Justine Musk

why Pinterest is totally not a waste of time: creating a visionboard for your creative project ( + why it’s helpful)

2012-01-27T02:49:52Z

I joined Pinterest for one major reason. I am returning to my novel-in-progress THE DECADENTS after a couple months’ break from it and wanted to create a digital visionboard to help drive it to completion.

This book has been tricky for me because it deals with some challenging subject matter. It’s also drawing on some raw life material from my years in LA which (it turns out) I’m still processing.

It’s a big departure from my three previously published novels, which I regard as the work of a much younger writer: someone who was still finding her way to her true voice, who hadn’t yet realized the Big Themes of her life – and thus her fiction. I’m not the same person I was back then, and I’m not the same writer. (I like to think I’ve deepened with age.) I’ve also lost a lot of illusions, which means that the personal world I am writing both from and about is very different. And some of those changes, I realize now, still had to settle into me before I was equipped to write the novel that I need to write.

But I digress. (Clears throat.) So.

Pinterest.

Visionboard.

Yeah.

I’ve always – always – written to music, and I create playlists for each novel (and for some of the characters) to serve as a private soundtrack. My brain learns to associate certain songs with a certain kind of fiction writing – neurons that fire together, wire together – so when I sit at my desk and start up iTunes on my Mac, my brain realizes it’s Bidness Time and shifts into the required state. (This is why creative rituals can be so effective – once they’re ingrained, they can shortcut you into productivity. )

Not to mention — music inspires, even without the power of ritual.

Music gets you in the mood.

So why not do this visually?

Marketers have realized that the more senses a brand can evoke, the more powerful the connection it can form with the consumer. It makes sense to apply this to the creative process. The more senses you engage as you bring your work into being, the more vivid and committed the relationship you form with it – which ends up creating a more powerful experience for your audience.

In his book BLAH BLAH BLAH: WHAT TO DO WHEN WORDS DON’T WORK, Dan Roam compares our visual and verbal minds.

Our visual mind, he says, is a hummingbird.

Our verbal mind is a fox. (How cute.)

The fox is:

Linear
Analytical
Patient
Clever
(A little smug)

The fox “advances step by step with laser-like focus.” He shifts as he needs to but keeps his eyes straight ahead. He “tests the wind, calculates distance and velocities, and, at the precise moment…he strikes!”

And then he’s very impressed with himself.

The hummingbird is:

Spatial
Spontaneous
Synthesizing
(flighty and easily distracted)

The hummingbird “sees clearly in all directions at all times…She sees her environment as a three-dimensional space with food potential everywhere; she can fly backward (and even upside down) to get to the nearest flower.” She’s so speedy that she doesn’t have to get from point to logical point like the fox; she just appears where she wants to be. And she synthesizes: “touching and seeing everything, she builds a complete model of the forest in her mind.”

And then she wonders where she put her keys.

The verbal mind is the “piece-by-piece” fox mind. The visual mind is the “all at once” hummingbird mind. The fox is the trees; the hummingbird is the forest.

I wanted, in writing my novel, a little less fox and a little more hummingbird. I felt like I was losing the forest for the trees, and getting trapped in thickets. Which is one reason I decided to cultivate the visual side of my brain.

By creating a visionboard, I am ‘telling’ the story of my novel….all at once. I can get a kind of deep visceral feeling for how the different parts relate to each other, and flash on some new insights as a bonus.

A visionboard acts as a creative trigger in other ways as well:

a) It sends you on a hunt for appropriate images. Since images, like music, evoke mood and feeling, you not only have to think about the look of your novel, but how it should make you feel.

(When I come across images that I like, and want to keep, but that don’t feel right for my visionboard, I use the ‘like’ button to tag them and store them away for whatever.)

Which means you define the general aesthetic of your novel by what you reject as much as — if not more than — what you select. As I do this, my vision for the novel assumes greater depth and clarity.

And for any vision to be compelling, it needs to be clear. A strong, clear vision that resonates with you emotionally can act like a kind of motivational tractor beam. It pulls you along. It pulls you in. Which means you’re more likely to achieve your goal – or finish the novel.

b) As you search out images, you are also feeding your head.

There’s a great quote by Gertrude Stein: Everything must come into your scheme, otherwise you cannot achieve real simplicity.

When you open yourself up to different kinds of influence, you are priming your creative pump. The mind is a restless, pattern-making machine: and, like a shark, it must be constantly on the move. Which means it’s constantly digesting what you feed it: seeking out new connections and relationships that incorporate this new material into whatever pre-existing scheme you might be working with.

So by discovering images that symbolize your old ideas….you’ll also find images that help you produce new ideas (or tweak the old ones in new ways).

c) Like any other form of social media, Pinterest can be addictive. But if used with intention and timing, it can also help your writing because of how it allows you to take a break from it.

Thoughts create neural pathways in the brain. When those thoughts repeat, those pathways deepen. We get blocked in our creative work when we get trapped in the same loops of thinking and cut ourselves off from the kind of stimulation that can trigger new ideas (see above).

In the book THE BREAKOUT PRINCIPLE, Harvard professor Herbert Benson refers to
“a powerful mind-body impulse that severs prior mental patterns and…opens an inner door to a host of personal benefits”

including an increase in creative insight.

In sum, the way to achieve this is by working a problem as hard as you can until you hit that inner wall and cannot get beyond it. Then you remove yourself to a completely different activity that lulls you into a kind of trance. Random thoughts might drift through your mind….and then, without warning, some kind of solution bursts forth.

(Benson talks about “the relaxation response, which measured cardiovascular and respiratory responses”, etc., and how the science of that underpins the breakout principle, but excuse me if I don’t get into all that. I’m going for the really general gist of it.)

Switching from your writing to Pinterest can also serve to switch off those repeating thought-loops that weren’t getting you anywhere. By immersing yourself in a different activity – one which allows your mind to relax and roam – you’re setting yourself up to kick some more creative ass.

As always, intention is important. Stating your intention at the beginning of any endeavor sends a signal to your unconscious mind to bring certain things to your attention while ignoring what’s not relevant.

To that end, you could create a “vision statement” for your board – and your novel – that keeps you focused and on track. You could come up with what Joyce Schwarz in her book THE VISION BOARD refers to as a “power word” that serves a both a “vision statement and defining image” for what you want your board to accomplish. It could be a word or words that states the general theme of your project, or the end result you want to create, or a feeling you want to invoke in the audience, or…anything, really.

After all, it’s your visionboard.

Do you work with visionboards? Do you have any thoughts on them or experiences to share in the comments below?

If you’re on Pinterest, and especially if you’re creating a visionboard of your own, look for me.

Maybe we can inspire each other.

how to become your own rebellion

2012-01-19T03:16:32Z

“I became my own rebellion,” writes Twyla Tharp in her book THE CREATIVE HABIT, and I have loved that phrase ever since I came across it a handful of years ago.

She was talking about her decision to become a dancer/choreographer: generally not a choice of profession that fills parents with glee. She goes on to say:

Going with your head makes it arbitrary. Going with your gut means you have no choice. It’s inevitable, which is why I have no regrets.

I was in my early thirties when I read this and realized that I, too, wanted to become my own rebellion.

Even if I wasn’t exactly sure what that meant.

I’m reminded of a conversation with an older, worldly friend shortly after my ex-husband filed for divorce. I was at the beginning of what we both knew would be a volatile transition.

My friend said, and I will always remember this: “You’re going to think and feel your way forward.”

