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.  There is nothing to go back to.  The AM radio days – gone.  Black and white ballgame days – gone.

Milk and Honey World

Ancient Israel was promised a land that flowed with milk and honey.  If you go to your refrigerator chances are you can easily procure a glass of milk, be it soy, rice, chocolate or regular cow milk.  Within the matter of a couple steps you’ll probably also find a pot of honey, a squeezy, plastic bear, in my case.  I live in a land flowing with refrigerated, pasteurized milk and Grade AA clover honey.

But this aint no Promised Land.  Because the Promised Land is always coming.  It is always in the future.  Hopeful artists strain toward it, create with a sunlit future in mind.  They dream of it.  Pray for it.  Bleed in that direction.

When we arrive in tomorrow, we’ll screw most things up, leaving the next generation a Promised Land dream.  (Am I right, baby-boomers and reformed hippies?)  This is the order of life and generations.

Trains to History

Sadly, there are still trains in the stations preparing to hurdle backward to 1950′s Americana, to Reagan or to JFK, to Egypt.  These rusty vehicles are piloted by fearful men, self-styled engineers of a prettier history.

I wonder how many Jackie Robinsons, Moses-es, MLKs, Reagans, Davids, Ghandis, Lincolns, Churchills have been herded onto the reverse train.  How much more difficult will our future be without those willing to break barriers, stop impending wars, engage in necessary wars and pray extravagant prayers?

The scriptures conclude with, “Behold I make all things new.”  There is never any indication that God will enter the business of rewinding toward a more genteel Egypt.

Dream and create forward.

Or be angry and cynical.

You can make a living either way.  Fear, anger and cynicism provide easy external validation.  Throngs of people are waiting to join your protest, read your book or blog, and watch you on TV.

Making art or inspiring hope of any kind is very lonely.  Validations are few and usually internal.  It takes a hundred years for the dream to come true.  You lose all your money and credibility along the way.  You’ll be ousted by the short-sighted.

The noble job of artists, leaders and entrepreneurs is to grasp their imagined future and rip it backward into the present.  Of course you’ll be wrong about some things and you’ll screw them up, but at least you won’t be surrounded by the angry mob you’ve riled-up who have boarded your return-to-nowhere train.

Your thoughts, please…

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.  Maybe 1 out of 50-70 readers will leave a comment.  This takes 4 minutes, sometimes longer.  Now your next reader, she will read your post, the latest comments and she may comment on the comments.  Voila, community.  All you did was write the post, but a few of your readers are now spending nearly 10 minutes investing in the community you’ve created.

Of course this reading-time thievery has negative consequences too.  Fewer page-book readers mean that those of us hoping to crack into traditional publishing have fewer potential buyers for our product.  This competition for readers means that only our best work will survive.

No smart business will risk their future on some hack with a blog who may not deliver sales.  Fewer of us will be traditionally signed.  Bye-bye Oprah’s couch and the dream of finally being as reclusive as we wanna be.  The business now requires constant connection.

Your blog is a community; community takes time.

When a reader commits time to your community they are giving you their free minutes as opposed to say, Melville, who is dead and doesn’t mind.  Isn’t it great to be so powerful?  Of course you are also borrowing time from living authors (who need to eat) by entertaining or instructing their would-be readers.  This dilemma demonstrates the power of your blog as a community-building tool.  Seth Godin, in a talk given to independent publishers, said in essence,

The books you are publishing are merely the souvenirs of community.

If this is true, and I believe it is; the game has been forever changed.  (You really should listen to this talk.)  Marketing becomes even more tribal, our networks more important.

We know how this community game works.  In order to build our own community, we must be willing to build others.  This not only rewards us with indirect traffic from related communities, but depending on whose community you invest in, can also improve your writing.

Look for writers with blogs who are better writers than you with a slightly larger audience than yours.  Learn from them.  Get involved by leaving solid comments.  You will get free exposure; so don’t be campy.  Find a couple of writers with smaller audiences than yours and leave them equally valuable comments.  What you receive, you must give.  There is no area of life in which this principle is not applicable.  Be genuine; be generous.  Retweet.

