Justine Musk's Blog, page 37
April 13, 2011
turn your blog into a social object of desire
Many author blogs tend to be online personal journals. Writers will write about their life and give their opinions and share a bit about their novel-in-progress and maybe chart their daily wordcount. There's nothing wrong with this – but if you're not already successful offline, it can lack social gravitational pull.
It doesn't give people who are not already interested in you a reason to gravitate to your blog. It doesn't pull in strangers and convert them to readers and fans.
So what does?
Content that looks outward — to the world — and enables change to happen on an individual or social level.
Content that can function as a social object,with layers and edges and angles that allow for different but related conversations.
A social object is anything that inspires people to interact with other people. The object is the thing they have in common. It can be an event (a wedding) or an object (the new iPad).
It's a shared experience through which people can connect with each other.
The interaction between like-minded individuals is the point. The object is the reason and the excuse. And since things change because of people interacting with other people, a powerful social object becomes a catalyst.
We use objects to express ourselves. The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the items we display on our desk, the framed prints we hang on our walls: the sum of these things becomes a statement of identity.
In social media, we express ourselves through the links and posts and images we create and curate and spread through our networks.
We are what we share.
We also seek out who we want to be, through the social objects that challenge, teach and inspire us.
Who do you need to find? What kind of signals do you need to send out in order to pull your right people to you? How will you keep them engaged? What can you give them? How can you empower them? What is the big meaning you can explore through your blog, the message at the center, that turns it into a genuine social object?
A novel requires you to journey inward. How can I serve the story?
A blog requires you to focus outward. How can I serve the reader?
A novel (or poem, or short story) is a world in and of itself.
A blog operates within a deep, rich context of other people — of reading, linking and sharing — in order to be successful. This is why old-school promotion and marketing doesn't work on the web. If your message is, "Buy my book", how is that going to resonate with people and vibrate out through their networks? What would make them want to share that, or talk about you or your work?
So maybe a brainshift is required. You market, now, through inspiration and thought leadership. If you give your blog a dharma — a reason for being that goes beyond self-promotion — you give it Big Meaning, and create a rich social object that people can help you explore.
You market, now, through creating your own little movement. Your own personal revolution.
There's that famous saying by Gandhi that everyone on Twitter seems to quote at one time or another, and I'm going to quote now. It might be something to think about when you're thinking on what you want to blog about. When you're searching for the dharma for your blog, your platform, your writing, and maybe yourself.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Who – and what – do you want to be?
things to think about when you think about your author blog
Many author blogs tend to be online personal journals. Writers will write about their life and give their opinions and share a bit about their novel-in-progress and maybe chart their daily wordcount. There's nothing wrong with this – but if you're not already successful offline, it can lack social gravitational pull.
It doesn't give people who are not already interested in you a reason to gravitate to your blog. It doesn't pull in strangers and convert them to readers and fans.
So what does?
Content that looks outward — to the world — and enables change to happen on an individual or social level.
Content that can function as a social object,with layers and edges and angles that allow for different but related conversations.
A social object is anything that inspires people to interact with other people. The object is the thing they have in common. It can be an event (a wedding) or an object (the new iPad).
It's a shared experience through which people can connect with each other.
The interaction between like-minded individuals is the point. The object is the reason and the excuse. And since things change because of people interacting with other people, a powerful social object becomes a catalyst.
We use objects to express ourselves. The clothes we wear, the car we drive, the items we display on our desk, the framed prints we hang on our walls: the sum of these things becomes a statement of identity.
In social media, we express ourselves through the links and posts and images we create and curate and spread through our networks.
We are what we share.
We also seek out who we want to be, through the social objects that challenge, teach and inspire us.
Who do you need to find? What kind of signals do you need to send out in order to pull your right people to you? How will you keep them engaged? What can you give them? How can you empower them? What is the big meaning you can explore through your blog, the message at the center, that turns it into a genuine social object?
A novel requires you to journey inward. How can I serve the story?
A blog requires you to focus outward. How can I serve the reader?
A novel (or poem, or short story) is a world in and of itself.
A blog operates within a deep, rich context of other people — of reading, linking and sharing — in order to be successful. This is why old-school promotion and marketing doesn't work on the web. If your message is, "Buy my book", how is that going to resonate with people and vibrate out through their networks? What would make them want to share that, or talk about you or your work?
If you give people a reason to become curious about you, to want to get to know you a little, they will discover your work on their own. And then share that with their friends.)
So maybe a brainshift is required. You market, now, through inspiration and thought leadership. If you give your blog a dharma — a reason for being that goes beyond self-promotion — you give it Big Meaning, and create a rich social object that people can help you explore.
You market, now, through creating your own little movement. Your own personal revolution.
There's that famous saying by Gandhi that everyone on Twitter seems to quote at one time or another, and I'm going to quote now. It might be something to think about when you're thinking on what you want to blog about. When you're searching for the dharma for your blog, your platform, your writing, and maybe yourself.
Be the change you want to see in the world.
Who – and what – do you want to be?
March 29, 2011
Three Story Skills that Self-Published Novelists Need
Hello boys and girls, I would like to present today's guest post from one of the best writing-advice-givers out there, author-agent Donald Maass.
(This is him brooding attractively against a brick wall.)
By Donald Maass
Author of The Breakout Novelist: Craft and Strategies for Career Fiction Writers
Here are three things that glib, hasty or form declines from New York aren't telling you.The solutions can help you whether you are seeking a major imprint or going it alone:
I was able to begin skimming your novel almost right away. Ouch. That's not the effect you want. The antidote is a high level of line-by-line tension, what I call "micro-tension."