She was telling me to listen to my gut. To take each day as it came and let my intuition lead me, like an unseen hand guiding me through a maze lined with thorns. The problem was, I had become disconnected from that sense of inner knowing. I was constantly questioning and second-guessing myself. I had spent too much time listening to certain people tell me what was wrong with me and invested too much authority in their opinions. Whenever my inner voice rose up to suggest a different perspective, I would discount it and switch it off.

This happens to so many of us. As kids, growing up, we learn strategies for getting the attention and the love that we need to survive. So often our strategies involve emphasizing this part of our personality while banishing that part into the shadows. Certain adults hold a godlike power over us, and they define our reality. If they say one thing – but on a gut level we know something else to be true – we’ll tell that inner voice to shut up. We’ll send it packing. It’s easier and safer that way. Who are we to challenge a freaking god?

As a child, this is basic survival.

As an adult, this turns into something else, called denial.

If you’re raised to be a nice girl, or boy, you learn to be polite and respectful and fair instead of being honest with yourself: you’ll override your intuition when it seems inconsiderate. Better to try and see things from the other person’s perspective and find ways to excuse his (or her) behaviour, even when that inner voice is telling you to get the fuck away.

It doesn’t help that for so long our culture has derided emotion and intuition. If someone calls you emotional, they generally don’t mean it as a compliment; and often words like ‘hysterical’ and ‘crazy’ aren’t far behind. Intuition, meanwhile, gets lumped in with New Age notions of being psychic. Both ‘emotional’ and ‘intuitive’ are regarded as feminine traits. To grow up in this culture means to absorb lots of big and little, covert and overt, conscious and unconscious messages that feminine equals weak and inferior — so much so that many women will scorn so-called feminine things in order to imply that no, they do not belong to that club.

But as it turns out, emotions don’t interfere with rationality — they enable it. It’s people who don’t have emotions (at least as we understand them) who make decisions that strike other people as irrational. When our brain creates memories, it lays down both the memory of the event and the way the event made us feel. Our brain’s biggest priority is physical survival. It uses memory as a kind of GPS, guiding us away from potential danger and pain (like being eaten) and toward safety and pleasure (like not being eaten).

Emotion and reason work together to help us determine what is happening, what that means to us, and what kind of outcome we would like to make happen.

When we do a gut check, or rely on so-called ‘female’ intuition, we are accessing a powerful form of nonverbal intelligence. Our subconscious is constantly absorbing the million little bits of information that bombard our senses at any given time and processing, processing, processing. Because it is not hooked up to the verbal part of our brain, intuition operates outside of language, communicating with us through symbol, hunches, dreams – and feelings.

To ignore what you feel is to shut down a big part of your brain, which makes it a lot easier for the world to take advantage of you. You have to rely on what other people tell you is true. You take what they say at face value, since you have no way of sensing what’s going on beneath their words.

This is what it means to be gullible.

Recently I read a book called THE VIRGIN’S PROMISE, which looked at the female archetypal equivalent of Joseph Campbell’s The Hero’s Journey. (Keep in mind that both the ‘virgin’ and the ‘hero’ can be of either sex.) The Virgin’s quest is to resist the urge to conform to the values and standards set by others that conflict with her true self:

The Virgin takes on the task of claiming her personal authority, even against the wishes of others. A big part of her story therefore is how she is viewed by society. Initially she is a valued commodity for being pure, untouched, good, kind, nice, compliant, agreeable, or helpful. She carries the hope for continuation of the virtues of a society. Through her journey she learns to redefine her values and bring her true self into being.

Because she is the “continuation of the virtues of a society”, by redefining those virtues she works to redefine society itself. She asserts herself against the status quo. She becomes a cultural activist. Instead of living out the life that others have handed to her, and would dictate, she creates it by connecting with her true self and finding effective ways to manifest that self in the world. And since truth has a way of resonating with others, her actions ripple outward to alter the world around her.

Instead of trimming and chopping and editing her personality to fit herself to her environment, she forces the environment to fit itself to her.

There is always some kind of price for this. A quest would not be a quest if there weren’t any dragons to slay (which is a slightly more poetic way of saying hey, if it was easy, everybody would do it).

When you become your own rebellion, you establish psychological independence.

Going with your head makes it arbitrary, Twyla writes. That’s because our conscious mind is the ultimate spin doctor. It deals in language and narrative. Language is not reality, but our best attempt to explain reality. We can edit it any way we want in order to rationalize or justify ourselves (otherwise known as “confirmation bias”). We put a certain spin on things. Or we allow other people to spin them for us, and absorb those distortions as truths.

But when you go deeper inside yourself, you move beyond words. Your body has its own language. It’s interesting that when we refer to a person’s authenticity or sincerity, we talk about who they are in their heart or at their core: words that locate the ‘self’ in the body. You may spin a decision however you want, but it either feels good — or not. It makes you feel light – or the opposite. It might even make you feel ill.

But it is what it is, and it can’t be argued with. Your truth is truth. You can move toward it, or let your head lead you away. But you can’t change its essential message — or the fact that it knows what you need better than you do (especially when what you need isn’t exactly what you want. )

Twyla chose the hard, uncertain life of a dancer. It was not the rational choice to make. It’s hell on the body, and poorly paid, and a difficult art to preserve (if the dancer is the dance, then the dance disappears with the dancer). I admire her for her discipline – dancers are the most disciplined people I know – and her sense of self that manifested at such a young age.

And now, when change is happening so rapidly in our world, when the old models no longer work and we’re forced to improvise new ones, it’s more essential than ever that we take the time to turn inward. We need to think and feel our way forward. Otherwise we’ll be lost.

I suspect that becoming your own rebellion isn’t something that happens only once. It’s a choice you make every time your quest offers up another dragon. You can always run away. Except when you know you’re on your true path, your only real option is to slay it.

Which is why you’ll have no regrets.

If you liked this post, please share. I’d really appreciate it. Plus, you know, good karma.

the art of letting your freak flag fly

2012-01-10T23:36:07Z

White collar conservative flashin’ down the street, pointing that plastic finger at me. They all assume my kind will drop and die, but I’m gonna wave my freak flag high. — Jimi Hendrix

I have multiple small male children, which means I do a lot of Lego (a pox on those Lego pieces that get lost and screw up the design until you find them three days later when you step on them barefoot). If I go to my laptop after a lengthy Lego session, something strange tends to happen: the keys on the keyboard feel oddly Lego-like. With each touch-tap my brain ‘hears’ and ‘feels’ a Lego snapping into place.

So I could relate when I read about something called The Tetris Effect (even though I don’t play Tetris). From a book called THE HAPPINESS ADVANTAGE:

Tetris is a simple game in which four kinds of shapes fall from the top of the screen, and the player can move or rotate them until they hit bottom. When they create an unbroken line across the screen, the line disappears. The point of the game is to manipulate the falling shapes to create as many unbroken lines as possible.

…In a study at Harvard Medical School’s Department of Psychiatry, researchers paid 27 people to play Tetris for multiple hours a day, three days in a row….

For days after the study, some participants literally couldn’t stop dreaming about shapes falling from the sky. Others couldn’t stop seeing these shapes everywhere, even in their waking hours. Quite simply, they couldn’t stop seeing their world as being made up of sequences of Tetris blocks.

It’s like the bright spots of light you need to blink away after a camera pops off in your face, or the surreal feeling you sometimes get when you walk out of a movie theatre. In this case it’s a cognitive pattern that caused these players to see Tetris shapes everywhere they looked. Playing Tetris had changed the wiring of their brain, laying down new neural pathways that distorted the way they looked at life.