Writing well or creating any sort of art is the most selfish pursuit.  You do it for you until it comes time to share your work.  Then all of your ME time belongs to anyone who cares to read.  Blogging can be abject narcissism, or it can be a nexus for your readers.

Slow, sustainable community building

We get the newsletters telling us how Joey from the Bronx earned a 6-figure income in 6 months of blogging.  Good for you, Joey.  The sales spiel is always the same, “We can help you become an A-lister too.”  Sure you can.

You visit Joey’s site.  Joey blogs about blogging: tips for SEO, how to master Twitter, how to create better spam.  If Joey is a real person at all, he should be publically executed because no one should JUST blog about blogging, especially if you are a writer.

My theorem for growing your writer’s blog is opposite of what 6-figured Joey might sell you.  Your writer’s blog is a community-building business tool.  Businesses that are most enjoyable for the proprietor grow steadily and often slowly.  The writing/business balance has never been more important because you, the writer, have never had so much power.

Even if you pay your bills by doing a job, writing is your business.  Developing your craft is working within your business.  Blogging is working on your business.  In the current market, would-be writers must do both.

Remember: small to medium

Your job is not to grow from small to mega.  Your job is to grow from small to medium.  Screw six-figured, short-cutting Joey who cannot write his way home from a wide-open field.  He makes his dollars by advertising.  You want to make yours from art.  Nothing wrong with advertising, but we cannot afford to take cheap short-cuts.

While it won’t hurt to bone up on the business of blogging by taking a couple of online courses; I fear for you, tender writerly-guy.  Your success as a blogger may impede your success as a writer.  Small, steady growth is always sustainable.

Writers with blogs must meet their audience, converse with them and invest time.  Chris Guillebeau, a tremendous blogger and good writer will respond to all of his readers’ email (I’ve tested his claim; it’s true).  This goes a long way.  You with the small blog, email a thank you note to every subscriber.  It matters, and it legitimizes your efforts.  Communication with readers tells them that you are not going away.

The sticky subject of blogging before you have a book for sale.

Many established writers will poke fun of blogging writers without books to sell.  Of course they will; we’ve already established that your blog is indirectly stealing their sales.  Publishers will only consider signing you if you already have an audience; the infamous Catch-22.

I don’t have anything to sell my readers yet.  Oh well, I am pre-selling.  You probably are too.  Ignore the nay-sayers.  Build your audience.  The discouraging writers are not part of your community anyway.  Forget them.  You must blog.  Just don’t confuse your blogging time with your writing time.

Realize your power.  You’ve already done your part to destroy the publishing industry.  Now we must rebuild it.  Readers need us.

I’m on vacation in 32 hours.  I’ve got a guest post lined up, and I plan on posting semi-regularly as well.  I may drift from this series for a few days.  If so, I’ll be back.  Write on.

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.

So I hated life… and decided to become a writer.  I started Ream of Paper.  No one came.  Maybe religion doesn’t sell because people are used to hearing half-honest confessions, and I’m only slightly more truthful than the writer of the terrible book.  I got depressed; I watched The Apprentice.

A crappy book and Bret Michaels saved my life.

Think about it: There are no top-40 songs about the hormonal workings of love, but there are millions of love songs.  The singers of these songs sell love, not pheromones.  The 80′s proved that you don’t even have to write good songs in order to make a living from writing songs about love.  You just have to write them.

Before Bret Michaels appeared on the Apprentice, he wrote a little song called Every Rose Has Its Thorn, a terrible ballad that any of us could sing at a karaoke bar.  I’m a tenor.  I will join you, if you’re willing to sing alto harmony.  Bret Michaels was on the Apprentice because he wrote sappy love songs and sold them.  Not vice versa.

On your small writer/artist blog, you are a young Bret Michaels. Write a bad song.  Write a better song.  Join a band. Fight with CeCe.  Write more songs.  Sell them on your blog.  This is where you promote your records.  Just be honest, please.

