassing, too strange.  But that something – the stuff that makes your stomach flip and clench – is the good stuff.  If you can’t bring yourself to put it out for the world, you could try finding the other you.  The one who doesn’t give a rat’s rear end about what her mother thinks.

Follow K.B. on Twitter.

unaccomplished writer.  unsolicited advice.

Step 2: Realize: the pen has never been mightier.

Last week the e-book overtook the real book in sales at Amazon.com.  Slightly more people chose to read books from a Kindle, an iPad, their phones or a computer screen than from a traditional page.  Before the rise of the e-book, the publishing world was already unraveling.  You made it happen.  You, with the small blog; it’s your fault.

We destroyed the long-standing rules of publication simply by pressing the publish button in our efforts to gain online readers.  People found value in your free work and in the connection with other people that your blog offered.

Consider the time your readers spent reading your last thousand-word post.  Time-on-site is a valuable metric.  As a writer, it is the one I pay closest attention.  Three and a half minutes to read the post; that’s three and a half minutes they will not spend reading better, more established, traditionally published authors. 

Step 1: Decide to be a writer (or an artist) with a blog.

Part two (Part one here) of a week-long series: How to Grow a Medium-Sized Blog for Writers and Creatives.

I used to blog about religion.

The Bible is a long, long book.  Chapter 19, shortly after “In the beginning,” there is a story about two sisters who get their father pass-out drunk so they can have sex with him in order to bear children.  Chapter 19.  Their father is technically one of the good guys.  It is in the Bible.

There are other long Christian books.  None that I’ve read involve incestuous drunkenness.  Books about the Book are dull and safe.  Three years ago I read a book by a well-known pastor; I suspected some confessions.  The word “confessions” was in the title.

He wrote about how he didn’t like some people.  His job was hard.  He cared about his image.  I mean, he did everything but make an actual confession.  I read the whole book because I hoped he’d confess something so that I could forgive him.  Whenever he came close to admitting a flaw, he patched it up for me.  In essence he said, “Here’s how I became better; and you can too!”  So I hate that guy now (forgive me, please), but he sold enough copies to warrant more non-confessional-type books about how to be awesomer.

The book made me want to confess things.  Things I didn’t even do.  So many people write books about being great.  Becoming better.

how i went from small blog to medium blog in just 500 days…

and what I’d do differently.

A few weeks back, the Google gods decided that Ream of Paper had graduated to medium-size.  [Applause light: ON]  While this came as no surprise to my writer’s ego, it was nice to see the metrics validate the efforts.  With graduation came a new set of standards.  Prior to becoming medium, I could log into my Analytics Dashboard and think of myself as being 300% above average in certain statistical categories.  Now, being judged against a new set of peers, I’ll admit my dismay when I see that I am a C or D-minus (or sometimes F) medium-sized blogger according to the new Bell Curve.

Rather than lament my newfound poor-standing amongst the medium bloggers of the world, I am going to be grateful and joyfully commit my own version of the unpardonable sin: blogging about blogging like some fool internet Sherpa (for a whole week!), in an effort to help other writers and/or creatives with blogs grow from little to medium.  “Why so altruistic,” you ask?  I don’t want to be alone in the D-minus category of medium-sized blogs.  You can be D-minus too!  If you’re a writer/artist with a little blog, perhaps we can achieve solid B’s in the medium-sized blog metrics before Christmas if we work together.

Ream of Paper’s real growth began in June.  I made some conscious decisions about changing direction in my life, including what I do here at RoP.  I set some new goals for myself.  I let go of some old goals; this is much harder than setting new goals, by the way.  There were new permissions to be granted.  I changed my perspective on my readers, on blogs I read, on the craft of blogging (as opposed to “real writing”) and Twitter.  In addition to these new perspectives, I humbly owned some mistakes I made along the way.

This week I am coming clean – in a very medium way.  I want to help you become medium.  Maybe we can crack the BIG metrics together.  I hate, and I mean that in the worst possible manner, blogs about blogging; so I promise to get over my increased stature as quickly as possible.

Go write and transform.

writing and living well.

Since I am a writer, I do not fall in love with principles.  Most often principles are hat-stands designed for people who wear hats to cover bald spots.  Sometimes they are true.  In his book Outliers: The Story of Success (Amazon Affiliate Link), Malcom Gladwell talks about 10,000 hours of practice as if these hours were some sort of principle.  Immediately I want to dismiss him, until he stops writing about Bill Gates and starts to include composers; then I must listen.

I write Ream of Paper with about 7,000 hours of practice under my belt, not enough to be great by Gladwell’s or any other set of standards.  But I practice.  Think about, and I mean give it a quick guesstimate, not the whole of your afternoon, how many hours you have spent writing.  How many hours have you practiced?

My first crack at writing a novel, I chalk up to pure diligence.  Your collection of poetry that no one will buy is not a loss; it is a reminder of 1,500 hours