using blogging to let out the inner-party clown OR Ryan Holiday, you sad, sad man!

i’m not ryan seacrest, nor am i ryan anything!!!

As I mentioned in a previous post, this week I’m reading Ryan Holiday‘s book about manipulating social media for personal gain. I’m still not sure why I’m reading this. I’m too riddled by Catholic guilt or a strange sense of integrity to think I would actually implement some of what the author has done.  I’m just not a gamer of systems.  I make money teaching, for God’s sake, so you know I’m not that savvy.  But I guess I want to better understand this system that any of us creatives have to play (at least a little) in order to get our stuff out into the world.

That said, I think Mr. Holiday might have gamed me.  In interviews, I’ve heard him say he gives away his secrets in the book, but apart from a few general examples, he doesn’t give many details.  He does repeat himself over and over again about how bad the blog-centric world of social media is and how easy it is to manipulate it.  After 250 pages, I can say that my biggest lesson from Ryan Holiday is that he is a sad man and makes his living doing sad things that even he feels bad (and sad) about.  He feels badly, he tells us, though not bad enough that he’s going to stop doing said sad things.  BTW, if you know nothing about Ryan Holiday, he’s the guy responsible for those American Apparel ad campaigns that verge on kiddy-porn.  You know the ones.  Middle-aged men tend to congregate around them at bus stops–maybe that will give you some context as to who this guy is.

So, now, 250 pages later, $9.99 poorer, I’m still wondering about blogging.  Specifically, why I’m doing it.  What secret hopes do I have for what I write, if any.  I enjoy posting.  Let me get that out of the way.  I have some really great bloggers reading me, and whenever I get onto this pragmatic talk about utility, they always remind me that blogging should be for fun and done for the sake of fun.  I agree. I certainly don’t think blogging is my way to fame as a writer. But still, I can’t deny that I’d like to express myself to more readers. But I want the writing to be honest and I want my concerns when writing to reflect writerly craft, not the need for page views. Ryan Holiday would say that’s a fool’s errand.  Well, whatev, Ryan.  I didn’t ask you.

I did, however, ask bloggers why they wrote, and Friday Jones, a reader of my last post and a blogger in her own right, left an amazing comment.  I will quote it here:

I have been wondering the same thing, but I think you as a blogger need to understand the purpose of your blog. For instance my blog is literally about me airing all of the dirty laundry of my life out as I tread the road of self discovery. It is an all over the place blog with a central focus. However what if you are like the the Ryan Seacrest of the boggersphere? Your topics would be broad and vast. If you as a blogger have the ability to let your personality shine through, then you are selling you as a brand versus a you as an expert on a limited subject. But if your personality get’s lost, then being “all over” will not serve you in the long run.

Friday Jones, you are a genius.  I’m no Ryan Seacrest, nor am I a Ryan Holiday.  (I don’t even really like the name Ryan unless it’s for a girl or a last name–just another issue of mine.)  But I think I let my personality show through.  And maybe that’s part of why I want to blog.  I’m like that shy guy in the corner at a party who wants to join in but is too shy.  Blogging lets me let my inner-party clown out.

What about you?  What does blogging do for you?  And do you all care about getting readers?  And if so, what would you be willing to do to get those eyeballs?

should a blog be focussed or should it be all over the place?

I’ve been reading Ryan Holiday‘s book, Trust Me, I’m Lying, and let me tell you, the experience is depressing.  In the book, Mr, Holiday not only talks about how he’s manipulated the media countless times, he also argues over and over again that the world of social media is not based on value or truth or quality writing; it’s based on tricking readers to view more pages.  It’s worth noting that as I read this book, I started to wonder if I was part of some kind of meta-experience set up by the author.  I wondered if the book itself was just a trick in that it repeated the same basic point over and over again.  Was my buying the book–a book that promises to describe in full detail the ins and outs of the media landscape–a trick?

But the most depressing part of reading this book has more to do with where I am than where the book or its author is.  I heard Mr. Holiday interviewed on Brian Lehrer‘s public radio show, and I bought his book because he said that in it, he would give away the tools of his trade. In other words, he would teach his readers how to manipulate social media.  I’m not saying that I wanted to do anything dishonest, but I was hoping to learn something I hadn’t known before–some trick of the trade that would help my blog, my career as a writer.  Kind of sad and lame, I’ll admit.

The only thing I really learned from the book is to ask this question of myself an of all of you bloggers out there.  Mr. Holiday repeatedly quotes big-time bloggers all saying the same thing: focus on one thing and become an authority on that one thing if you want people to come read you.  As a generalist, this troubles me, but at the same time, it stands to reason.  People like to know what they are getting, so if they want spots, they go to that blog or channel or whatever, and likewise, they want to know about food or clothes or relationships.  Blogs, so Mr. Holiday argues, are all about consistency.  That sells, by which he means, that’s what readers want.  Is that so?

What do you all think?  Do you care if people read or if they comment? Do you write for yourself or are you trying to get your stuff read by as many people as possible? Do you force yourself to post about a limited amount of topics or are you all over the place?

i’m a loser, i’m a genius, i’m a loser: a writer’s dilemma

It’s a sign of age that things are not one extreme or the other. When I was younger, if I failed at something,  I would almost certainly tell people I sucked.  I didn’t mean, I suck at this or that.  I was trying to make more of an existential statement, as in I am a person who just lives in a state of sucking, i.e., a loser.

I was never so confident or clueless to say I was a genius when something went my way.  But I’ll admit that somewhere in the back of my head, I was hopeful I might find that thing I was amazing at. If I’m really honest, I’d add that I wanted to find something I was amazing at without having to put in bone-crushing effort needed to make amazingness.  Of course, even geniuses put in effort–I’m assuming this though I cannot say for sure since, if you haven’t figured it out on your own, I am no genius.  (I know. Big surprise.)