The non-confessional book reminded me that writers make confessions and big bold statements, or they invent imperfect worlds similar to our own to tell their stories.  It reminded me that even the Bible is full of shameful stories with unhappy endings.  And Bret reminded me that I do not have to be the best songwriter in the world to sell records.  When you and I write, we write about the feeling of love not the science behind it.

So I started writing more honestly.  I started writing about transformation, and people started reading more.  I got a few links.  Wow, I became a medium-sized blog in only 500 days. (That is tongue-in-cheek in case you didn’t catch it.)

My early mistake was in my approach to blogging: “I am a Christian blogger, and I want to be a writer.

Insert any faith or set of staunch ideals for mine.  Feminist, Atheist, Buddhist, Republican, Socialist; unless you are building your blog as an echo-chamber, you will not achieve an audience for your writing.  And your writing, my friends, is what is for sale.

The correction: “I am a writer with a blog, and I’m trying to live a little bit like Christ.

It took me a long time to admit this because I used to be paid for my faith similar to the guy who wrote the bad book.  You are at an advantage.  Your ideals have probably not been attached to a paycheck.  You probably do not feel the pressure to paint acceptably; like Thomas Kinkade when you’re feeling Van Gogh.  There is nothing wrong with Kinkade; he’s got his thing with the lights and the buildings on hills.  I’m not him; you aren’t either.

I no longer blog about religion.

If you’re a writer with a small blog with goals of becoming medium, you must tell your truth.  My faith is often expressed in my writing.  Sometimes it is not.  It does not matter.  I am a writer with a blog, and my writing is fueled by certain ideals.

Beginning writers with blogs confuse the medium with the message with their underlying ideals.  Photographers with blogs, for example, do not face the problem writers do.  Writing and blogging feel like the same thing.  A photographer understands that she must continue to take pictures, rather than describe photo-shoots.  Writers with blogs must write far beyond what they post for public consumption.

Writers with blogs must be careful to separate message, medium and ideals.

You are an artist with a blog and a set of ideals.

First: you must always write for you.  I know this is selfish. There is no other way to go about the craft.  When someone else buys something you’ve written: bonus. Sure you write a second-draft for your audience, but never sit down to do your business with them in mind.

Unless you are the sort of unfortunate lunatic who bears your soul to everyone you meet, unfiltered.  Then go ahead.  But expect to be ignored.

Your blog is not your art; it is a tool to help you sell your work.

While it is important to have a nice, clean gallery, you must hang things up for display.  Even if you have not reached the point of exchanging money for your work, you are selling yourself (more on this tomorrow).  Blogging is a sales medium, a place to create community.  Not your art.

Your ideals are not your art; they are fuel.

This was my biggest mistake; don’t repeat it.  Spouting ideals will add subscribers.  Leave this for people who are paid to spout ideals.  You are paid to reveal motion, motivation, tension and character.

Ideals make you hurt and hope.  The hurt and hope is the story or the picture or the painting or the film.  If I am not sympathetic to your ideals by way of your creative work, you should be happy having a small blog; you’re not ready for a medium audience.  I do not even have to agree with your worldview to join your audience, nor must you accept mine if I’m doing my job.  Let religious and political leaders titter over the how’s and why’s.

You’re a writer.  Show the struggle.

The nineteenth chapter of the Bible is an incest scene.  Why is this scene so close to the beginning?  I don’t know.  The main character is a flawed good-guy.  Or is he a bad-guy who is trying to be good?  This is a question for theologians and moralists.  I don’t think it matters.  He is a good character; I know a lot of people like him.

Write about him; don’t judge him.  Introduce us to him on your blog.  Now you’re heading toward medium-sized blog.

Photo Credit: Witheyes from flickr.com

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 of practice.  The words, everyone of them a reminder that no one is reading 18th Century imitation lyrics.  See, you’ve learned a great deal from your practice.

