Wait, How Is This Relevant?
If I’m a writer, and this is a blog about writing, why do I write so much about things that aren’t writing?
The short answer: I don’t.
Quite a few people visit this site looking specifically for posts tagged “marketing” and ignore everything else. Which is indicative of a larger trend, of people being more interested in selling a book than in creating one in the first place. But all the marketing strategies in the world aside, and Tommy Boy references aside, you can’t actually sell a dump in a box. First you have to do the hard work of learning how to write and, moreover, learning how to write something that people want to read. And you do that by connecting with them.
I write about what’s interesting to me, but the better part of my less technical musings are related to what I’m writing, or planning to write, at that moment. Describing swords and lances and cannibalism, that’s the easy part; making people care is what’s hard and so I spend the lion’s share of my writing time, some days, thinking through how to first connect myself emotionally to what’s happening with my characters and second, how to share those feelings with my readers. How to help them feel what I feel: to share that sense of urgency, that sense of dread. That fear that things won’t work out–or that they will. It doesn’t matter if you’re writing about football or sparkly vampires or the middle ages, what makes all good stories real isn’t where they’re set or what they’re about but that human connection.
If a person isn’t interested in other people, and in what makes them tick, and in the world around them, I quite frankly don’t understand how they can be even a mediocre writer. Forget a good one. To me, all that stuff that so many dismiss is what it’s all about. And no, I’m not trying to write for everyone–that’s impossible. Same as, when I was single, I wasn’t looking to marry everyone. I was looking to be the best me I could be, and thus attract the best partner: someone who valued me, completely, for who I actually was. And whom I could value in turn, on that same level. As a writer–as a person–you look to make, not hundreds or thousands or millions of equally shallow connections but those really important ones. To connect with those people, who are in tune with who you are.
I spend a few hours a month on marketing. And most of that time is spent discussing and debating what I’m doing and whether or not it’s working. The answer is never to blindly throw more money, or more time, at the problem. If a little of a certain strategy isn’t working…what makes anyone think that ten times as much will suddenly produce different results?
But most of my work-related time I spend writing. Actually writing, or researching, planning and taking notes. I’m not much of an outliner, except in the broad strokes sense, but I do take copious notes. And when I’m stuck on a particular person, place or thing, I get out there. You can’t grow in your writing unless you’re also growing as a person, and that means learning what the universe has to teach you.
All of it.
Not cherry picking, based on your current understanding of your current needs, but being open to the complete experience.
Thoughts?