That’s the way it is with our brains: They very easily get stuck in patterns of viewing the world, some more beneficial than others…the Tetris Effect…is a metaphor for the way our brains dictate the way we see the world around us.

Gratitude journals, no matter how corny and Oprah-esque you find them, can be surprisingly effective because of their own version of the Tetris Effect. When you routinely scan your days for things that you are grateful for, things that make you feel good, you retrain your brain to start picking up on the positive while letting the negative fade into the background.

When you write fiction, you learn to pay attention to the details of your scene. As you develop your craft, you learn to be selective, editing out everything except a few well-chosen details you then present to the reader in order to construct a very specific (if non-existent) reality. Details are small things, but every one of them contributes to a larger whole that makes up the vision, the worldview, expressed through the experience of story.

Your brain is the author of your own, ongoing life narrative. It chooses what it considers the ‘relevant’ details to bring to your attention – according to the patterns in which it has been trained — while the bulk of incoming stimuli gets edited out from your waking consciousness. Those details form the ‘reality’ that you navigate everyday, as well as how you interpret it: if the glass is half-full or half-empty.

There’s a lot of talking and blogging about how in this day and age it’s important to Be Remarkable. We have entered The Creativity Age: what matters now is whatever can’t be automated, outsourced, or copied by your competitors. Your ability to succeed is tied to your ability to reach people emotionally as well as intellectually, to enlarge their perspective or put an unexpected twist on it, to be relevant, interesting and original. Otherwise you’re just another “me too” brand or product or blog, another unread manuscript in the endless Internet slush pile.

For the most part, we don’t grow up learning how to Be Remarkable, and the fact that we will take various tests in order to learn what our strengths are indicates that neither do we grow up learning ourselves the way that we probably should. That whole question of ‘who am I?’ gets shuffled behind other pesky questions like ‘How will I make rent’ or ‘will we be graded on this’ or ‘will I get laid tonight’ or even ‘are you going to eat that, and if not, can I have it?”

We get trapped in patterns of thinking, including the way we’ve learned to perceive the different aspects of ourselves. We learn what is wrong with us – or rather, what other people perceive as wrong with us. Those external voices get internalized and become the inner voices that we carry around with us until we decide (if we decide) to finally stop listening to them.

What we often don’t recognize is that it’s the things that we get criticized for, that get declared as the ‘weaknesses’ that we must fix and fix and fix (until we fail, give up and watch American Idol), that hold the key to our potential Remarkableness. In our weaknesses lie our strengths (and vice versa). If our brains can only learn to perceive them that way.

“As young people,” writes Parker Palmer,

“we are surrounded by expectations that may have little to do with who we really are, expectations held by people who are not trying to discern our selfhood but to fit us into slots. In families, schools, workplaces, and religious communities, we are trained away from true self toward images of acceptability…our original shape is deformed beyond recognition; and we ourselves, driven by fear, too often betray true self to gain the approval of others.”

From kindergarten on, I’ve always been a freakish reader. I vaulted from picture books to Agatha Christie (my favorite book as a first grader was TEN LITTLE INDIANS) and my parents, thank their souls, left me alone to read as much as I wanted, whatever I wanted.

Teachers, however, were forever trying to shoo me outside during recess and lunch hour to Play and Be Social. I didn’t want to Be Social. I wanted to read. And then, later, I wanted to write.

When I was a 17 year old exchange student in a small country town in Australia, my host parents expressed concern that I was spending summer afternoons holed up in my back bedroom with a stack of library books. They fretted that I was an isolate, anti-social, a teenage recluse. They thought I should get out of the house and Be Social. The father advised me to read less (and only nonfiction, because then I would “learn something”). I nodded and smiled and ignored them. They didn’t know what to do with me. (When I finally did start partying with some older kids, and breaking curfew, I’m sure they were relieved: “Thank the Lord, she’s almost sort of relatively normal!”)

I’ve always been freakishly disorganized and absent-minded (“Justine,” one boyfriend asked me during college when I was looking for whatever it was that I’d inevitably misplaced, “how do you get through daily life?” I found it an excellent question). When I was a child, kids teased me because I cried too easily (until I trained myself not to) and because I would sometimes, as they put it, “spazz out” (until I trained myself not to do that, either). I used too many big words and thought too much. I was too intense, given to stalking dramatically out of rooms or hurling my putter when I lost at miniature golf. Later, through my late teens and early twenties, I was too serious, too cerebral (although one guy told me that I smiled too much). Boyfriends who were in taekwondo with me or majoring in English lit with me said I was too competitive. Recently, during a somewhat drunken conversation in a bar in San Francisco, a well-intentioned friend told me that in the time she’s known me I’ve been too melancholy, too much the “tormented writer”.

We’re allowed to be some things, so long as we’re not too much of anything. We prune ourselves back and rein ourselves in, in order to fit in and be normal. And for women, ‘normal’ often translates into effacing ourselves; we worry that if we speak, we’ll be too obnoxious or offensive; if we attend to our own needs instead of those of others, we’ll be too selfish. Someone told me that the TEDXWomen conference came into being because of all the women who were turning down invitations to be guest speakers at the original TED. They would defer instead to some man they claimed “knew more” or “was better qualified” to speak on that topic. (Note to all women everywhere: PLEASE STOP DOING THIS.)

And we do this – chip away at our too-ness, become lesser quieter versions of ourselves — because we think that if we follow the rules and fit in, if we can somehow fix ourselves, we’ll become balanced and well-rounded. We’ll survive and thrive, be loved, find success or, at the very least, some degree of security.

We’re kind of deluded that way.

Irony is – today – that the safety found in numbers, in being average and ordinary, is no longer so safe or secure. Management guru Tom Peters argues that “The White Collar Revolution will wipe out indistinct workers and reward the daylights out of those with True Distinction.”

By True Distinction, he means those who are too much of something, or do too much of something. Who go to an extreme. Who are decidedly not the norm.

Who are, in some way, freaks.

But as David J Rendall points out in his book THE FREAK FACTOR, the good news is: we’re all freaks. We just need to reclaim those parts of ourselves that we’ve been hiding away out of shame or embarrassment – for being too this or too that – so we can look at them with a retrained eye, recognize our strengths and build on them, and become even more of what we are already too much of.

My weaknesses have had a funny way of turning into my strengths. When I took this Strengths Finder test,it identified my top strength as Input:

Driven by your talents, you have been described as someone who reads a lot. You probably carry reading material with you just in case you have to wait in line, eat alone, or sit beside a stranger. Because the printed word feeds your mind, you frequently generate original plans, programs, designs, or activities. Chances are good that you link your passion for reading to your work. Your definition of “recreational reading” probably differs from that of many people. By nature, you continually expand your sphere of knowledge by reading…Like world travelers, you pick up a variety of souvenirs from your reading, such as facts, data, characters, plots, insights, or tips.

By this point in my life, Input has been good to me. I can’t complain about the benefits of my extreme reading, even if, sometimes, people in my life complain that I’m too preoccupied.

‘Cried too much’ and ‘oversensitive’ became empathic and compassionate, two of the traits I value most about my character.

‘Isolated’ and ‘anti-social’ became independent enough to leave my hometown and see the world. I was unafraid of being the new kid, or of being alone in a foreign city where I didn’t speak the language. I could always learn what I needed to know from a book – and you’re never lonely when you’re reading a good book.