Here's how it works: When every paragraph, if not every line, of your novel creates in the reader's mind a worry, question, apprehension or even a mild disease, the reader will unconsciously seek to relieve that tension. The result? The reader zips to the next line.
Constant micro-tension results in what is paradoxically termed a page-turner. You'd think that would mean quickly skimmed but it means the opposite: a novel in which you are unable to stop reading every word.
I really don't care about your main character. Double ouch. How can that be when your main character is so real, passionate and ultimately heroic?
There's a trick that top novelists use, which is in the opening pages showing why this character matters. The trick's a little different depending on the type of protagonist you've got. For the everyman or everywoman type, the secret is to demonstrate — even in a small way — a quality of strength, a minor heroism.
For already heroic protagonists, the secret is to show one way in which they're human like anyone else. Dark protagonists need to express one way in which they'd like to change, to be more normal. That hint of the redemption-to-come can signal to readers that this tormented character is worth their time.
Too many clichés! A long parade of familiar phrases and purple emotions can start to pound in a reader's brain like a migraine headache.
Fresh language and imagery starts with looking at the world in the unique way that your character would. What does your character notice that no one else does? What details stand out for him or her?
A surprising emotional landscape can be built by working with secondary, less obvious feelings. Think of it this way: If a character's predominant emotion at any given moment is big and universal, then the reader probably has already felt it. Explore feelings that are less apparent.
There's a lot more to great fiction, obviously, but the three big areas for improvement above will put your novels ahead of the pack.
Donald Maass, author of The Breakout Novelist: Craft and Strategies for Career Fiction Writers heads the Donald Maass Literary Agency in New York City, which represents more than 150 novelists and sells more than 100 novels every year to publishers in America and overseas. He is a past president of the Association of Authors Representatives, Inc., and is the author of several books.
For more information please visit www.maassagency.com and follow the author on Facebook and Twitter .
March 20, 2011
where to find your interestingness as a writer + blogger + ruler of your domain*
1
I did an online guest lecture/Q&A for the e-course "How to Build Your Author Platform" offered by Dan Blank of www.wegrowmedia.com.
Much fun.
One of the questions involved the question of what to blog about. The student knew the way to attract an audience is to go narrow and deep: choose a niche, write to a specific person instead of trying to throw out something for everybody (which wins over nobody). Yet, she pointed out, Tribal Writer seems to range across different topics. How was I managing this?
So I talked about how your niche could actually be a sub-niche, created by intersecting one interest or passion with another. That not only gives you a little realm of your own to Totally Dominate (at least in your head) – where, say, social media crosses with the pursuit of the creative life — it gives you a number of different edges you can roam along and explore. And when you write out to the various edges of your sub-niche, you can appeal to different audiences and lure some of them back to your lair (where they can fall madly in love with you and live happily ever after).
2
Edges are interesting.
Edges are where one thing meets up with another thing and transforms and is transformed by it. Ideas bang into each other. Sparks fly.
Out on those edges is where you find the creative and intellectual outlaws, the restless soul-searchers, the rebels and misfits, the early adopters.
It's where you find truths people don't want to know and secrets they won't admit to keeping.
The only thing you need to get there is your own curiosity (if you don't have it, then you can always fake it). You write out to the very edges of your knowledge – and then learn more. You ask yourself, "What else?" and "What next?" This is how you slowly turn into an expert, which, in the world of blogging, is a fine and helpful thing to be. (Note: you never. ever. in a zillion years. refer to yourself as an expert. You're only an expert when other people call you that, when they are confident that you know more than they do.)
John Hagel refers to all this as the passion of the explorer:
…a passion that takes the form of a long-term commitment to explore a particular domain, usually fairly broadly defined. It is not content with passive observation, but it wants to learn through doing. In the process, it seeks to achieve a growing impact on that domain by continuing to test and extend one's own personal performance limits.
He also refers to the questing disposition
People with this kind of disposition need continuing stimulation. But it is stimulation of a certain type – the kind that comes from going beyond one's comfort zone, addressing new challenges, engaging in creative problem-solving and developing new skills to make progress in a challenging environment.
Hagel also points out how nature rewards us with a dopamine high:
When we undertake a challenge and expect to overcome it, our brains release a surge of dopamine which gives us a sense of pleasure and helps to motivate us to pursue the anticipated reward…
As a result, dopamine stimulates exploratory/seeking behavior. It is much more tied to the anticipation of a reward than the actual attainment of the reward…
It makes us much more willing to explore unfamiliar territory and try out new activities.
In other words, nature rewards us for going to extremes, even if the extremes are nothing more than the self-perceived limits of our minds and personalities.
As fate would have it, so does the Internet.
Gary Vee points out in his new book The Thank You Economy:
…very little in the middle is often memorable, and what is memorable is what sticks. Stories and ideas that catch us off guard, make us pay attention, and show up where we didn't expect them – those are sticky. Sticky stories are the ones that get carried forward, permeating the barrier around the middle and reaching far more people than you'll ever find in that limited space.
–4–
The problem is, we're not trained to ride the edges, go to extremes, develop our questing dispositions.
When we do that, we put ourselves out there to be judged, laughed at and hurt.
