I typically know what I want to coach out of a guest to best celebrate her work while also providing the most possible value for the listener.
But what’s the map?
Sure, the interstate system of highways is straight, efficient, and fast. You can drive 90 miles per hour in Montana.
But what if you take the back roads? The scenic route? Well, now you’re getting into the weeds, the great details, the scenery is richer. You’re going slower so you can take more in. I guess you can say it’s speed dating vs. that rich first date.
You still need to get somewhere, but one is far more revealing and less superficial. Depending on your goal and the time you have, consider the back roads.
Writing prompt: How can you turn more conversations from interstates to back roads?
If you’re anything like me, you get a bit distracted by the shiny new thing.
You get excited at the possibilities of the new hobby, the new story because it’s that thing that’s going to bring you the satisfaction you want.
If I shared with you the myriad things I do and/or want to do, you’d wonder how I get anything done at all.
And that’s when I always go back to professional athletes or people with singular drive and singular vision. Prima ballerinas aren’t consumed with baking bread or writing or drawing or web design. Bodybuilders aren’t consumed with woodworking, welding, or making baked goods. Professional athletes, let’s just say in season, focus on their game, preparation, study, not gardening, painting, or book binding.
Yes, we need hobbies. We need ways to distract ourselves and to relieve tension.
But I think many of us stay in the mud because we lack a certain ruthlessness to finish the job, to truly master our craft. While we flitter over here, our main skill, the main reason we got into whatever mess we got into, it operates at a fraction of its potential, and yet we wonder why we don’t thrive.
I guess what I’m saying is this: It’s a long life, if we’re lucky, and I think we’d be better served giving our entire selves over to the thing for as long as the thing means something to us. Reevaluate. Does this still serve me? If not, there’s no shame in quitting. Your identity isn’t tied to your art. Your identity is tied to your generosity and willingness to share.
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You remember quidditch, right? It’s the wizard game at Hogwarts that is sorta like lacrosse and hockey and soccer and capture the flag … but on brooms.
It’s really cool. That said, it’s only cool for so long when it comes to the story.
J.K. Rowling described quidditch matches in great detail early in the series. As did the movies. The movies used them as bigger set pieces early in the run.
But what can you really do with them after the novelty wears off? It’s like any sports book. You might want to recount all the games, all the races, all the events, but what you’ll find is they get very repetitive. They start sounding the same. There’s only so much these games can show the reader or the viewer.
So you need to use them sparingly. Once that novelty wears off, they must only be used to illustrate character and to move the story forward.
Otherwise, you’re left with what I call the Quidditch Problem.
So ask yourself: Am I putting in a game of quidditch because it moves the story forward or because I just think it’s cool?
If you read and/or listen to this little show, you’re likely a writer of some kind.
In an age of life hacks and the seduction of short cuts and quick hits, we often seek answers to questions that will take out the growing pains, smooth over the pavement when what we really need to do is drive over those potholes and feel the chassis rattle.
And I guess what I’m saying is the answers are already on your bookshelf. I’m looking over at mine right now. Who do I most want to emulate on my way to finding my voice?
Pull down the book.
Get in there and read it with intention. Stew over it on a low heat. Stir the words around. Write in the margins. Take a big-picture view of the structure of the book then the micro-structure of each chapter.
The answers to how to do this are in the books. They aren’t how-to or prescriptive in the traditional sense. Rather, it’s a whole lot like Jeopardy!
The books have already given you answer: You now have to engineer the question. And it’s along that journey that these books will teach all you ever need to know about this silly little game.
How’s this for a pull quote from Jason Naylor (@jasonnaylor on Instagram):
How do you find your style? How do you find your voice. And the truth is, I think that you don’t find it until you stop trying to find it. You just make work. If you’re a writer, you just keep writing. If you draw, then you just keep drawing, and the more you do it, you start to see patterns, you start to see a rhythm in what you’re doing. And then one day you look back and you realize, ‘Oh, I actually I can see that I have a voice.’
OK … so I don’t have an issue with writing retreats, per se. It’s nice to have a place to go and write free of distraction and really focus on the work.
But my sense of retreats is this: It’s a status symbol. I earned this retreat or I won this retreat, so look at me.
I doubt people truly get that much work done on a retreat.
But more importantly: I think a writer of a certain mindset feels that if only I earned a writing retreat or bought my way into one, then I will be able to write my book, finish my book, and be a capital W writer.
It looks good on Instagram. A great peeve of mine is the bucolic vistas writers take as if THIS is the writing life. Look at the dappled light. Look at the mountain. Look at the trees. I don’t know about you, but seeing that outside my window makes me want to go climb stuff and not be at the ledger writing paragraphs. That’s just me.
My point is this: You don’t need a retreat to write. Yes, you need time alone. Yes, you need time away from distraction. You can do that in your basement. You can do that at a hotel in town. You can get an AirBnB if you really need to change your context.
But don’t be fooled by the writing retreat industrial complex and the graduate school industrial complex that preys on the insecurities of the impressionable artists.
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?
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.