My episodes of ‘spazzing out’ as a child turned into what I like to think of as a decent sense of humor: an appreciation of the absurd, the perverse, and the ridiculous.

Too ‘intense’? I prefer passionate and spirited. Too ‘dramatic’? I have an active imagination that is great for writing fiction. Also for performing. Too ‘cerebral’? Oh please. ‘Melancholy?’ I’m in touch with a range of emotions and the hardwon wisdom they have brought me. Yes, I am ambitious and competitive: would these be bad things in a man? I can be selfish, rebellious and bad – I have what a good friend once described as “a defiant fuck-you spirit” — and I’ve become grateful for that, otherwise certain life events would have trampled me underfoot.

‘Disorganized’ and ‘absent-minded’? Well, yes, but I’ve learned to work around that, realizing that it comes as part of the package of my creative brain. I find myself moving toward minimalism and sustainability. As minimalist blogger Joshua Becker recently tweeted, “It’s better to own less than to organize more.” I know enough about myself to stay away from administrative, detail-oriented work; if I ever show up as your personal assistant, you can take it as a sign that the apocalypse is upon us. You can also fire me.

I’m not one of those people to go on about how we are all perfect just the way we are.

I think we are gloriously and perfectly imperfect.

I think there is beauty, wisdom, strength and vulnerability in our secret fucked-up selves.

But so often the smart thing is not to try to change our natures, but our situation, including relationships that prove toxic to us; we’re like plants that differ wildly in their needs for water, light, shadow, soil. It’s our job to seek out the conditions we require in order to grow, to blossom, to bloom – hopefully not into the kind of plant that eats people like in LITTLE SHOP OF HORRORS (remember the movie? Steve Martin was great in it).

And what I’ve learned is that if I can change the way I perceive myself, if I can recognize my strengths and weaknesses as flipsides of each other and appreciate them as innate to the experience of being, simply, me; if I can cultivate and celebrate the freak in me, and expect others to do the same (and if they don’t or won’t, avoid them), then I have to turn that same, retrained gaze on those around me.

I can’t be attracted to certain people for certain reasons and then wish that they were, well…different.

It’s perhaps one of the biggest tragedies of our nature that we take the people we love and attempt to change them into who we think they should be…because it makes life easier for us, because it suits our agenda, because it makes us feel more comfortable.

If we could only play Tetris in a different sense, if we could only catch the flaws – in ourselves and others – as they fall from the sky, rotate and maneuver them until they form one unbroken line across the screen.

And then disappear.

If you like this post, please be a total stud and share it. I’d appreciate it. Thank you.

letter to a young emerging creative who thinks she wants to blog (gods help her)

2012-01-08T00:46:14Z

Anything with a low barrier of entry will let in a lot of crap. This is just the natural order of things (of social media, of blogging). But this only makes it more important – not less – to strive for excellence, relevance and meaning.

You need to have an intention. ‘Developing a readership by attracting strangers and turning them into Fans and maybe True Fans’ is a very different kind of intention from ‘making money online’ or ‘putting up a blog so my agent/editor/writing instructor will get the f*ck off my back’.

I was talking with a young writer who wanted to start building her online platform and said she needed “to get on Tumblr.”

“Why Tumblr?” I said.

She kind of shrugged and said something about how Tumblr is hot and all the cool kids are doing it.

“And if all the cool kids were to jump off a bridge….”

I didn’t really say that, because that would be annoying. But I did mention how Tumblr is great for short posts with lots of visuals, is that what she wanted to do?

She wasn’t sure what she wanted to do. I told her to go online and explore different blogs and websites and see what she resonated with, what she could see herself doing in a way that would maintain her interest over a long period of time.

If you can form a very…clear…image in your head of what you want your online presence to ultimately look like, be like, feel like, then you have something specific to move toward.

You have a destination.

You have a journey.

You don’t have to reinvent the wheel. You can find someone online who inspires you. When I became seriously interested in blogging, it was the writer-entrepreneurs who intrigued and excited me: Chris Guillebeau, Danielle LaPorte, Jonathan Fields, Joanna Penn. I also fell in love with Kelly Diels’ defiantly personal tone in a world of ‘authority blogging’ (which is also, interestingly enough, predominantly male).

You also don’t have to do what other people tell you to. In fact, it’s probably better if you don’t. Soak up all that online advice, keep what serves you and reject what doesn’t and then experiment, experiment, experiment. Ultimately what works best for you will be that thing, that ‘you-ness’, that might not work at all for anybody else and which nobody else would have known to teach you.

At some point you will revise your intention to focus less on yourself and more on your readers. You will realize that it’s about them. You will stop asking yourself, “How do I get more people to read me?” and start asking instead, “How do I create value for other people? How can I help? What can I give?” This is when your traffic will slowly but steadily grow.

But don’t get too hung up over the whole traffic thing. Blogging has a learning curve, and you need that time in the beginning when no one is reading you (except maybe your mom – hi Mom!) to figure out not only what the hell you’re doing, but where you want to take this.

What your purpose is. Your Big Meaning.

An effective social media presence does not require you to get down and dirty with the details of your life. (Here’s the amazing thing: we don’t care!)

You are not required to share what you had with breakfast, or what new exciting sexual positions you tried with your partner(s) while swinging from the chandelier the other night –

and even if you do want to share, the question is, are those personal details relevant in any way to whatever it is that you’re hoping to accomplish?

Which comes back to intention.

I believe that the most powerful blogs are fueled by an underlying mission that goes beyond ‘promote my stuff’ and it is this mission, this Big Meaning, that shapes your content and your direction and gives your blog an identity.

The standard advice in the blogging world is to find your niche: that particular subject in which you can establish expertise that will draw in new readers who want to know what you know. A niche can be a good place to start when you’re still learning who you are as a blogger; it’s easier to talk about your blog to people when you can tell them what kind of blog it is (“a creativity blog”); and one way to attract an audience is to answer their questions and solve their problems. But as a creative, you’re doing much more than selling solutions to problems – which is ultimately what niche blogging is about – you’re also engaging your people with the voice and worldview that shapes your creative work. In the end, you probably won’t want to be limited to ‘a niche’.

Superstar blogger Leo Babauta talks about this in a post encouraging you to bundle together several topics you are passionate about, so long as you can find an ‘angle’ on them that differentiates you from everybody else.

I think that angle should be your Big Meaning, your Ultimate Why – and by that, I mean the reason why you do that voodoo that you do. The big life question that you’re compelled to explore. The wound that you seek to heal. The quest, the mission, the journey you’re on that will ultimately make the world a better place – while inviting other people to be a part of it.

This goes beyond blogging – it goes right to your art, your life, your identity. It’s also not something you decide on so much as discover – your ‘why’ rises of its own accord, up from the core through all the layers of thinking and creating until you can finally feel what you’re all about.

And by feel, I mean exactly that – it’s a sensation, a resonance, a fullness. It lights you up. That’s because – as Simon Sinek puts it in his great book START WITH WHY – your ‘why’ taps directly into the part of your brain, the limbic part, that is nonverbal, emotional, and busily influencing all the decisions your neocortex thinks it makes through ‘logic’ alone.

(As Simon puts it, we ‘like’ things out of our neocortex. We not only like them, we can explain why we like them. But we ‘love’ things out of our limbic system, which means we can never articulate exactly why we ‘love’ something or someone; the feeling lives in a place beyond language. We can use words to gesture toward it, but that’s it and that’s all. So if you can’t understand why your best friend is in love with that crazy dude, don’t worry, she can’t either.)

