March 2021 – Page 2 – Home of The Creative Nonfiction Podcast

Adding More Weight

In order for me to understanding something, or to make sense of something, I need to dumb it down into athletic and physical terms. Sport metaphors work real well for me.

I was scribbling in my journal this morning about my inability to gain any kind of altitude. And yet I do the same thing every day expecting to generate lift. Isn’t that the definition of insanity?

But something more apt came to mind: weightlifting. This is my favorite form of exercise. It’s objective. Lift more weight, you’re stronger.

Say you’re squatting 135 pounds and it’s hard the first week. You do it the second week and it’s easier. Third week easier still. At some point, you need to add weight to the bar to test yourself, to stretch yourself, to test your limitations.

I know this is true for me regarding my writing, career, podcasting: I’ve just been squatting the same 135 pounds day after day, week after week, month after month, year after year and wondering, why am I not getting any stronger?

The real question becomes: What’s the equivalent of adding weight to the bar in a progressive manner that doesn’t create injury but still gets us to where we want to go?

Best Book Marketing Tip Ever!

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You’ll pardon the click-baity feel of the title to this little post, but hear me out.

The best book marketing tip ever is this: Write a damn good book.

Write a book that you want to read. Write a book that is so charged with your passion and expertise that the energy spills out from between the covers.

And write a book people will talk about. Write a book that people will buy five copies of so they can talk about it with their friends.

You can have the biggest audience on social media. You can have an email list of 20,000 people and maybe that buys you 10,000 books sold. Not too shabby, but you won’t get on any best-seller lists. Not that you should want that to be your goal anyway.

Point being, the way to sell a lot of books won’t have anything to do with social media reach. It’ll be because you wrote something so good, so important, that good old fashioned word of mouth moved mountains for you.

Tweet that!

Never a Wasted Word

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It’s easy when looking at the finished works of the people we admire to think that what comes out of their pens and pencils and keyboards is fully formed and finished.

It’s especially dispiriting to read their journals, the rawest form of their prose (one imagines) and to see how polished and lucid those are.

But though our work pales by comparison, every word we scribble in a journal, on a napkin, in a zine, every email we write or note we pass or text we send, it’s all words and it’s all language.

Every keystroke is a chance. An opportunity to get a little bit better.

There’s never a wasted word if we don’t let words go to waste.

But There are No Gaps

By Brendan O’Meara

Again, and I apologize, I come back to social media.

Ever notice how you don’t notice when someone has taken a break from social media?

Really, the only time you ever notice if someone has taken a break from the hamster wheel of social media is when they return to social media and tell you about their break.

Then you’re like, “Oh, I didn’t notice you were gone. Well, welcome back, buddy!”

That gets to the point of how insidious the whole machine is: We need to then broadcast on the very platform we’ve abstained from the fact that we left in the first place for the bump of dopamine and validation. But we’re back … on the platform … to tell you how great it was to be away from the platform.

There are no gaps in your feed. Imagine if you saw a gap in your “programming.” A channel that appears on or off. But no, there are no gaps. It gets filled in with whatever the bots have detected you need at that moment. Not because you liked so-and-so’s riff, but because something in your browser history, or a link you clicked, or something else told the AI that at this time, we’re gonna shovel this coal into your furnace.

And I don’t need to tell you: coal doesn’t burn clean.

Episode 246: Jenni Gritters on the Freelance Life, Not Waiting for Perfect, and Sh*t Sandwiches

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By Brendan O’Meara

Jenni Gritters is here.

She’s a freelancer and she is not a struggling freelancer in the ways that many of us identify as a struggling freelancer, which is to say: we po’.

Jenni, @jenni_gritters, along with her co-pilot on The Writers’ Co-op Podcast Wudan Yan, are thriving. Through strategy and rigor, Jenni is a six-figure earner, this during the pandemic, this when many writers are struggling to make a go of it.

She turned her skill into money, which allows her to double down on her skill and do more projects that are more personal-driven.

I like to think of some content/branded writing gigs like when Jake Gyllenhaall does a blockbuster movie so that he can then do the art-house stuff he probably wants to do. Book your Marvel movie, then go write your memoir. Haha.

A ‘New’ Kind of Search Engine

By Brendan O’Meara

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These days, the beauty of the Internet is the ability to ask a question and to have it answered as fast as you can type. There’s value and utility in this. Not to mention speed, something we’re all addicted to.

The search engine of the past was the elders or a network. And I’d challenge you to make a phone call to your dad before you look something up on YouTube.

There are myriad things that I could ask YouTube or Google (they’re the same, right?), but when it comes to handy matters, I text or call my father in law. I call it “Googling Doug,” but, more accurately, Doug is a search engine for a particular kind of expertise. Sure, I could type something into Google, but why not use the people you know as a kind of search engine? It’ll help your relationships and it’ll make the people you know feel useful, or of use.

Who in your family, or friend circle, or network might have the answer to a question or the counsel you seek? Maybe before you ask Google a question, maybe Mom or Dad or Sibling or Colleague has the answer.

And if you’re lucky, you’ll be their search engine, too.

Slow = Fast

By Brendan O’Meara

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I may have said this before but it bears repeating: slow is fast.

I read a great quote thanks to the brilliant NITCH account, from the actor Viggo Mortensen:

One of the best pieces of advice I ever got was: go slow to go fast. We live as though there aren’t enough hours in the day but if we do each thing calmly and carefully we will get it done quicker and with much less stress.

That’s so spot on.

And if you’re a fan of Cal Newport’s work and his concept of Deep Work, it means turning off the notifications, turning off the WiFi and methodically going about the work. Don’t check Twitter or Facebook or IG as it’ll spike the cortisol and make you feel like crap. It’s like a candy sugar high. You might get a bump, but the crash isn’t worth it.

Try five super deep breaths if you need a moment. Try a short walk. Then get back to the work, bit by bit, drip by drip, and you’ll feel much more accomplished.

The Narrator in Memoir

By Brendan O’Meara

After reading “The Body” by Stephen King, a fictional memoir of four pre-teens tromping off into the woods to find the dead body of a boy their age hit by a train, I was struck by how the narrator comes into the picture.

Gordie Lachance is grown up, professional writer looking back at this experience. On the one hand, he stays in the moment of his childhood, but then, at times, he swoops in and offers introspection, rumination, meaning from maturity and the distance between the current day and what he’s reflecting on.

It’s much like Ralphie in A Christmas Story or Nick Caraway in Gatsby.

The story element is very tight, very focused: Labor Day weekend for The Body, the Christmas season for Ralphie, and one summer for Caraway, and so when the narrator from the future pops in, he pops in to reflect on a very tight window.

I think of this a lot. How much should we stay in the moment and how much should we offer the reflection of the guy who made it out alive to tell the story. It’s a fine balance, but all three have this in common: the narrator from the future has a very light hand. He and it is a he in these three cases, largely stays in the timeline of the story, probably 75% of the time.

That’s a good number to aim for.

An Editing Hack

By Brendan O’Meara

With a hat tip to the writer and editor Glenn Stout, a great editing trick is this:

Change the font and the change the size of the font.

I typically compose in Times New Roman, but to change the “eye level,” to borrow a baseball term, I then edit in Comic Sans size 14.

I know, there’s all kinds of hate for Comic Sans, but let me tell you, I almost never miss a mistake.

Convert it back and ship your clean draft. Easy peasy.

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Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!

Brendan’s Monthly Newsletter: First of the month! No spam! Can’t beat it!