I bring all of this up because a couple weeks ago, I experienced a pretty big failure and a nice success back to back.  The first was a screening of my second short film (the trailer appears above).  The screening happened here in SF at a big theater as part of a festival that happens out here regularly.  As part of the festival, after the screening of each movie is over, the crew and cast go down in front and take questions.  Often the questions are pretty slight, i.e., why did you you use that logo for your production company; do you think you’ll make a sequel to that romantic comedy with the happy ending that couldn’t possibly go anywhere else because it is a short with a happy ending; I love chocolate, and the main character was eating some in that one scene, what kind of chocolate?  You get the point.

But when Cherise, my strange little Cinderella story in reverse, was done, it was like ghost town silence.  We went up and looked out into the vast audience (over 600 people) and you could feel the rampant indifference. What I would’ve given for a question about chocolate?

On later reflection and because my director reminded me of this, I realized that we made the movie we set out to make.  We wanted to make something that was lovely to look at.  We wanted to tell a story with dance and music and through minimal dialogue. We wanted a visual experience more than we cared about story.  Well, we hit those marks.  But still, there was a part of me sitting in that theater harkening back to my younger days, the younger me that often told himself, Jesus, dude, you suck the big one.

A day later, I had a reading. It was the first time I’ve ever been asked to be a featured reader, and I was excited.  But there was also a part of me that was fearful.  Would I suck at this, too?  Would the crowd, mostly poets, look at me and my little fables/fairy tales/ urban micro fiction about old ladies popping happy pills and would they reject what they saw? Would they get all aggro the way poets at spoken word events often do?  What is the opposite of snapping fingers and saying, groovy, man? As it happens, they did not hate me.  In fact, they were very enthusiastic. Some people might have even  snapped some fingers.  And for a moment or two that night, I felt like like I had arrived. I was a writer.

I’m no genius. That thought never crossed my mind even with the snapping, but I’m ok with that. The violins will never soar as I write the great American Novel. I’m no Mozart.  I’m not even Salieri. But with practice, I hope I write something that gets close to great. That’s a realistic goal–I hope it is.

As for the sucking part, the truth is I know I don’t suck, either–not in existential way.  But ironically, that’s almost more disappointing than not being a genius.  If you tell people you suck and you believe it, there’s always a way up.  There’s always room for improvement. And more importantly, if you fail at what you’re attempting, you can wrap yourself in the Sucky Blanket of Low Expectations.

You think I sucked that night?  You think my movie was shite?  Well, of course my dear man/woman, I suck.  I suck the big one.

NO MORE!  It’s time to grow the hell up. I’m just too old to be carrying the Sucky Blanket around. I need to work and not worry. I might die with nothing to my artistic record, but I’m not going down sucking, goddammit.

 

trying to make sense of violence–a couple more things about the Batman shooting…

I almost let it go.  And I will since this blog doesn’t really tend to take up politics.  But I’m going to be impolitic and say (maybe criticize) how people are reacting to the shootings last week in Colorado.  It’s not surprising that cable news is going nuts with the story, asking people who once knew the killer if they suspected that he would one day open fire on a room full of innocent people.  You know that the news producers want to find that neighbor or classmate who will say, “why yes, actually, I did suspect something,” which we all know is a pile of dung.  There are many reclusive odd-bods in the world who might be anti-social but are not sociopaths.

There’s also the Right, which wants to go off about Hollywood violence while the Left makes its half-ass effete comments about the need for stronger gun regulations.

You all know this.

But if you go to the post before this one and you look at the first comment, you’ll see a rather novel take on this tragedy.  A man named Sam Harrington, a first-time commenter which I am thankful for, left a very thoughtful analysis of what he sees as the reason for the tragedy.  For Mr. Harrington, the answer is economic.  I’ll let you make what you will of this theory, but for now, I’ll summarize, running the risk of oversimplifying.  Put simply, Mr. Harrington takes a page from, of all places, the Dark Knight Rises.  In that movie, the villain, Bane, is a class warrior, literally, and he calls for the people of Gotham to rise up against the well-off and the comfortable.  Mr. Harrington believes, it seems, that this is the same kind of thought process that ran through James Holmes’ mind last week. I’m sure Mr. Harrington was not arguing a defense for Mr. Holmes, but he was making the case that people in need can only take so much before they start the revolution.

In general, I might agree with Mr. Harrington.  There probably will have to be a reckoning of some sort, sooner than later.  Things are tough for so many and then there are the bubble people who are oblivious to the pain.  Living in San Francisco, there are a lot of bubble-types living all around me.  BUT, the ironic thing about Mr. Harrington’s comments, and to a certain extent, all the cable newscasters trying to form their own theories and to the political types on both sides of the divide, is that they are blind to the fact that there isn’t a reason why this happened.  Cruelty is not a science; its fruits are not always easily explained.

And this is where I become impolitic because I don’t think it’s my place to stifle a commenter like Mr. Harrington, nor do I want to make light of theory, punching holes in it. And yet I want to.  I could point out that there were probably a lot of other 99% types in that theater. I could make the case that his argument excuses something horrible by trying to explain it. I feel the self-righteous grad student coming out. I want to tell Mr. Harrington and the newscasters, and the gun people on the Left and the violence people on the Right that they should all just shut the hell up and grieve.

But I’m going to stop myself.  Theories, even overly simple ones, come out of grief, I think, by which I mean, they come out of a need to understand when a movie director and score and a screenwriter can’t suddenly break in with a flashback that puts everything in context. There is no context here. There is only a sad man who took out his sadness on 59 people last week for no one reason, or scarier yet, for no reason we would ever be able to understand.  There is only a void left by this kind of act, and no amount of words or theories can fill it.