Are you obligated, as a creative, to do any of this? Of course not.

But this is what I believe: we live in a world that is now so interconnected that we can no longer afford to blindly buy into this ‘individualist’ ethos that would have each and every one of us standing alone, working and creating alone. As it turns out, that’s not how real creative insight actually happens.

Every creative has his or her natural audience – and by that I mean her right audience, who values her for what she is, who stimulates her and enables her to flourish. (Your wrong audience, on the other hand, could trap you, suffocate you, encourage you into all kinds of artistically compromising positions).

There is a point where your needs and desires intersect with your right audience’s needs and desires, so that you are your audience and your audience is you.

Which means, if you are a writer, you don’t have to wonder if you are writing for your audience or for yourself; you are writing for both.

Blogging becomes an extension of that.

You use your voice and your craft to serve your audience; and through serving them, you serve yourself. And it’s not just because your right audience will do the real work of promoting you to others through the all-powerful word-of-mouth; it’s because of how you learn and grow in this mysterious, rather magical space that you and your audience co-create online. And it’s the influence and creativity and levels of insight that you and your audience can unleash together that ripple out along all the lines that connect us and tilt us toward better – or worse.

The real power of social media is not about the (often misleading) number of fans and followers you can brag about, but the potential global impact that you as a cultural creative can have through your work and your platform and the ‘why’ that fuels both. (Sales of your work happen as a side benefit.)

It doesn’t happen overnight – it takes, literally, years – but there will be new voices rising with something real to say (and different platforms through which to say it).

You can settle for just trying to promote your work. Or you can turn into your corner and scoff about those talentless hacks who tweet what they had for breakfast and Lord knows what other nonsense (“don’t they have lives???”). Or you can maybe look above these tired, stale, outdated notions of what it means to market online to see something new emerging, something deep and long-lasting and powerful, and decide that you want to be a part of it.

There are no wrong answers, only personal preferences. Whatever yours are or may be, I wish you the best.

If you like this article – or this blog – please share. I’d appreciate it.

how to flunk social media + lose me as a potential True Fan (but you know I love you)

2011-12-25T02:11:23Z

The other day I finished reading the kind of novel you develop a relationship with: the characters move off the page to take up residence in your head. Their reality runs like a shadowy river alongside your own, waiting for you to step back into it.

When it was over, I leaped online to check out the author. For the most part, at least in my experience, literary writers tend to eye the social media platforms as if they’re instruments of sexual bondage: I’m supposed to do what, exactly? Surely you’re joking. What exactly is that, anyway?

gratuitious sexual bondage photo

Still, I was hoping for a blog. I wanted to prolong the experience of the novel by remaining in contact with the author’s voice. At the same time, I was curious about the author. More than curious: I felt a respect and readerly affection for her.

I had touched her mind.

I had walked through her imagination.

I wanted to show up at her virtual doorstep with the equivalent of a bouquet of flowers to say thank you and let her know how much her novel meant to me. I was ready to evangelize her to the world – or at least my small corner of it.

reading is awesome

The website was static, uninteresting: I didn’t care about any of the promotional stuff, I was looking for a blog, which there wasn’t. The Facebook page and tweetstream were also broadcasting and promotional. I was invited to leave a message – a “polite” message, as if I was in danger of being rude – but the flush of my enthusiasm had faded and I no longer saw the point. So I clicked away.

I think about this now, because it reflects the changing nature of the artist-audience relationship. I bring different expectations to that relationship than I would have, say, five years ago, when of course the author would have remained this remote, mysterious figure in the distance, giving me a well-meaning wave through her book readings and interviews.

Now, here I was, ready to be not just a reader or an admirer but a True Fan, ready to spread the word.

And feeling denied.

What had I been expecting, exactly?

Interactivity. Engagement.

Not with me, since she had no idea who I was, and although I have many flaws I am not, at least to my knowledge, psychotic; but with others, as if she was holding court in the center of a café and I had wandered in to join the crowd. It was like she had spurned the café entirely – I’m supposed to do that? — and so I ordered my mocha latte and took my Android tablet from my bag and started on another book, another author, hoping to fall in love again, knowing that, sooner or later, I would.

As a reader of literary fiction, I’m probably not the norm: although I do indeed love the smell of a physical book, the flick of the pages, the creak of the spine, the heft of the thing in my hands, I do most of my reading on my devices (pick one: my smartphone, my tablet, my Kindle Fire). I’m a social media enthusiast, live on the edge of the tech industry and spend a lot of time online, which might be why I consider this to be a good and exciting time to be a writer. (Since I became a Kindle convert a couple of years ago, I buy and read even more books, not less – and, judging from the data, this is typical.)

But – dare I say – the future of reading looks like me (as William Gibson so succinctly put it, the future is already here, it’s just unevenly distributed). And as my reading habits adjusted to the new technology, as I absorbed the values and customs of social media culture (transparency, authenticity, connectedness), I became one of those people formerly known as your audience.

It’s no longer enough to seduce me with a good book.

My world is crowded, noisy, and moves at lightning speed.

In order to keep me as a longterm reader, you need to engage me, or in the time between your last work and your next work some other charismatic wave will have borne me away. It’s the difference between checking out your next book and seeing if it appeals to me – and buying it immediately, no matter what the content, and talking about you to my friends, and on my blog and Facebook and Google+ and whatever else I happen to be using at the time.

Let me be clear: I don’t expect or demand one-on-one communication. I am happy to remain faceless and nameless to you. But the online world is exactly that – a world — full-bodied and dazzling and multi-dimensional — and it’s transformed my relationship to you (or any writer) into a place that I would like to find cool and interesting enough to visit. Often.

In his book SMART WORLD: Breakthrough Creativity and the New Science of Ideas, Richard Ogle talks about “idea-spaces” and “the extended mind”. Basically, in order to navigate a complex and sophisticated world with as a little mental effort as possible, we offload our intelligence into the spaces around us through our myths, customs, technology, business models, codes of behavior. Our knowledge, our sets of ideas, live outside us (and breakthrough creativity happens when you can look across different idea-spaces, recognize emerging patterns and find new ways to fit them together).

What I wanted to find wasn’t standard self-promotion….but the author’s own personal idea-space, where she had offloaded enough of her mind and voice and personality (through blog posts and ongoing conversations) to invite me in relationship with her brand.

And yes, this requires extra, unpaid work on the part of any writer. Then again, writers always had to promote their stuff in one way or another. We also have to remember the definition of ‘marketing’ (taken from marketing genius and online master Marie Forleo):

…an emotional connection with the people whom you’re meant to serve.

(Did handing out bookplates and bookmarks and badgering people to come to your book signings create that ‘emotional’ connection? At least in the old world, there was the illusion that that kind of marketing actually worked.)

You serve people – not all people but your people, your right people, your tribe – through creating value for them. And, increasingly, what that ‘value’ looks like is a sense of community: individuals gathered round that offloaded version of you holding court in the center of your thoughtfully constructed idea-space. You, and your work, become a social object that gives like-minded souls a reason, or an excuse, to come together. You’re no longer simply ‘marketing’; you’re creating a little values culture.

Thing is, when different forces meet up with each other – when the distance drops away between artist and audience – chemistry ensues and transformation happens. Nothing brings us face-to-face with ourselves the way a relationship does, or exposes us to new ideas, or reshapes the ideas we may currently hold. A blog becomes more than a blog: a site of discovery, of creative and intellectual collaboration. It’s a living document, forever evolving, as readers shift in and out, and create value for themselves and for you through comments and sharing.