We learn young that edges = different, and difference = isolation and social estrangement. When you're a kid, this feels like abandonment, which feels like death. So you smooth out your own edges, or maybe cut them off. You go to the middle, where everybody else is, where your friends are; where you would read the same books and listen to the same songs and go to the same movies and watch the same TV shows. It's where the advertisers knew they could find everybody, to bombard them with the same commercials.
The middle often looks safe. It seems like a center, except it's a false center. Instead of feeling the freedom to express yourself to the fullest, you tamp yourself down. You slouch. You pretend to be shorter, or dumber, or quieter, or nicer, or tougher, or sexier, or less sexier than you are. You fake an interest in sports, or the opposite sex, or law school, or babies. You become a kind of performance of yourself.
Which is not what the Internet wants. The Internet wants authentic, or else we might as well go back to watching Superbowl commercials.
–5–
When you think about it, the middle kind of sucks.
What's the most difficult part of writing a novel? The middle. When are you most tempted to give up a task or activity? In the middle, when the bloom of beginning has worn off and the light at the end isn't in sight yet. Why is Jan Brady famous for saying, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia…!" Because she suffered middle child syndrome.
Seth Godin writes about The Dip: that period of progress when it doesn't feel like you're making any progress at all. It's when most people quit. Those who don't, who push on through to the other side, emerge into mastery.
But the point is that the Dip – the middle – is not the place where you're supposed to stay. Either you realize that you're on the wrong road entirely, and get off as soon as you can, or you're just passing (or struggling) through in order to pick up the skills needed and demonstrate the grit required. You're not in one place or the other, fully one thing or the other; you are journey, change, and transformation.
Enlightenment is never in the middle. Whatever you're doing, and whatever emotion attends it – fear, for example, — enlightenment is always on the other side.
–6–
I'm not into what I think of as New Age imagery – feathers and dreamcatchers and Spirit and women running with the wolves and things like that – but I've always been intrigued by the concept of shamanism. A shaman is a "wounded healer" – wounded from his or her time in the middle, maybe – who has been marked as 'different' through mysterious dreams and visions. Shamans travel out to the edges of experience and encounter other worlds. They suffer, but they transfigure that pain into power, special knowledge, to bring back to the tribe.
They return to the middle not to get stuck there, but to change it.
–7–
When I spoke to Dan Blank's online class, I didn't mention shamans or The Dip or Jan Brady or any of this.
Choosing a topic for your blog is such a personal thing, and your choices are a lot more limited than you maybe realize. Your topic needs to sustain you over years, and there are only a handful of things – if that – likely to ignite your deep, sustained interest and curiosity. In order to Feed the Blog week in and week out, you're forced to chase that topic down, to learn and evolve.
Not to mention that your subject matter gets folded into your 'brand', which is your reputation, which is your online identity. So, in a way, you are what you write. And by writing out to the edges of your topic, you're writing out to the edges of yourself. Whether those edges are rough, smooth, jagged, whatever – doesn't matter. So long as you get there, and hang out for a while.
Which reminds me of lines from a Margaret Atwood poem:
I move
And live on the edges
(what edges)
I live
On all the edges there are.
* see Abby Kerr's website about how to brand yourself, find your niche and rule like a pro. Because she's awesome.
find the "edgy" blog topic that will give you total superpowers
1
I did an online guest lecture/Q&A for the e-course "How to Build Your Author Platform" offered by Dan Blank of www.wegrowmedia.com.
Much fun.
One of the questions involved the question of what to blog about. The student knew the way to attract an audience is to go narrow and deep: choose a niche, write to a specific person instead of trying to throw out something for everybody (which wins over nobody). Yet, she pointed out, Tribal Writer seems to range across different topics. How was I managing this?
So I talked about how your niche could actually be a sub-niche, created by intersecting one interest or passion with another. That not only gives you a little realm of your own to Totally Dominate (at least in your head) – where, say, social media crosses with the pursuit of the creative life — it gives you a number of different edges you can roam along and explore. And when you write out to the various edges of your sub-niche, you can appeal to different audiences and lure some of them back to your lair (where they can fall madly in love with you and live happily ever after).
2
Edges are interesting.
Edges are where one thing meets up with another thing and transforms and is transformed by it. Ideas bang into each other. Sparks fly.
Out on those edges is where you find the creative and intellectual outlaws, the restless soul-searchers, the rebels and misfits, the early adopters.
It's where you find truths people don't want to know and secrets they won't admit to keeping.
The only thing you need to get there is your own curiosity (if you don't have it, then you can always fake it). You write out to the very edges of your knowledge – and then learn more. You ask yourself, "What else?" and "What next?" This is how you slowly turn into an expert, which, in the world of blogging, is a fine and helpful thing to be. (Note: you never. ever. in a zillion years. refer to yourself as an expert. You're only an expert when other people call you that, when they are confident that you know more than they do.)
John Hagel refers to all this as the passion of the explorer:
…a passion that takes the form of a long-term commitment to explore a particular domain, usually fairly broadly defined. It is not content with passive observation, but it wants to learn through doing. In the process, it seeks to achieve a growing impact on that domain by continuing to test and extend one's own personal performance limits.
He also refers to the questing disposition
People with this kind of disposition need continuing stimulation. But it is stimulation of a certain type – the kind that comes from going beyond one's comfort zone, addressing new challenges, engaging in creative problem-solving and developing new skills to make progress in a challenging environment.
