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.

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!

Christopher Columbus discovered a populated land.  Societies were already in progress.  This chunk of earth was new only to European explorers.  The only thing he really discovered were his new, if temporary, neighbors.  Lutherans have officially existed for nearly 400 years, and I am just stumbling into their society.

(Parts – One, Two and Three)

Quotients of showmanship are low at Christ’s Lutheran.  They call their programs – programs.  Nothing is dressed up as being the next great wave of disciple-making.  Their bible-studies, yes, they refer to them as bible studies.  The liturgies aren’t overwhelmingly formal.  I am Columbus.  These are my new neighbors.  They are like my old neighbors in Minnesota.

Ours is a day marked by defensiveness, where every institution has its own version of the second amendment.  It’s a wonder that high school debate teams aren’t swarming with neophytes,

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.

We move past the Kyrie, but I am stuck there in the imputed innocence.  The technical term is imputed righteousness.  I know this because I have read it in explaining textbooks about ten-thousand times.  Righteousness doesn’t seem the proper term; maybe it is the heavy consonants, the way a speaker of the word is allowed to prolong the R sound and the muddled must-be-Germanic mess in the middle.  Innocence, at least for the moment, seems better proportioned.

Ryan Lind – Facebook Pharisee

6 ways your social media presence is killing your friends’ faith

I had a beauty in store today; I told myself, “No explicitly Christian message today.  Post a story.  Make someone’s life more beautiful.”  But I accidentally logged onto my facebook feed and that ruined my intentions.

I wish for the next 30 minutes, while I write this post, to be a faithless man, unbound by mercy, unsaved, a run of the mill pagan or just an outside observer.  Fortunately such wishes do not come true.

Facebook and Twitter are killing my faith. Don’t worry, I’ll make it.  But some won’t, and that should sound some kind of alarm.  It won’t.  But I’ll do my best.  I’m all for using facebook and twitter to express your