There’s you, and your audience, and then this thing, this entity, this energetic space, created when you come together. Jerry Garcia attributed the success of his band The Grateful Dead to the magic that happened at live performances when the Deadhead community fed the band with their energy. Since the band never played the same show twice — and believed in experimentation and innovation — they created a new show each time with the audience, responding to the audience even as the audience was responding to them. “Everybody should be in the band,” Garcia enthused. “And when that’s happening, it’s really something special. It’s an amazing thing.”

Writes Barry Barnes:

When you erase the distinction between band and audience, between producer and consumer, wonderful things can happen. Ken Kesey once explained the difference between the Dead and other bands: “The Doors were playing at you. John Fogarty was singing at you,” he said. Garcia, on the other hand, “was not playing [at the audience]. He was playing with them,” and often members of that audience would realize, “He’s not only moving my mind. My mind is moving him!”

I’m not saying that you should let your readers dictate your plot choices, or that you should compromise your vision or pander to your people (they’re too smart for that, and will abandon you in droves). But I’m reminded of a recent post in which successful entrepreneur/author Jonathan Fields discusses his decision to blog less frequently so he can create greater depth and quality, more value, with each post. “I write to make a difference,” he says, and refers to the “sweet spot between your authentic genius zone and the deeper needs of your community.” As an entrepreneur, Fields knows what online marketing is – and isn’t.

It’s not a billboard to let your readers know how great and accomplished you are.

It’s writing to make a difference.

It’s a sweetspot. It’s an idea-space. It’s a relationship with your readers…that can move your mind.

That is, if you’re willing to let it.

7 awesome reasons to kill your inner ‘nice girl’ (or maybe just send her to Cleveland*)

2011-12-13T16:17:14Z

“Killing the angel in the house was part of the occupation of the woman writer.” — Virginia Woolf

I give you seven awesome reasons to kill your inner nice girl.

(Or maybe just send her to Cleveland or something.)

You get to be kind.

As my friend Scott Hoffman told me, “Nice is not the same as kind.” (He’s a literary agent, so he should know.)

It’s not the same as civility either. We are polite out of consideration for others. It is an act that we perform. Two people who despise each other can still make the decision to be civil to each other, while knowing full well that each holds the other in unqualified contempt.

Niceness also isn’t a trait – nobody gets described as ‘nice-hearted’ – so much as a superficial layer of behavior. But unlike civility or politeness, niceness pretends to have some depth to it, masquerading as the person’s actual thoughts, feelings, or character. It often hides a self-serving agenda (like kissing up to your boss in order to keep your job; or wanting to please everybody in order to feel loved, accepted and safe; or trying to charm someone into random meaningless sex**.)

‘Nice’ can be a symptom of feeling powerless; people can’t say what they truly mean or ask for what they really want, so they maneuver and manipulate to get it. Which is probably why we sometimes associate ‘nice’ with ‘spineless’. (Also with ‘resentful’ and ‘passive-aggressive’.)

Kindness, on the other hand, can require great courage.

You get to be authentic.

We all learn how to perform ourselves – online or offline – but the people we admire are the people who feel ‘real’ to us. Their persona is an honest expression of their personality (instead of a distortion or a disguise).

As Eckhart Tolle puts it:

“[They] function from the deeper core of their being – those who do not attempt to appear more than they are, but as simply themselves, stand out as remarkable, and are the only ones who truly make a difference in the world…Their mere presence, simple, natural and unassuming, has a transformational effect on whomever they come into contact with.”

You get to stand for something.

You can’t have your own strong point-of-view when you’re too busy accommodating every other point-of-view out there, or when you’re afraid of offending people or rocking a boat (any boat).

We don’t see things as they are; we see them as we are. Your point of view is who you truly are. (It’s also how you differentiate yourself.) To deny people that is to deny them – yourself – the chance to get to know you – as well as robbing yourself of the chance to get known.

Standing for something means that you will piss some people off. They won’t like you. That’s okay. (That helps to bond together the people who do like you.) It’s much more liberating to live your life according to your values. Not to mention that when you do that, you attract people who stand for the same things that you do. They might even be inspired by you. And that is super cool.

You get to live off your ragged edge.

The ragged edge is the edge of your comfort zone. It’s the jumping-off point on your way to mastery. It’s where real growth begins.

Growth is a messy process, filled with events that some people label ‘mistakes and failures’ and others regard simply as ‘data’. (It’s the latter types that tend to be more successful.)

People who are overly invested in the opinions of others can be perfectionists. They don’t want to risk falling on their face (or ass). They think appearing perfect = being loved.

(The ironic thing is, people as a general rule tend not to like ‘perfect’ individuals. We’re quick to sense that that kind of perfection is bullshit.)

But if you don’t let yourself rise to your level of incompetence, you’ll never get the chance to explore, discover …and move on to something greater.

You get to love up your inner voice.

Your inner voice is who you are at core. It knows what you need – even if what you need isn’t necessarily what you want – and points the way to your ultimate well-being and self-actualization.

If, that is, it hasn’t been drowned out by all the voices of all the individuals you’re so busy trying to please.

(And if it has, don’t worry. That voice isn’t going anywhere. You just need to get yourself to a still and quiet place so you can tune back into it.

Also, a beer might be helpful.)

You get to be the hero of your own freaking life.

The whole point and purpose of a ‘nice’ girl is to support somebody else — usually male — in his life quest for accomplishment, purpose and epic meaning. As Carolyn Heilbrun observes in WRITING A WOMAN’S LIFE, throughout history women have been expected to live out ‘marriage plots’ while men live out ‘quest plots’. Although obviously this is changing – and has been changing for decades – there’s still an expectation embedded in the culture, often unspoken and barely registered, that at some point the woman will put her dreams and ambitions in check and follow her man to wherever his quest takes them. The woman’s own quest ended with marriage and children – the rest is details.

Clearly, for those of us who are maybe not such domestic goddesses, who may want marriage and children and/or something else, it doesn’t have to be this way. But to take full control of your destiny and assert the importance of your own needs is to risk being called ‘selfish’, and a nice girl doesn’t do that sort of thing.

You get to have a voice.

And when you tell your truth, you give other people permission to tell their truth. In the end, we’re never as alone as we think.

* I have absolutely nothing against Cleveland.

** which might not be a bad thing, depending.

how the power of free can help you become a raging success (just ask the Grateful Dead)

2011-12-09T03:24:33Z

Why should you bust your ass on your creative content and give it away, online, for free?

How is this supposed to help you?

And it can’t be mediocre stuff, either.

It has to be remarkable, engaging, useful, distinctive…or else no one will care.

Part of becoming a powerful artist involves being a relevant artist.

Consistent blogging gives ideas life and energy as it tosses them to you, dear reader, and you bounce them around and back to the blogger.

The blogger can lean into what works, what resonates, and discard or reshape what doesn’t.

I’m not saying that, as a blogger, you learn to pander — which doesn’t work all that well anyway, since people respond to authenticity (tricky to define, an easy word to overuse, but we know it when we see it, or at least when we don’t).

I’m also not saying that you learn to compromise your vision to fit your (inaccurate) sense of the (ever-shifting) creative marketplace. But ideas evolve through expression and social interaction, and that growth weaves through your creative work.

Creative work requires isolation, but creative insight develops when you’re in the world, observing and asking questions and testing your aforementioned ideas and exploring stuff and meeting cool people and taking risks and learning cool shit.