Hagel also points out how nature rewards us with a dopamine high:
When we undertake a challenge and expect to overcome it, our brains release a surge of dopamine which gives us a sense of pleasure and helps to motivate us to pursue the anticipated reward…
As a result, dopamine stimulates exploratory/seeking behavior. It is much more tied to the anticipation of a reward than the actual attainment of the reward…
It makes us much more willing to explore unfamiliar territory and try out new activities.
In other words, nature rewards us for going to extremes, even if the extremes are nothing more than the self-perceived limits of our minds and personalities.
As fate would have it, so does the Internet.
Gary Vee points out in his new book The Thank You Economy:
…very little in the middle is often memorable, and what is memorable is what sticks. Stories and ideas that catch us off guard, make us pay attention, and show up where we didn't expect them – those are sticky. Sticky stories are the ones that get carried forward, permeating the barrier around the middle and reaching far more people than you'll ever find in that limited space.
–4–
The problem is, we're not trained to ride the edges, go to extremes, develop our questing dispositions.
When we do that, we put ourselves out there to be judged, laughed at and hurt.
We learn young that edges = different, and difference = isolation and social estrangement. When you're a kid, this feels like abandonment, which feels like death. So you smooth out your own edges, or maybe cut them off. You go to the middle, where everybody else is, where your friends are; where you would read the same books and listen to the same songs and go to the same movies and watch the same TV shows. It's where the advertisers knew they could find everybody, to bombard them with the same commercials.
The middle often looks safe. It seems like a center, except it's a false center. Instead of feeling the freedom to express yourself to the fullest, you tamp yourself down. You slouch. You pretend to be shorter, or dumber, or quieter, or nicer, or tougher, or sexier, or less sexier than you are. You fake an interest in sports, or the opposite sex, or law school, or babies. You become a kind of performance of yourself.
Which is not what the Internet wants. The Internet wants authentic, or else we might as well go back to watching Superbowl commercials.
–5–
When you think about it, the middle kind of sucks.
What's the most difficult part of writing a novel? The middle. When are you most tempted to give up a task or activity? In the middle, when the bloom of beginning has worn off and the light at the end isn't in sight yet. Why is Jan Brady famous for saying, "Marcia, Marcia, Marcia…!" Because she suffered middle child syndrome.
Seth Godin writes about The Dip: that period of progress when it doesn't feel like you're making any progress at all. It's when most people quit. Those who don't, who push on through to the other side, emerge into mastery.
But the point is that the Dip – the middle – is not the place where you're supposed to stay. Either you realize that you're on the wrong road entirely, and get off as soon as you can, or you're just passing (or struggling) through in order to pick up the skills needed and demonstrate the grit required. You're not in one place or the other, fully one thing or the other; you are journey, change, and transformation.
Enlightenment is never in the middle. Whatever you're doing, and whatever emotion attends it – fear, for example, — enlightenment is always on the other side.
–6–
I'm not into what I think of as New Age imagery – feathers and dreamcatchers and Spirit and women running with the wolves and things like that – but I've always been intrigued by the concept of shamanism. A shaman is a "wounded healer" – wounded from his or her time in the middle, maybe – who has been marked as 'different' through mysterious dreams and visions. Shamans travel out to the edges of experience and encounter other worlds. They suffer, but they transfigure that pain into power, special knowledge, to bring back to the tribe.
They return to the middle not to get stuck there, but to change it.
–7–
When I spoke to Dan Blank's online class, I didn't mention shamans or The Dip or Jan Brady or any of this.
Choosing a topic for your blog is such a personal thing, and your choices are a lot more limited than you maybe realize. Your topic needs to sustain you over years, and there are only a handful of things – if that – likely to ignite your deep, sustained interest and curiosity. In order to Feed the Blog week in and week out, you're forced to chase that topic down, to learn and evolve.
Not to mention that your subject matter gets folded into your 'brand', which is your reputation, which is your online identity. So, in a way, you are what you write. And by writing out to the edges of your topic, you're writing out to the edges of yourself. Whether those edges are rough, smooth, jagged, whatever – doesn't matter. So long as you get there, and hang out for a while.
Which reminds me of lines from a Margaret Atwood poem:
I move
And live on the edges
(what edges)
I live
On all the edges there are.
March 15, 2011
how to get out of your own way and quit procrastinating on your novel
1
A few weeks ago, a woman named Marie Forleo surprised me and about eighteen other women with a boudoir photo session. We were all solo entrepreneurs or aspiring entrepreneurs gathered for a three day retreat in Santa Monica. You wouldn't think that posing in lingerie (or nothing at all) has anything to do with learning about online marketing, but Marie's larger point was this: just because things aren't perfect isn't a reason not to just do it, as Nike likes to say. If your hair needs washing, your feet need a pedicure, and you would like to lose those extra five pounds: well, so what. There's still no time like the present.
Not long after that, I listened to the writer/activist Eve Ensler talk about her work in the Congo, where she and her organization, V-Day, built the City of Joy. City of Joy is a community that shelters and trains female survivors of sexual violence (I was in the Congo to witness the opening of the City, and it was one of the most profound moments of my life). Eve mentioned the people who tried to discourage her, who said that the Congo is the Congo and will never change, the wounds are too deep and vast to heal. But she went, and she built this place, and now there's a burgeoning movement not just of women, but men (V-Men) who support them.
"Just do something," Eve told us. "No matter how overwhelming the situation might seem, just do something. There's power in that, because one action can lead to another action, and once you do something, someone else will do something, and then someone else will do something, and so on and so on. You don't know what will happen, or what you could start."
