Shall we begin?
September 5, 2016
“You should blog,” my sister tells me. “You’re hilarious,” all of Facebook tells me. “I’ll read anything you write,” everyone else in the Universe says. But for real though? Cause, I used to write poetry in high school (let the reader understand) and when my other sister read the first draft of my first novel she dryly declaimed,
“It made me want to fucking kill myself.”
I put that last sentence in super big letters just for her. (One day Joanna will be famous for having the guts to utter those words.)
My work is not always brilliant.
Universe, silly silly Universe, perhaps you should reconsider your enthusiastic offer.
But I started thinking about it in the Spring, about blogging, and there was a podcast and a road trip and a convergence of ideas and I decided, ok Universe, we’ll give this a try.
Which is the best part of the whole thing.
You know, the part in which you are excited and can imagine a whole website full of clever, clever blogposts all shiny and sharp and Pinterest perfect and so much traffic is happening on your blog that The Cyber Gods have to install a roundabout or a virtual traffic light or something in cyberspace to warn people: “Kristianna’s Blog Is Ahead - Be prepared for Delays.”
That’s the fun part of any process.
The part when you can See this endeavor succeeding and you talk to folks and say, “Oh yes, I’m going to start blogging” and it sounds so Successful the way you say it; creativity and cleverness ooze out of your verbage and you have the sparking confidence that everything you’re going to do is going to translate beautifully and it’s like it’s already done and you’re ready to sit back to have a whiskey and put your feet up.
I can see Bridget Jones in my head, which is weird, in the scene from the film when she first starts her TV reporting job at the firehouse and everybody over the age of 30 remembers when her butt hits the camera and all of her delusions of grandeur are pressed up against the glass of life like so much unflattering ass on the screen.
That’s about where I am right now.
I lost my mind trying to figure out how to actually build a blog. Am I right? (I now envision URL slugs as being fat black sludges of slime that ooze their way through the 1's and 0's of internet code.)
Then I sat down to write my clever clever blog posts and I had NO WORDS. No words worth writing down. I started this post and I was scared. My mind went blank. My bitterness was palpable. My first paragraph opened with, Adorable little Meg Ryan put her words out into the “dear void” of the strange and then-new expanse of cyberspace and she didn’t seem too messed up about it.
Who picks on Meg Ryan? What kind of an animal am I?
Tom Hanks was waiting on the other end but, you know, Meg was calm as hell BECAUSE SHE WAS OBLIVIOUS. She had no idea of the vastness of the Thing we created and the amount of people WATCHING. If she knew how many people were watching her she would have kept her words to herself from the fear of someone ACTUALLY READING THEM.
The world changed, I’m told, while I was having babies.
You want to publish a book? Get a freaking audience. What’s your brand? Yourself. How many twitter followers? How big is your reach? What’s your platform like? Are you vlogging? Are you guest vlogging? Are you Youtubing? Are you Periscoping and Zooming? Are you? Are you?
DO IT! Do it meow! Put yourself out into the fathomless depths of the Intraweb. Go ahead, say something! Be clever. Be smart. Be funny.
Everything hinges upon EVERYONE LIKING YOU!
I see. Well then, that’s all I have to do? Be liked by freaking everyone on the planet? That’s reassuring.
This was not my dream when I was eight-years-old planning my NPR interview for the great American Novel that I would have completed right after my 23rd birthday which would have come right after my trip around the world in which I walked the dusty forgotten paths of ancient places and eaten in huts in India and toured the museums of Europe.
Holy hell. You wouldn’t have seen Emily Dickinson hitting up every single social event in town to network with strangers to promote her new volume of poetry.
Right? She didn’t have daguerreotypes of herself made and put clever quotes on the bottom and have her siblings like, pass it out down by the river. That didn’t happen.
Ok, granted, in terms of an effective metaphor, she’s potentially one of the worse examples I could ever pick of a writer who would have hustled to be published. And, granted, I’m no Emmy Dick.
It’s alright. Have a good laugh. It was coming my way.
We writers have to be honest and admit it’s always been about Who you know, to some degree. But that Who used to be your cousin who knew an editor at a publishing house, or an agent, or someone who was Somebody. Or maybe you got desperate and slept with someone.
Let’s be honest; it’s always been about connections.
You can write Anything and as long as you know Someone that Anything might become Something Big. But what is THIS? What is this crazy new world I have found myself in? This was not my dream. What happened to Writers being recluses? I grew up aspiring to lock myself up in cabins and on moors and in romantic urban locations that could be used as the backdrop for unrequited vampire love novels. We brood. We meditate. We self-torment. We drink a lot.
Or, you know, we live mundane normal lives with 9-5 jobs and the occasional head colds and lock ourselves up in the basement to work on collections of short stories that we’ll probably never finish. Because Life.
But damn it, Jim, I wanted to be a craftsman, I wanted to write stories that were worth reading. I sure as hell wasn’t fantasizing about putting together clever blog posts and making sure that I tweeted some concise yet sardonic commentary on my life every other day. (That’s weird.)
When the hell did telling the world a story go from I don’t know, telling a story, to: SELL YOUR SOUL AND GET YOURSELF AN AUDIENCE?
I understand that this is old news and I’m late to the game and missed all of the writer memos about being a social media guru and building an audience. Cause, you know, writers have that....worldwide writer communication...thingy...
I feel like Robin Williams, in Hook, being like, “I missed the 80‘s; I was an accountant.” I missed the Evolution of Publishing; I was having babies.
Maybe I should subscribe to one of the thingies that have sprung up to teach writers how to be Beloved. Because it is no longer about the Work, but the Persona. Maybe I should pay one of these fifteen dozen people promising me they’ll help me figure out how to escalate my twitter following and forge a solid platform. Maybe I should take a seminar.
You know what this is like? It’s like the first televised presidential debate in 1960 and everyone looked at Nixon and was like, “Aw hell, that man ugly and sick,” and then they looked at Kennedy and went, “Aw hell, I wants to make sweet sweet love to him. Vote for Kennedy!” It’s like that. You know.
You put all these writers on the television and everyone is like, “Aw hell no, you ugly and sick looking, get off my youtube.”
Oh man.
Effectively, I must now stand up on the top of the world, arms wide open, shouting “WATCH ME! BE MY AUDIENCE! ONE DAY I WILL WRITE A BOOK AND YOU WILL BUY IT BECAUSE YOU WILL ALREADY LOVE ME!” They tell me this is what I must do. But I don’t want to. And for a moment there it seemed quite hopeless.
And then I remembered, there's You. There's all of YOU who, for whatever reason, stumbled on to this post and took a few minutes and read it. You read it. You actually read it. (Or most of it.) That means that we're not writing to The Void. I'm not writing to The Void. I'm writing to all of You. I’m writing to Readers.
At times I panic and I forget that a compelling reason I write stories is because I want to give gifts; I want to convey love and joy and pain. I want to give us all something that we can rally around and cry over and shout out, "This is what it means to be human!" And, you know, laughter. I like to give people the gift of laughter. And, you know, just make up stuff. Cause it's fun.
I'm not writing for the Universe. I'm not writing for The Void. I am writing for You.
I am writing because Stories.
“After nourishment, shelter and companionship, stories are the thing we need most in the world.” ― Philip Pullman
My husband is concerned about my emotional stability. That’s perfect for a writer. That’s gold. It’s gonna be a good show.