Blogging is a way to be in the world that wouldn’t be possible otherwise.

Even if the benefits stopped there, I would wonder why more writers in particular, especially literary writers, don’t take advantage of this.

“But why should I write,” they grumble, “for free?”

Which brings me round to my opening question.

John Perry Barlow* nails it in his introduction to the book EVERYTHING I KNOW ABOUT BUSINESS I LEARNED FROM THE GRATEFUL DEAD (seriously, how could you not want to read a book with this title)?

The band became a massive success without compromising their values or vision in large part because they gave away their music for free. Or rather: they allowed tapers in the audience. As bootleg tapes of their concerts (free content) circulated among fans, they attracted new fans who paid money to come to their concerts (paid content). And because fans knew from listening to the tapes that Grateful Dead concerts changed from night to night they had incentive to attend as many concerts as possible

endowing us eventually with a following so devoted that we could, for a time, fill any stadium in America.

Barlow makes the point that an information economy is “fundamentally different” from a physical economy. In the latter, scarcity equals value. If we can’t have it, we want it more. It’s why De Beers manipulated the diamond market so that diamonds appeared scarce when they were all over the damn place.

But these rules don’t seem to apply to expression

where there appears to be an equally strong relationship between familiarity and value instead.

The worth of a diamond remains the same whether it’s hidden in your pocket, displayed in public, or dropped into the ocean like in the movie TITANIC (which I always thought a stupid pointless move on the part of the heroine, but whatever).

Barlow continues:

…the world’s greatest song has no value to anyone but me as long as it’s in my head…Only when a lot of people have heard and enjoyed it does it start to accumulate value, and even then not so much for itself but for me as its source. In this, music is more like a service, something that is continuously provided, rather than an object of commerce. The more people who become aware of the quality of that service, the more that can be economically derived from providing real-time access to its provision. Thus, every time we “gave away” a show to the tapers, we increased the value of the music that hadn’t been played yet.

It’s the free content that draws you in to a much larger story the artist is telling.

The unfolding of that story — that sweeping, creative, singular vision expressed over years through an evolving body of work — is a service rather than an object. The more people become aware of “the high quality of that service”, the higher the demand, the higher the perceived value, and the more the artist can charge for access to certain aspects of it (if the artist is inclined in that direction).

Blog posts, in a way, are like songs: little units that have value in and of themselves, fluttering out in all directions, assuming lives of their own –

– if they’re good enough to win attention.

Familiarity builds trust and likeability. There’s a psychology study in which a girl at college shows up for class everyday — and then, in another class, shows up only some of the time. In both cases, she doesn’t speak to anybody, or make eye contact, or linger in any way before fleeing the lecture hall.

But the students who saw her everyday rated her ‘likeability’ much higher than the students who barely saw her at all.

The more you hear a song, the more you tend to like it (at least until you hate it again for being so overplayed).

When the success of your creative work depends largely on subjective elements — appealing to subjective tastes — it makes sense to attract your right people (through the power of your amazing content) — and make your style as familiar as possible — even before you have anything to sell them.

Because this whole question — are people willing to pay for content? — is, in my mind, kind of ridiculous.

Yes! They are!

It just depends on the story you’re telling.

* I met Barlow at a String Cheese Incident concert. It was a highly memorable evening.

cool quotes by badass women

2011-12-06T18:19:26Z

“I’m selfish, impatient and a little insecure. I make mistakes, I am out of control and at times hard to handle. But if you can’t handle me at my worst, then you sure as hell don’t deserve me at my best.”
― Marilyn Monroe

“The most courageous act is still to think for yourself. Aloud.”
– Coco Chanel

“Please give me some good advice in your next letter. I promise not to follow it.”
–Edna St. Vincent Millay

“A voice is a human gift; it should be cherished and used, to utter fully human speech as possible. Powerlessness and silence go together.”

–Margaret Atwood

“One is not born a woman, but becomes one.”

““The writer of originality, unless dead, is always shocking, scandalous; novelty disturbs and repels.”

– Simone de Beauvoir

“The role of a writer is not to say what we all can say, but what we are unable to say.”

“And the day came when the risk to remain tight in a bud was more painful than the risk it took to blossom.”
– Anais Nin

Add one in the comments below.

the art of the creative pause (+ not being Amazon’s bitch)

2011-12-06T03:05:03Z

It’s good to disrupt yourself.

My kids went to their father and I went to Palm Springs and Joshua Tree. I’d forgotten how much I love the desert. I felt drawn to it as a kid – to the New Mexico landscapes featured in Lois Duncan’s YA novels, or Judy Blume’s book TIGER EYES – and it was good to be reminded of that.

Shift your location, shift your perspective. We get attached to ways of thinking. We don’t realize that we need to change the frame.

She ponders how far she is from Coffee Bean.

So I’m writing this novel, and one day I’ll finish, and decide what I’m going to do with it. I read this piece about reasons not to self-publish. It’s an intelligent, well-written article —

– but something keeps nagging me. Something about the old-school frame that’s shaping the writer’s question. It’s a good question. But is it the truly central question?

The problem is no longer getting published, but finding your readership.

Where and how are your right readers going to find you? How to initially catch their interest and make them care when they have a zillion other things to do?

“I don’t want to be Amazon’s bitch,” this writer says: a reason why she seeks a traditional publishing contract for her first literary novel.

I don’t want to be Amazon’s bitch either. But I’ve been through the traditional-publishing thing (on the genre side), and I don’t want to be anyone’s bitch. William Goldman’s famous words come to mind – he was talking about Hollywood, but they still seem appropriate:

Nobody knows anything.

It’s a time, I think, for strategic improvisation. For what business theorist and jazz musician Frank Barrett describes as “fabricating and inventing novel responses without a pre-scripted plan and without certainty of outcomes; discovering the future that [your] action creates as it unfolds.”

It’s the ability not just to plan and act in real time, but to make adjustments, lean into what works and pivot away from what doesn’t.

If you’re locked into a traditional publishing contract for the next couple of years – and god knows what the publishing landscape is going to look like by the end of that (how many generations of e-readers will we have cycled through, advancing not just the technology but our comfort with it, our reliance on it?) – how, exactly, can you stay fluid enough to adapt as you need to?

When you sign that contract, how can you know what rights you need to fight for when the objects of those rights are in the process of…redefining themselves? How do you know that your books are going to be in bookstores when the bookstores themselves keep closing down and going under? What are the other places that might stock your book – drugstores, Target, Wal-Mart, airports? Are they likely to stock your book?

Don’t get me wrong. I think traditional publishers are still a great way to go…especially if you’ve built up a platform on your own, and maybe sold enough self-published novels that demonstrate your healthy, growing readership. You’re less likely to be someone’s bitch if you’ve followed Seth Godin’s advice and created your own media company. You’ve given yourself options (a.k.a. ‘leverage’).

And the interesting thing about finding your audience is that it involves finding yourself.

There’s something to be said for that.

Writers feel such a sense of urgency when it comes to getting published – and that often works to our detriment. We submit manuscripts before they’re ready. Or we do get published, and it turns out to be a mistake. We weren’t yet the writer we were meant to become.

What if we took this time of uncertainty as a chance for a creative pause?

As a time for radical exploration and experimentation? While the publishing industry shakes itself out and the trailblazers forge new pathways and make mistakes — so that the rest of us don’t have to?

As a chance to write whatever the hell we want, embrace mistakes of our own, and learn from them?

To get really fucking good?