2
I was having trouble starting a new section of my novel-in-progress. I told myself it was because it needed some incubation, but the truth was: I wanted the draft to be perfect, and I was overwhelming myself with everything I wanted the novel to accomplish.
Never mind the fact that it was a first draft, which is supposed to be imperfect.
Never mind that I had forgotten one of the basic laws of creativity: there is always something in the box.
This is a phrase I took from the book IMPROV WISDOM – a great little book – which warns you not to overprepare, but to pay attention to the moment, to prepare only to be surprised. The book suggests an exercise in which you close your eyes and imagine a gift-wrapped box. Imagine yourself taking the lid off the box, reaching inside and finding – what? What do you find? What do you pull out of the box?
I myself found a little statue of a Chinese horse, but that's not really the point. The point is this: there's always something in the box. Your mind will offer up its gifts to you. Your mind won't let you starve. It will feed you richly.
You only have to start.
3
If you're anxious – and what is beneath procrastination if not anxiety – it helps to do what Eric Maisel calls hushing the mind. Sloooooow everything down. Breathe deep. Downshift those brainwaves into creative mode. When you're in thought overwhelm, it's way too easy to freak yourself out and go watch Real Housewives instead.
Empty your mind.
Do a brain dump of all the things that are bothering you, all the tasks you need to do. Get them out of your head. Clear that mental space for other thoughts, more creative thoughts, to enter. There's always something in the box, but first it helps to get rid of the junk.
Create a ritual that will shift you from the everyday-state into creative-state. Rituals are powerful once they're ingrained in you because of the way they wire certain actions together, so that once you start one thing (just start!), you'll move automatically into the next action, into the next action, and then suddenly you're working on your novel. No drama. A ritual is like a willpower shortcut. You only need the willpower to do that first, simple thing – lighting a candle, or putting on a certain playlist, or tidying your desk – and the ritual will flow you through the rest.
Small actions are important, because they don't freak out that primitive part of your mind that senses change, or difficult task ahead, and so immediately slams on the brakes and spins you toward some stress-relieving activity. You can use the power of small by setting small goals for yourself. Micro-goals. Five words of your novel everyday for thirty days. Five words? The brain laughs, but goes ahead and sits at the desk and meets that goal and feels the thrill of satisfaction, of closing the loop, and so does it again the next day, and the next day, until three, four weeks have slipped by and sitting down at your desk to write everyday has become a habit. The principle behind this is called kaizen, the Japanese word for progress through tiny but steady improvements.
If I know you – and I don't, except I do – there's that book you want to write, or need to finish, but you don't think you know how. You tell yourself it's not the right time. You tell yourself you'll get around to it tomorrow. You tell yourself this because if you think too much about the book, your thoughts crowd your head until you can't think at all.
But a good friend once told me this, and I pass it on to you:
Everything you need to know is already inside you.
It doesn't have to be perfect. It does have to get out of your head, to manifest, so that you can work it, and pay attention to it, and follow where it leads you.
One small act of creativity begets another small act of creativity, like links in a chain leading all the way to a finished draft.
Breathe deep. Hush your mind.
Prepare to be surprised. You don't know what could happen, or what you could start.
So go ahead.
Open the box.
March 9, 2011
why the world needs you to be a "creative badass" (and have a zestful f*ck you spirit)
In which this blogger ponders the matter of identifying your audience, the word "psychographic", and the defining characteristics of the creative badass.
a working definition of "creative badass"
In which this blogger ponders the matter of identifying your audience, the word "psychographic", and the defining characteristics of the creative badass.
March 7, 2011
britney spears + lessons of badass blogging
Be unapologetic.
I'm a woman. I tend to apologize too much. Women tend to do that. We throw around "I'm sorry" like we do "please" and "thank you"; it's a reflexive response, a form of courtesy, and other women know that. (Whereas a man will think that if you apologize for something, you really did fuck up in some way.)
Many women – not all – want to apologize just for taking up space. We think if we speak up, sprawl out, jump into the conversation, if we act eager and animated and passionate, we'll come off as…obnoxious.
But in truth, it's the reverse behavior – acting aloof, quiet, guarded — being in-your-head instead of in-the-moment – that people find much more difficult to connect with. When you're onstage, people want you to be animated and eager and passionate. It wakes them up. It engages them. It takes them out of their heads and puts them right smack in the moment, and it's in the here and now that we feel the most alive.
Having a blog, or an online presence in general, is all about the taking up of space, the claiming of it: with your voice, your opinions, your personality, your name, your passion, your interests, as well as any controversy that follows in your wake. And yes, if you're doing your job even remotely right, someone, somewhere, is bound to criticize you. You will get criticized.
So what?
We need to expand, not contract. And we need to stop being so fucking apologetic. We need to just be. As gloriously as possible.
Play to your strengths.
This is one of the points I make again and again in my blog, because it can't be emphasized enough. And by 'strength', I mean: whatever energizes you, comes easily to you, and makes you feel great about yourself. Why waste your time building up your weaknesses when you could focus, instead, on building up your strengths – which is your chance at becoming truly outstanding at something, as well as absolutely loving your life?
Britney knows she's not the most powerful vocalist. "I would love to have a voice like Whitney, or Christina Aguilera," she said once in an interview. "But I'm a performer."
