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.”

Note to self.

… and many other selfs I know.

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.

It has been a year and a half since we visited Minnesota.  Every year we say, “Next year we’ll take more time.  We’ll spend more time with my dad or with my cousins.  We’ll go to the beach for an extra day.  We’ll fish more.”  Every year we visit we say these things, and we never do them.  Being here alone is even worse; I can only imagine all of the promises I’ll make on my way out of town, back to Cleveland.  All the promises I’ll have broken on this trip.  These are frustrating thoughts and they make me miss Molly.  She was not able to get time off, so I am vacationing alone with the kids and the dogs.  Vacation.  No tweeting, no blogging, minimal phone calls, texts only from my wife and a few local buddies, so in that regard it has been vacation-esque.

Without Molly everything smells different.  The dogs smell like dogs.  The boys smell like dogs.  Iris smells like a boy.  I’m pretty sure I smell great.

This is my first visit to my mom’s new house.  My mom and step-dad bought a great house with a yard set up for business.  The whole thing is a garden.  They sell hostas; over a thousand varieties.  Very impressive.

So I am busy trying to be fun without my favorite person, my better half.  It’s hard.  The trip itself was easier and faster without her and her incessant water-drinking.  “I need you to pull over at the next exit.  I’m not kidding.”  Easier without that.  We’re more efficient.  But efficiency is only so valuable.  She would really like the garden.  She’s never seen it in person, only in pictures.

I am going to go sit in the garden for a minute and think of something fun to do for the rest of the day.  Then I might do it.  Enjoy the photos; sorry about the quality.  I took them with my phone.  (Yeah, my wife is usually responsible for the camera stuff.  Whoops!  I suck again.)

I have at least two posts lined up for the rest of the week, including a guest post for writers with blogs.

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. 

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.