Since I have a blog (and since you are presently reading it), I am occasionally inclined to believe that because a few hundred readers show up each day, I have somehow bypassed the practicing stages.  You fall into this trap too.  We don’t need practice; we have readers.  Therefore you and I are brilliant already in this digital age.

But we’re not.  We’re still practicing.

Your notebook, the one you’ve pushed aside in favor of the WordPress Dashboard is awaiting your return.  You should go and scribble in it for an hour.  If you’d like, you can later revise your practice and post it to your blog to show your many, many generous readers how far you’ve come in your 4,000 hours of practice.  I do not think this is a bad habit.  Receiving criticism and rejection properly also requires around 10,000 hours.  Don’t roil in it.  Feel it and then go practice some more.

A little over a decade ago I bought my first guitar, a cheapie with a short in the pickup.  For about a year I practiced everyday for half an hour, sometimes two or three hours, and then I rushed to the stage.  I was not ready for the stage, truthfully I am still under-qualified.  The stage did not teach me to love the guitar even more, it taught me to love the stage; unfortunately I am good at being on stages.  I have thousands of hours of practice on the stage.  People love a vulnerable rock star.

So you have a blog, or you could think of it as a stage.  And you love your blog; you should.  Don’t practice being on the stage too much, because your goal is not to work the hell out of your stat counter; your goal is to write better and to connect a reader to herself by proxy of your work.  To play that guitar like it demands to be played when no one is watching.

Whatever aspirations you might have, whether in banking or in business or in art, require 10,000 hours of patient, mostly unnoticed practice.  This is more true if you are starting over in a brand new field.  Transforming your work-life will involve taking what you’ve learned from past experiences, and either breaking from those experiences or transferring the knowledge you’ve gained into a new collection of 10,000 hours.

The accolades and critiques you receive along the path to where you are going, neither spurn them nor digest them.  Look at them.  Listen to them.  Remember them.  They are only fuel for more practice. You are getting better.  You’re at 8,000 hours, genius-status is only a year or two away.

Do not be fooled by the stage.  Your stat counter is only a tool; you could do without it.

Later this week I will refine a bit of my notebook practice on RoP for demonstrative purposes.  On that date, you should “lay it on about how groovy I am,” (old song lyrics) or supply some critique.  Because I need the practice.

Photo Credit: Pensiero (Stefano Corso) from Flickr.com

Your blog, your business, your business copy, your kids, your recovery group, your faith, your friendships, your hobby…

You can describe things that are important to you.  If I asked you to tell me about your business, would you ramble off your company’s mission statement, manufacturing procedures and annual revenues?  Or when asked about your children, would you start listing their vital statistics?  “Joey is four-foot nine.  He wears size 2 shoes.  He has brown hair.”

You wouldn’t.

“When you can state the theme of a story, when you can separate it from the story itself, then you can be sure the story is not a very good one.  The meaning of a story has to be embodied in it, has to be made concrete in it.  A story is a way to say something that can’t be said any other way, and it takes every word in the story to say what the meaning is.  You tell a story because a statement would be inadequate.”  –  Flannery O’Connor, Mystery and Manners

But statements are easy, so we keep stating them.  We pretend the statement tells the whole story.

• Here is a list of features/benefits.
• This is our four-fold mission statement.
• Kids nowadays are lifelessly addicted to video games.
• My blog is about tractors.
• Do these three things and you’ll find a life-completing faith.

Of course the widget you sell will make potential buyer’s lives better.  Show me an example, and not a hyped-up testimonial; something from real life covered in tears or blood or laughter.

If your four-fold mission statement has never inspired anyone to live more richly; scrap it!  It isn’t working.

When you see a child with screen-weary eyes, you don’t write-off an entire generation.  You take them to a ballgame.  You give them a job to do.  You go for a walk in the woods looking for undiscovered creatures.  You buy them a book or take them to the library.

Your blog is NOT about tractors.  It is about how the soil smells, and the careful attention you pay to the earth after the tractor-ing has been done.  Yes, you write about tractors; you can tell me that tractorX is superior to tractorY.  And I’ll believe you if you show me something beyond the information I could find on a brochure.