Britney's strength has always been her onstage charisma, her dancing, her bold, in-your-face, aggressive sexuality. We don't mind (so much) listening to her, but we love to watch her, and she knows it. All the training and effort in the world won't turn her voice into a match for Aguilera's – but who would you rather watch in a music video? (And if you said Aguilera, then, uh, you are the exception that proves the rule that proves my point. Yeah…)
If you hate to write (for example), but you light up in front of a camera, then clearly you shouldn't be blogging. You should be video-blogging. It worked for Gary Vee.
Explore your edges.
Just when I was bored with Britney, and no longer paying attention to her, she partnered up with a musical artist named Rusko and introduced a little dubstep into her pop songs. Dubstep is a form of electronic music that takes its influence from a variety of sources. It is heavy on the bass, and heavy on the sub-bass, and tends toward the dark and ambient. Dubstep is edgy. By aligning herself with one of the best artists in the genre, Britney can reinvent her sound while still keeping it very, you know, Britney.
If you're familiar with Joseph Campbell's Hero's Journey Myth, then you're familiar with the themes of change, identity and transformation. The whole idea of the 'hero' (or 'heroine') is about someone living in the Ordinary World who receives a "call to adventure" that forces her to venture beyond her comfort zone and into the "Special World". There, she must explore new territory, and acquire new skills and knowledge. She must then take that knowledge back to her Ordinary World and share with the others, in effect synthesizing the Ordinary and Special Worlds and becoming master of both.
I know it's kind of a leap to go from Britney and dubstep to Joseph Campbell, but you get my point. Be the hero. Go out from your 'center' to the edges of your obsessions, let yourself be influenced by what you find there, and bring that influence back into your writing, your blogging, your creative work, your use of social media. …hell, your life. That's when the center can get really, really interesting.
(Also to point out, this is a great example of how Britney effectively navigates her weaknesses. Instead of training hard and putting in lots of effort to become a sort-of-good vocalist, she chooses a genre of music that doesn't make operatic demands on her and works around and plays up the breathy tone of her voice. She even transforms that weakness into a creative strength by choosing to partner with artists like Moby and Rusko. It's not just about what you can do; it's about what you can do when you team up with others.)
Bring your life into your work.
The edge that separates your life from your creative work is fuzzy at the best of times. As a performer – as someone who doesn't write her own songs, or at least not the vast majority of them – Britney is in a better position to distinguish her life from her work, but do we really want that from her?
We don't want your work to be untouched by your life.
We want soul, dammit.
Soul is where your originality is. It's where your true self is. Your soul is you, your voice, your brand, your signature style, your emotional sweetspot, your values, your ruling passion, your pleasure principle, your message, your thing. It's not about improving yourself. It is about stripping down to who and what you already are, and then turning up the lights, the colors and the volume. This takes balls and a surprising amount of work and practice – hey, if it was easy, then everybody would be walking around as their most authentic, creative, finely honed selves – but it's what makes you irreplaceable. No one can outsource your soul. No one can automate it. No one can download it from Amazon (at least, not yet).
Ship.
Britney ships. A lot.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with it, 'shipping' is a word that Seth Godin appropriated to mean producing creative work and getting it out into the world. As Eric Maisel points out, the creative process has two different stages that come with their own brands of anxiety: making the thing, and then showing (or shipping) the thing. You've got to do both, or you're not in the game. And the more projects you ship, the more likely you are to hit at least one of them out of the park.
Then again, there is a balance. Many writers, for example, ship their manuscripts too quickly, too early, to agents and editors or the public in general (thank you, rise of self-publishing). You need to give your work time to bake, to innovate, to refine and improve itself. Churning out projects of mediocre quality will disappoint your fans (or fail to win you any in the first place) and hurt your career.
But Seth's point, I think, is that shipping is a skill in and of itself. It involves the art of starting something – and then the art of carrying it through — and then the art of finishing. You have to practice each and every one of these arts in order to get better at all of them. And you do that by doing them over and over again. You start projects. You finish them. You ship. You don't let yourself get paralyzed with fear and insecurity. You don't give in to the Resistance. You understand that some things will fly, and some things won't fly, and that's just how the world works. No drama.
What shipping does require is a serious work ethic, and a commitment to your art. Not a pretend or half-assed commitment. The real deal.
Be polarizing.
Britney is possibly the most controversial pop star in the history of pop stars. She's also wildly, wildly popular. She can't get out of the public eye if she tries (and she has tried).
My point is not that you might desire that level of fame — although if you do, I'm sorry, and may the gods help you – but to point up the relationship between interesting and controversial. Interestingness is not always nice, or easy, and doesn't always come in smooth well-rounded packages. It engages you, gets under your skin, and provokes you. Because interestingness comes with a clearly defined point of view, its own strong sense of self, not everybody is going to agree with you or the ideas that you embody.
For those of us raised to be nice, this can be problematic.
But seriously? Get over it. Nice — which is different from kindness – is what other people want you to be when they don't want you to follow your own agenda. Nice accommodates. It succumbs. It pleases. It eats away at your soul and compromises your sense of identity.
It's more invigorating – and also, I think, much more honest – to develop a strong point of view, to live it, to be it. Just make it as informed as you possibly can. A true, authentic, and deeply educated point of view is a gift to the world.
Surround yourself with good, cool people.
In the book CONNECTED: The Surprising Power of Human Networks, the authors make the point that no man or woman is an island. We are so deeply wired into each other that we are not only influenced by our friends, but also our friends' friends, and our friends' friends' friends. How you eat, if you smoke, how much money you make, how happy you are today – the habits and beliefs that shape your daily reality – are all subject to the influence of people you don't even know. So if you want to change some aspect of your life, you probably need to change some aspect of your community. It's important to surround yourself with people you not only like, but want to be like. It's not about being a snob, but about taking care of yourself and honoring who you really are.