In his book BRAND LIKE A ROCK STAR, Steve Jones observes that

There are very few Facebook-style overnight success stories to tell…Every band, and brand, needs that incubation time to refine their craft. Lennon and McCartney needed to figure out how to write songs together. Bob Dylan needed to meet Woody Guthrie and immerse himself in the folk counter-culture of Greenwich Village….

At some point every rock star brand finds that moment of transition when the kindling catches fire and the tiny flame becomes a massive blaze.

Maybe it’s time to improvise your way forward by looping back to learn something you didn’t quite get the first time. Maybe it’s time to change the frame and ask yourself new questions about what a writing career might look like if it played uniquely to your strengths, not just as a writer but a blogger, speaker, online entrepreneur, multimedia producer. Etc.

Or maybe you just want to take some time to make that manuscript a freaking masterpiece.

And when the kindling catches fire, you’ll be ready to blaze.

beauty, sex + power?

2011-12-03T16:59:36Z

I went to an exhibit called BEAUTY CULTURE and saw a documentary by Lauren Greenfield in which a woman said something like, “People think that we’re living in a beauty culture now…but we have always been living in a beauty culture.”

I like to look at beautiful women. I admit it.

I’m hardly alone in this; BEAUTY CULTURE is the most popular exhibit the Annenberg Space for Photography has ever shown. A slowly shuffling line of attendees snaked past the walls of photographs.

“There aren’t any pictures of men,” I pointed out to my boyfriend. Although the exhibit didn’t claim to be about women specifically, it didn’t even pretend to take an interest in beautiful males.

(And it’s interesting that male supermodels make a fraction of the money and get a fraction of the attention that female supermodels do. This can’t be just a ‘male gaze’ thing; if women wanted to look at pictures of beautiful men the way some of us want to read vampire novels, for example, I have a feeling that chiseled males in various stages of seductive undress would be selling us everything from makeup to furniture to luxury vacations to wine to footwear.)

And it struck me that men aren’t celebrated for their sexual power, because in men, power is sexual. Their sexuality is expressed through what they do and who they are…not just what they look like.

Our fascination with gorgeous women is like our fascination with sex: visceral, primal and unlikely to go away anytime soon. I’m not sure I would even want it to. I kind of agree with a woman in a different documentary (also about female beauty) who cheered, “Let’s hear it for the hot young things! Where would we be without them?”

The problem I have is with the disconnect, the distance that our culture tries to put between the fact of ‘beauty’ — and the woman who has it. What you see in photographs is an attempt to isolate that beauty, to freeze one perfect moment brought about by god knows how many hours of makeup and hair and stylists and lighting and so on and so forth, to turn it into a thing that will never change, age, or evolve in any way.

This is the kind of ‘beauty’ that becomes a caricature of itself. It’s got nowhere to go. It’s a definition of being beautiful that, among other things, is embedded in being young, and not even the greatest of beauties can be young forever.

And when I walk around Beverly Hills, I can see them: women in their fifties or sixties, brittle-thin, hair dyed and shellacked in place, their faces stretched and freeze-dried. I saw one of the most famous women in the world come into my gym every now and again, with that same preserved ‘look’ from so many years ago – except, now, drained of all the movement and sensuality that made her so magnetic in the first place.

There is no real sense of personhood in our definition of beauty. Beauty gets abstracted, presented as a set of standards for us to live up to – and those standards change just often enough to keep us off-balance. It’s kind of like a lover who makes us want him all the more because even when you have him, you don’t really have him (or her).

Beauty is static, inanimate and perfect.

Human beings are none of these things.

To meet those standards – to try to meet those standards – we’re encouraged to turn ourselves into objects, distorted versions of youth where our faces used to be.

What the fuck?

We collude in this, we continue to fuel the beauty industry, because on some level we grow up believing that a very singular and narrow definition of beauty will bring us love, and that female sexuality translates to power in the world.

The problem, of course, is that these things aren’t true.

When I was 19 and living on Nantucket Island for two weeks, I noticed how the people around me – including my boyfriend at the time, including the very lovely middle-aged couple we stayed with – spoke with disdain about pretty, supposedly less-than-bright girls. When I asked my female host about this, she seemed surprised. She had to think for a moment: “I guess it’s because things come easy to them. They don’t really have to work for anything.”

From my vantage point now, that’s an interesting statement to think about. What is it, exactly, that comes so easily to pretty women? Love and money? How many clubgirls, aspiring models and actresses would agree with that? I suspect they’d be more likely to resonate with Michelle Pfeiffer’s statement that Beautiful women get used a lot. If people are only interested in you for your looks, then you’re not a person, you’re a commodity; and you get discarded.

We complain about people who need too much attention, but the truth is that we all require some degree of it: it’s as if some primitive part of the brain equates it with love and survival.

But if the rest of us don’t feel that you’ve properly ‘earned’ it, we resent you for it. And we’re so quick to resent girls and women. We make snide remarks behind their backs (and sometimes to their faces). We massacre them in online forums. This girl was assaulted in a public place – by other girls – for posting provocative, artistic photographs of her exceptionally attractive self online.

And this is the strange thing about female beauty: if, by some freak of genetics, you actually have it, you’re not supposed to admit to knowing you have it (and if this can’t be helped, because denying your beauty would make you seem like an imbecile – like with supermodels — then you need to stress what an ugly duckling you were as a child). You’re not supposed to knowingly use your looks to get attention (like the girl above) —-because then you’re a slut.

You’re also not taken seriously.

There seems to be an unspoken law in this culture that in order to be a powerful woman….you should be asexual. Your own sexuality can undercut you; it can be used against you. Two of the most powerful, brilliant, strategic and political women in history – Cleopatra and Catherine the Great – are remembered, respectively, for being a wanton manipulative seductress, and for having sex with a horse: not because these things are true, but because of the rumors that their enemies carefully and artfully spread about them after they died (it’s hard to defend yourself when you’re dead).

If this is power, it’s a very strange form of it.

I fantasize about a culture that celebrates women not (just) for being exotic objects of beauty, but for being sensual.

Sensuality, to me, is about who you are as a person, how you move and laugh and talk and think and style yourself and relate to other people. It’s the fullness of your life. It’s your charisma and your character.

Prettiness fades, but sensuality evolves.

Sensuality is living and organic; it’s not a thing, but an energy.

Sensuality can’t be disconnected from a woman’s personhood the way beauty can, because sensuality is expressed through her personhood. Which is why, ultimately, sensuality fascinates in a way that beauty does not. The greatest courtesans in history weren’t necessarily beautiful, or even young – but they knew how to evoke the senses, how to provoke and dazzle and charm. They did it, of course, to survive; they had to capture, and hold, the imagination of their patrons.

What if we simply did that for ourselves?

What if, instead of being hot, we encouraged girls to be fascinating?

What if we gave girls attention and recognition simply for being their own lovely, creative, complicated selves? What if we celebrated them for doing well in school, for chasing and achieving professional success, financial independence? What if girls looked out at the culture and saw women celebrated not just as models and actresses and the reality TV stars that we love to hate, but teachers and nurses and doctors and engineers and investment bankers and mothers (including single mothers) and artists and orchestra conductors and politicians and venture capitalists and entrepreneurs? What if we expected and demanded of them to develop their minds and talents along with their wardrobes?

What if we didn’t punish them for seeking attention, but offered them lots of legitimate, constructive ways to do so?

We give all of this lip service, of course.

But what if we actually meant it?

What is beautifulsexypowerful to you??