Story connects souls.  There is a reason the bible is over a thousand pages.  There is a reason recovery has 12 arduous and repeatable steps.  You went through a divorce with the help of your closest friends.  That’s why they are your closest friends; not because their qualities have been weighed against your list of personal values.

I have a friend in in-home sales.  When he arrives at your door, he will ask for a cup of coffee.  If you don’t have coffee at the ready, he’ll ask if you might make him a cup.  His sales spiel goes beyond his product.  He will ask for the sale a couple times.  If you say no, he will call back at a later date.  His conversion rates are scary; top-earner in his office.  Yet he often defies the logic of making the immediate sale.  He believes in his product, but more than that, he believes that if he shares more than his pitch, he might be able to come back and sell you even more product in two weeks.  Why?  You’ve already had coffee with the man, you might as well give him your business.

Tactics like this take time.  Unless they’re not really tactics at all.

Today time will be short.  So you’ll cheat.  You’ll allow your writer’s group to be all about reading and critique, when you could be accomplishing those purposes while passing around a bottle of wine (or 3; it’s a writer’s group!).  You’ll lament that your kids have been playing video games all day, as if the lament is enough to change their course of action.

Congrats to you.  You read this whole post.  I suppose I could have just written,

“Statements suck.”

But then I doubt you would have believed me.

Photo Credit: Dayna Bateman’s photostream on Flickr.  Might I humbly suggest a click-through to read the story attached to the photo.  Reading it will take a little bit of time.  But then, I guess, that’s kind of the point.

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.

Or legitimate genre…

The driveway is a 40-second walk, unless it’s raining, then I can get to mailbox in 10 seconds flat.  10 times a year Writer’s Digest appears.  Maybe today, I hope on the way to the mailbox.  One instructional, inspirational evening awaits.  Not this month…

July 2010 – The Memoir Edition.

Crap!

Chelsea Lately writes memoirs.

The old TV chick from Sober House with Dr. Drew wrote a memoir.

(Hey, blogs are a different animal, leave me alone.)

Don Miller is interesting.

Anne Lamott is incredible.

Beyond those two memoir-ists, I couldn’t care less about the genre.  Yet every athlete who sleeps around or pumps himself full of juice is rewarded with a book deal.  Really, Jose Conseco gets to write a book?  He couldn’t even perform the most basic fundamental of his profession – catching!

Don't got it! It bounced off his head. Remember?

Writer’s Digest encourages this sort of public catharsis?

Now, I may be just a pretend writer, and perhaps I am only jealous that Conseco gets big bucks for using steroids and ratting out his old buddies, perhaps…  But here’s the deal:

I think we read memoirs because our lives are becoming purposefully less interesting.  You’re reading a blog post right now.  It is a good one to read, but nevertheless, you are sitting in front of a screen reading my latest wild thought.  I am sitting in front of a screen writing my latest wild thought.  You see, we’re hosed, doomed to read about Chelsea Handler’s affinity for liquor.  Unless we can find something better to do.

No, the memoir is not necessarily mere lingual porn.  And yes, you probably should start writing one tout de suite.  But along the way, please don’t forget to do something remarkable.

While the stories of our lives may not be remarkable, there is no reason to not live them more fully.  Inspiration or commiseration are the dual purposes of the memoir.  When I read A Million Miles in a Thousand Years, a book largely about riding bike across America with that old Miller charm thrown in, I wanted to beat Don Miller with a tire pump.  I am not single.  I have three children.  I cannot ride my bicycle out of the driveway without being summoned to some responsibility.

But I was also reminded that a human can be reborn.  This is not mystical, though it is mysterious.  Rebirth is a million little choices with one new goal.  And if you do them well people might buy your over-priced memoir, and they might form long queues to get your autograph.  Those things are not guaranteed.  But along the way, you will probably discover some kind of contentment, and when you find that, everything else is just gravy, baby!