Even a brief look at Britney's personal history and the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of her career will demonstrate how her success depends greatly upon the people she chooses to bring into her life.
Rebel.
Rebellion, so long as it's genuine, is your opportunity to define yourself and what you stand for against what you are decidedly not. It's an opportunity to refine your point-of-view and present something refreshing and original to the world that it maybe didn't even know it needed. Because if something pisses you off enough to speak up against it, chances are it's pissing off other people as well, and making them just as hungry for an alternative (especially the alternative that is the soulful you.) It's scary to be the first, lone voice in the wilderness…but it can be amazing how quickly other voices join in.
Britney rebelled against her own past, her own corporate, sexy-but-'virginal' image that turned out to be less about honesty (she wasn't really a virgin) and more about how the powers-that-be could best make money off her (virginity sells!). You can question – seriously seriously question – many of the decisions she made (*cough*Federline*cough*) but in the end it was her right to make them. And here's the thing. She still has a career. Would that be the case if she was still playing the good girl role, instead of standing that role on its head? If the culture was still obsessing over her virginity? instead of maybe – maybe – maybe taking a tiny step towards being the kind of place where a girl's moral character is measured by something other than what's between her legs?
So go, Britney.
Work it out. Rock hard. There's a lot of us rooting for you.
Hello! Thanks for reading this all the way through, I know it's long…If you liked it, please enrich the place by commenting below…or maybe join my List, so I can be cool to you in some way I haven't quite figured out yet. I promise not to spam. Spam is Evil.
things about blogging i learned from britney spears (uh, sort of. okay, not really)
Be unapologetic.
I'm a woman. I tend to apologize too much. Women tend to do that. We throw around "I'm sorry" like we do "please" and "thank you"; it's a reflexive response, a form of courtesy, and other women know that. (Whereas a man will think that if you apologize for something, you really did fuck up in some way.)
Many women – not all – want to apologize just for taking up space. We think if we speak up, sprawl out, jump into the conversation, if we act eager and animated and passionate, we'll come off as…obnoxious.
But in truth, it's the reverse behavior – acting aloof, quiet, guarded — being in-your-head instead of in-the-moment – that people find much more difficult to connect with. When you're onstage, people want you to be animated and eager and passionate. It wakes them up. It engages them. It takes them out of their heads and puts them right smack in the moment, and it's in the here and now that we feel the most alive.
Having a blog, or an online presence in general, is all about the taking up of space, the claiming of it: with your voice, your opinions, your personality, your name, your passion, your interests, as well as any controversy that follows in your wake. And yes, if you're doing your job even remotely right, someone, somewhere, is bound to criticize you. You will get criticized.
So what?
We need to expand, not contract. And we need to stop being so fucking apologetic. We need to just be. As gloriously as possible.
Play to your strengths.
This is one of the points I make again and again in my blog, because it can't be emphasized enough. And by 'strength', I mean: whatever energizes you, comes easily to you, and makes you feel great about yourself. Why waste your time building up your weaknesses when you could focus, instead, on building up your strengths – which is your chance at becoming truly outstanding at something, as well as absolutely loving your life?
Britney knows she's not the most powerful vocalist. "I would love to have a voice like Whitney, or Christina Aguilera," she said once in an interview. "But I'm a performer."
Britney's strength has always been her onstage charisma, her dancing, her bold, in-your-face, aggressive sexuality. We don't mind (so much) listening to her, but we love to watch her, and she knows it. All the training and effort in the world won't turn her voice into a match for Aguilera's – but who would you rather watch in a music video? (And if you said Aguilera, then, uh, you are the exception that proves the rule that proves my point. Yeah…)
If you hate to write (for example), but you light up in front of a camera, then clearly you shouldn't be blogging. You should be video-blogging. It worked for Gary Vee.
Explore your edges.
Just when I was bored with Britney, and no longer paying attention to her, she partnered up with a musical artist named Rusko and introduced a little dubstep into her pop songs. Dubstep is a form of electronic music that takes its influence from a variety of sources, and is heavy on the bass, and heavy on the sub-bass, and tends toward the dark and ambient. Dubstep is edgy and interesting, and by aligning herself with one of the best artists in the genre, Britney reinvented her sound while still keeping it very, you know, Britney.
If you're familiar with Joseph Campbell's Hero Myth, then you're familiar with the themes of change, identity and transformation. The whole idea of the 'hero' (or 'heroine') is about someone living in the Ordinary World who receives a "call to adventure" that forces her to venture beyond her comfort zone and into the "Special World". There, she must explore new territory, and acquire new skills and knowledge. She must then take that knowledge back to her Ordinary World and share with the others, in effect synthesizing the Ordinary and Special Worlds and becoming master of both.
I know it's kind of a leap to go from Britney and dubstep to Joseph Campbell, but you get my point. Be the hero. Go out from your 'center' to the edges of your obsessions, let yourself be influenced by what you find there, and bring that influence back into your writing, your blogging, your creative work, your use of social media. …hell, your life. That's when the center gets interesting.
(Also to point out, this is a great example of how Britney effectively navigates her weaknesses. Instead of training hard and putting in lots of effort to become a sort-of-good vocalist, she chooses a genre of music that doesn't make operatic demands on her and works around and plays up the breathy tone of her voice. She even transforms that weakness into a creative strength by choosing to partner with artists like Moby and Rusko. It's not just about what you can do; it's about what you can do when you team up with others.)
