Ho‘ohana Aloha

Seth Godin hits a significant milestone:

I’ve done this longer than any professional project I can remember, and I still consider it a joy and a privilege. I write and edit every word myself, and always have. This is me, unvarnished.

Thank you for letting me write this blog for you, and thank you for being along for the ride.

Showing up daily isn’t my challenge—it’s learning to live with the fact that I can’t say everything I want in a single post, that the trade-off of reaching people easily is that you can also lose people easily. It’s a journey, for both of us, and I’m thrilled to be taking it with you.

My biggest surprise? That more people aren’t doing this. Not just every college professor (particularly those in the humanities and business), but everyone hoping to shape opinions or spread ideas. Entrepreneurs. Senior VPs. People who work in non-profits. Frustrated poets and unknown musicians… Don’t do it because it’s your job, do it because you can.

The selfishness of the industrial age (scarcity being the thing we built demand upon, and the short-term exchange of value being the measurement) has led many people to question the value of giving away content, daily, for a decade or more. And yet… I’ve never once met a successful blogger who questioned the personal value of what she did.

austinkleon:

There’s another (paywalled) John McPhee piece in this week’s New Yorker on his writing process. After he reads his second draft aloud and makes some adjustments, he starts drawing boxes around words that he thinks can be improved:

You draw a box not only around any word that does…

Click thru to read Austin’s not-paywalled Tumblr entry… .

Joe Konrath:

I love writing. I loved it for the 12 years where I didn’t sell a single thing, and I’ve loved it for the 12 years I’ve been a professional. I have all the conceits that every writer has. I think about my characters as if they’re real people. I dream about scenes. I secretly believe my stories are the best in the world. I laugh at my own jokes, cry at the emotional parts, and often dislocate my elbow patting myself on the back after a good bit of dialog or a fun twist. Being a writer does more than define me; it isn’t a job, it’s a way of life. And when I put my life out there for the world to see, I want it to be the very best that I am capable of. I want readers to enjoy it as much as I have. I want every chapter, every scene, every sentence to be deliberate, to convey exactly what I want it to convey.

Do you know what the real definition of success is? It isn’t about how many books you sell, or how much money you make. It isn’t about winning awards, or getting great reviews. It isn’t about having fans.

A successful writer is one who can defend every single word in their story. Because the ones they can’t defend should get cut.

It isn’t easy doing that. It takes a lot of time, a lot of commitment, a lot of work. But it’s work I embrace, because I’m having a lifelong love affair with storytelling, and I want to keep getting better until the day I die.

I’ll never be finished with being finished.

It’s a weird thing, writing.

Sometimes you can look out across what you’re writing, and it’s like looking out over a landscape on a glorious, clear summer’s day. You can see every leaf on every tree, and hear the birdsong, and you know where you’ll be going on your walk.

And that’s wonderful.

Sometimes it’s like driving through fog. You can’t really see where you’re going. You have just enough of the road in front of you to know that you’re probably still on the road, and if you drive slowly and keep your headlamps lowered you’ll still get where you were going.

And that’s hard while you’re doing it, but satisfying at the end of a day like that, where you look down and you got 1500 words that didn’t exist in that order down on paper, half of what you’d get on a good day, and you drove slowly, but you drove.

And sometimes you come out of the fog into clarity, and you can see just what you’re doing and where you’re going, and you couldn’t see or know any of that five minutes before.

And that’s magic.

I haven’t gone on a writing retreat for a while now, and it’s time. Time for the magic. And time for the clarity.

Loving this blog curation by Shaun Usher; would reblog it constantly if it were a Tumblr!

Recent faves:

• How to Write: Advice from advertising legend David Ogilvy
• Wartime Golf Rules: As the Battle of Britain began to take hold in 1940, a bomb fell on an outbuilding belonging to Richmond Golf Club in Surrey, England. As a result, the club — rather than halt future rounds of golf — issued an incredible list of temporary golf rules to all members that took into account the potentially life-threatening conditions on the course.
• Edison’s To-Do List: From the notebooks of Thomas Edison — the fourth most prolific inventor in history, and as such a ridiculously busy man — comes a five-page to-do list, handwritten in January of 1888 when Edison was still just 40 years of age.
• Things to worry about: In 1933, renowned author F. Scott Fitzgerald ended a letter to his 11-year-old daughter, Scottie, with a list of things to worry about, not worry about, and simply think about.
• 10 Commandments for Guitar Playing: In 1976, Moris Tepper joined Captain Beefheart’s Magic Band as guitarist; Tepper was handed the “Ten Commandments of Guitar Playing,” as written by Beefheart himself.

I could keep going, but you should just subscribe too.

Because

“No one clutches an email to their hearts”

BIG Mahalo to Steve Sherlock for pointing me to this wonderful essay.

Read it if you love writing/publishing, and wonder about sitting, and the possibility in fully noticing (a tumble/blog post last week) …

Could anyone ever fully exhaust their Sense of Place?

A timely essay, in light of my post for Talking Story yesterday: Why I blog, circa 2011 (and about ‘real books’).

As Ehrenreich writes:

The emphasis shifts with each telling, but every writer, editor, publisher, bookseller, and half-attentive reader knows the fundamental story.  After centuries of steady climbing, book sales leveled off towards the end of  the 1900s.  Basic literacy began to plummet.  As if television and Reaganomics were not danger enough, some egghead lunatics went and  built a web—a web!—out of nothing but electrons.  It proved a sneaky and seductive monster.  Straight to our offices and living rooms, the web delivered chicken recipes, weather forecasts, pornography, the cutest kitten videos the world had ever seen.  But while we were distracted by these glittering gifts, the internet conspired to snare our friend the book, to smother it.

Opinions flourish on the “death of the book” with those opinions are rooted in our reading and writing habits, and that’s natural I think; our feelings intensify to the degree of our engaging in those processes. My post yesterday was an example, being (in part) about what I consider ‘real books’ to be, and as such they’ll never get away from me completely, or from others like me willing to publish them ~ and I think I have lots of company in that.

I enjoyed the historical coverage of Ehrenreich’s essay, and do recommend it. It is fairly long, but very well written.

“Writing has been bottled up in books since the start,” wrote American poet and journalist Robert Carlton Brown in 1920.  “It is time to pull out the stopper.”