(This is part 5 of a non-preachy, memoir-ish thing about faith. It begins here. There are links to subsequent installments in each post.)

Deconstructive Year

What they don’t tell you at Personal Transformation University is this: when one is becoming something new, the first thing that happens is dishonor, then death. This omission is the direct result of pretending there is a place one can learn life lessons apart from experience. There is no PTU, only aging and attention.

No one tells you that when you quit your job as a truck driver to become a baker, all of your truck-driving friends will think you’re stupid. They’ll say, “He’s becoming a baker because he is addicted to food.” Or, “She is doing this because of pain and anger.” You’ll say, “No, I’m not.” Your friends will say, “Yes, you are.” And you have no shred of proof to the contrary. None; only an argument. Your truck-driving buddies might be a little right. So what? The argument doesn’t matter.

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 woke up on a sunny morning in November.  I told my wife that I had to go to church that day.  Lucky for me, it was a Sunday.  “Where are you going to go?” she asked.  I said that I was probably going to go down the road to the Lutheran church and that I was going to take the kids.  She didn’t want to go.  I didn’t care.  I figured that my long-dead great grandparents might be there and maybe someone like Sharon, whom I have always liked.

If you missed part one, part two will not make any sense.  Stop reading.  Go back.

While the aforementioned demon possessed Christians were quick with recommendations on where I might BEST worship, I wasn’t so interested in best as I was in NEAR.  A kitsch church sign reads:

In Defense of the e-narrative, and why it might not work.

Bloggers, like real writers daydream of discovery; the day your work ends up on the landing page of problogger, followed by dinner and drinks with Darren Rowse and his family.  Of course the medium is not what it used to be five years ago, when a solid subscriber base meant a sizable book deal.

Now everyone with a notebook, pen and A computer skill blogs about something.  Many of the world’s most traveled blogs are about (drumroll) blogging.  While this is not inherently bad, bloggers need assistance with their craft too, it does reveal a cyclical nature of this particular WWW beast.

• Blog in lists.
• 300-400 words.
• 2-3 relevant links per post.
• Leave comments on related posts.
• Maximize your SEO.

The common wisdom is helpful when blogging for dollars.

Yesterday Maggie Lemere and Zoe West posted a piece at copyblogger about using stories to change the world.  The post is, I think, one of the great Jerry Macguire moments in blogging history.

“What if we all told a story?”

Their proposal is not about making one more dollar from AdSense or attracting sexier advertisers, nor is it about building your subscriber list.  It is about a demonstration of soul (e-soul? or iSoul, if you’re a Mac) using narrative.  Lemere and West propose that bloggers should make the internet a richer place.

When Copyblogger speaks every blogger listens.  Other widely networked bloggers, are making similar statements.  Notables include: Jonathan Fields, who sometimes breaks from business blogging to discuss SRV, while making it seem perfectly relevant to his content and,  Steven Pressfield, who has never really sold his soul to the blogging for dollars game (of course he came into blogging with serious cred).  Pressfield routinely blogs in narrative, whether or not it relates to his most popular post tags.

I wonder though if this trend towards story blogging might become just another niche in the blogging world; if the next wave of how-to-blog blogs, might be merely how-to-blog-using-story blogs, completing yet another internet loop, while ignoring actual stories.

Narrative blogging probably won’t work

Go ahead, bloggers, stop writing for SEO.  Stop writing for robots, write for humans.  This means that you’ll have to squeeze your great story into your Metadata tags – even when it doesn’t quite fit.  This might hurt your page ranking on Google!  Robots like similitude, and your post about Burmese Refugees walking through your small town is not robot-friendly!

Yes, you will have to write for your human audience, interested in human things, which is only scary when you understand your audience might not be interested in the same stories that light your fire. Forcing you to ask…

What if they unsubscribe?

There is already an accepted method for making money from your blog.  Way-back-when, when we still called them weblogs, or referred to our sacred internet spaces as “my online journal,” the medium was about storytelling.  Then we believed everything we were told about the shrinking human attention span and immediately began catering to the lowest common denominator and the GoogleCrawler.  We jumped the shark very organically! and in community! but we still jumped.

I am a narrative blogger.  I am all for the push towards storytelling.  But then again, I only make enough money from RoP to buy a few monthly ice cream cones.  Maybe I should spend more time writing about the sex lives of Search Engines.

Like Jerry Macguire, if we choose to began writing great stories rather than the commonly acceptable robotic boilerplate, we’ll be tossed out of the blogging community on our collective ears, hoping we can land that one dedicated reader.  Perhaps a few more will follow, but first we’ll have to prove our methods in the face of standard operating procedures.  Following SOP can lead to dollars.  What if ignoring it led to riches?

Tomorrow: Back to story (yay!) – Faith Like Minnesota – Part two.  If you missed part one; read it here.

In fiction the best enemies are the ones the reader almost likes.

Captain Ahab has the great whale.

Huck has his Pap.

Whoville has the Grinch.

Holden Caulfield has himself.

Readers love all of these bad guys a little bit, because the best enemies are not flat, one-dimensional characters.

In modern non-fiction, our daily walk-about lives, we have come to strip the humanity off of our antagonists.  While it might help a cause to characterize our enemies in the most black-and-white terms, it hurts the protagonist and his/her non-fiction story.

I went to hear Donald Miller speak on Monday.  I arrived a few minutes late, but really just in time.  As I was approaching the doors of the gargantuan church someone was moving toward the same destination from an opposite parking lot.  He beat me to the door by a second or two, so he held it open for me.  Donald Miller was a few minutes late too, and playing the role of my personal doorman, though when he entered the building they did not ask him for $15.  I said, “Hey, nice to see ya,” as if we were estranged and uncomfortable friends.  Don didn’t say, “You too, I read your crumby blog all the time.  How ya been?”  He looked at me in silence, the way the credit guy at a car lot looks at a loan applicant.

After an hour of reading the Gospel According to Matthew this morning, I was left with one major question.  Hundreds of small questions like: “Why does this text say that?  What is Jesus trying to say?  I wonder what the Greek words are for things like ‘laborer’ and ‘vineyard’ and ‘Caesar Salad?’”  They all added up to produce this one great question: “Why do we distill the beauty of the story to produce principles?”

The Bible reads like a curious storybook of increasing wonder at the nature of God, and somehow we generally arrive at a bulleted list of principles.  Oddly, there are no books of the Bible dedicated to truncated lists without purpose.  Sure there are genealogies, the list of rules in Leviticus and sections of books like Nehemiah and Chronicles that provide lists.  But these all have the purpose of connecting people to the story, like a parent explaining to their child about how their great-great-great grandfather fought in the war, or did some other significant feat.  Even the Levitical Law provides an avenue to understand the righteousness of God.  It is not a bullet list.

The red words don’t boil down to simple sentences or alliterations.  They attempt to stick inside the heart of the hearer.  “He who has ears to hear, let him hear.”  The sad truth about the information age resides in the desire to compile lists of data.

“10 ways to skin a cat.”

“3 keys to a happy marriage.”

You get the idea.  In between the ways and means of skinning that cat and remaining happily married are stories that might reveal larger life questions; “Why that darn cat needs to be skinned, or why should I even keep at this marriage thing, especially in light of my current level of happiness?”  The truth isn’t in the list of “how-to” principles.  It’s wrapped up in story and learned through history.

(To my pastor friends working on a teaching for this weekend: ditch your list of silly principles.  We’ve heard the 5 C’s to a happy new year, and we thought it sucked the first time!  Tell a great story this week, one that is easily pasted onto a human heart.)