Bring your life into your work.
The edge that separates your life from your creative work is fuzzy at the best of times. As a performer – as someone who doesn't write her own songs, or at least not the vast majority of them – Britney is in a better position to distinguish her life from her work, but do we really want that from her?
We don't want your work to be untouched by your life.
We want soul, dammit.
Soul is where your originality is. It's where your true self is. Your soul is you, your voice, your brand, your signature style, your emotional sweetspot, your values, your ruling passion, your pleasure principle, your message, your thing. It's not about improving yourself. It is about stripping down to who and what you already are, and then turning up the lights, the colors and the volume. This takes balls and a surprising amount of work and practice – hey, if it was easy, then everybody would be walking around as their most authentic, creative, finely honed selves – but it's what makes you irreplaceable. No one can outsource your soul. No one can automate it. No one can download it from Amazon (at least, not yet).
Ship.
Britney ships. A lot.
For those of you who might be unfamiliar with it, 'shipping' is a word that Seth Godin appropriated to mean producing creative work and getting it out into the world. As Eric Maisel points out, the creative process has two major stages that come with their own brands of anxiety: making the thing, and then showing (or shipping) the thing. You've got to do both, or you're not in the game. And the more projects you ship, the more likely you are to hit at least one of them out of the park.
Then again, there is a balance. Many writers, for example, ship their manuscripts too quickly, too early, to agents and editors or the public in general (thank you, rise of self-publishing). You need to give your work time to bake, to innovate, to refine and improve itself. Churning out projects of mediocre quality will disappoint your fans (or fail to win you any in the first place) and hurt your career.
But Seth's point, I think, is that shipping is a skill in and of itself. It involves the art of starting something – and then the art of carrying it through — and then the art of finishing. You have to practice each and every one of these arts in order to get better at all of them. And you do that by doing them over and over again. You start projects. You finish them. You ship. You don't let yourself get paralyzed with fear and insecurity. You don't give in to the Resistance. You understand that some things will fly, and some things won't fly, and that's just how the world works. No drama.
What shipping does require is a serious work ethic, and a commitment to your art. Not a pretend or half-assed commitment. The real deal.
Be polarizing.
Britney is possibly the most controversial pop star in the history of pop stars. She's also wildly, wildly popular. She can't get out of the public eye if she tries (and she has tried).
My point is not that you might desire that level of fame — although if you do, I'm sorry, and may the gods help you – but to point up the relationship between interesting and controversial. Interestingness is not always nice, or easy, and doesn't always come in smooth well-rounded packages. It engages you, gets under your skin, and provokes you. Because interestingness comes with a clearly defined point of view, its own strong sense of self, which means that not everybody is going to agree with you or the ideas that you embody.
For those of us raised to be nice, this can be problematic.
But seriously? Get over it. Nice — which is different from kindness – is what other people want you to be when they don't want you to follow your own agenda. Nice accommodates. It succumbs. It pleases. It eats away at your soul and compromises your sense of identity.
It's more invigorating – and also, I think, much more honest – to develop a strong point of view, to live it, to be it. Just make it as informed as you possibly can. A true, authentic, and deeply educated point of view is a gift to the world.
Surround yourself with good, cool people.
In the book CONNECTED: The Surprising Power of Human Networks, the authors make the point that no man or woman is an island. We are so deeply wired into each other, that we are not only influenced by our friends, but also our friends' friends, and our friends' friends' friends. How you eat, if you smoke, how much money you make, how happy you are today – the habits and beliefs that shape your daily reality – are all subject to the influence of people you don't even know. So if you want to change some aspect of your life, you probably need to change some aspect of your community. It's important to surround yourself with people you not only like, but want to be like. It's not about being a snob, but about taking care of yourself and honoring who you really are.
Even a brief look at Britney's personal history and the rise and fall and rise and fall and rise of her career will demonstrate how her success depends greatly upon the people she chooses to bring into her life.
Rebel.
Rebellion, so long as it's genuine, is your opportunity to define yourself and what you stand for against what you are decidedly not. It's an opportunity to refine your point-of-view and present something refreshing and original to the world that it maybe didn't even know it needed. Because if something pisses you off enough to speak up against it, chances are it's pissing off other people as well, and making them just as hungry for an alternative (especially the alternative that is the soulful you.) It's scary to be the first, lone voice in the wilderness…but it can be amazing how quickly other voices join in.
Britney rebelled against her own past, her own corporate, sexy-but-'virginal' image that turned out to be less about honesty (she wasn't really a virgin) and more about how the powers-that-be could best make money off her (virginity sells!). You can question – seriously seriously question – many of the decisions she made (*cough*Federline*cough*) but in the end it was her right to make them. And here's the thing. She still has a career. Would that be the case if she was still playing the good girl role, instead of standing that role on its head? If the culture was still obsessing over her virginity? instead of maybe – maybe – maybe taking a tiny step towards being the kind of place where a girl's moral character is measured by something other than what's between her legs.
So go, Britney.
Work it out. Rock hard. There's a lot of us rooting for you.
Hello! Thanks for reading this all the way through, I know it's long…If you liked it, please enrich the place by commenting below…or maybe join my List, so I can be cool to you in some way I haven't quite figured out yet. I promise not to spam. Spam is Evil.
