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

I started following this cat, Hugh MacLeod, on twitter (@gapingvoid).  It was the best Twit-cision I have ever made.

Here’s an example of his stuff:

I know I only have about 32 readers on Saturdays, but if all 32 of you checked him out, you’d have a much funnier weekend.

S-P – Here is your business model!

This week Hugh tweeted about this guy, The Daily Letter:

So there you have the weekend awesome.  Enjoy.

Writers, whether they are real or pretend (like I am), are supposed to say Yes.  @ProcrastWriter (if you’re any sort of writer you must follow Jennifer Blanchard on twitter and read her helpful blog) retweeted this article a couple days ago.  I read it in full agreement.

Until Saturday’s undisciplined morning.

With one full day of rest and thought between me and Saturday’s debacle, I thought about the dilemma – to blog or not to blog.  I thought long and hard about blogging and writing and modern writers.

photo: http://www.despair.com - for all your demotivational needs

Christopher Moore has a blog.  He writes about everything, though very rarely.

Annie Proulx does not have a blog.

Steven Pressfield does more than blog.  He helps make other people into a version of Bagger Vance on his blog.  This guy is busy, and I should add, he is generous.

Cormac McCarthy does not maintain a weblog from the Mexican border, nor from the road.

Of course, Dave Berry does; and naturally Annie Dillard does not have time to blog.  She is, as it were, gathering preying mantis egg sacs and watching them with primordial fascination.

He speaks:

-James Frey.  Does.  Not Blog.

Authors who need no links to their blogs, as their books are the results of their online dominance include: Seth Godin, Chris Guillebeau, the almighty Dooce and Darren Rowse.  For these bloggers, blogging is writing.

But what about us amateurs?

Blogging is a time-suck into a fictional world where advertisers award easy money to everyone with a WordPress account.

The problem with blogging for authors and would-be authors is the extra blank screen.  Writers face enough that is blank.  Bank account, that post-morning headspace, the three notebook pages you left to finish the rough draft of that last short story.

The screen on your blog’s dashboard has some handy doo-dads, but the center portion where the text is supposed to go, is always blank.  Like your current notebook.  Like your word-processing screen.

Always blank.

The discipline to write every day becomes a curse, because writers, even us pretend writers, learn to fill things that are blank; not the bank account of course, but the pages and the screen and the seeping headspace.  Fellow-writer, do you need one more blank space to fill?

See, the internet rewards those who write about the same things over and over and over.  If you’re a writer, odds are, you write about everything.  Try rising to the first page of google if you write about your adventures in the woods and the next day you follow that up with a piece on Sudanese slavery.

If you google a Ream of Paper, guess what?  I’m number five!  First page, baby.  This would be very rewarding if I were selling unused reams of paper to prospective paper purchasers.  Alas I sell you whatever is inside my head (and you tend to be a cheap audience, by the way).  There is more than a half-ream of manuscript beside me on my desk right now.  I curse it every day.  If you wanna buy it, click on Google’s number 5 listing in my “paper niche.”

If you’re a writer, sure set up a blog – and have a blast communicating with your audience.  But take Ms. Lindey’s sixth piece of advice:

“Blogging is great for practicing writing.”

Ahem: and sentence structure, but i digress.  Treat blogging as practice and you will not be disappointed in the abysmally low number of readers your BEST blog post ever managed to draw.

Wednesday’s post will most-likely be part 4 of my memoir-ish thingy on faith.  Unless, of course, I go off the rails later today.  This week, I am going to completely sell-out, blow reamofpaper to smithereens and began again – for the billionth time.  Viva la Raza.