Are You Writing Your Writing?

Ocean, mirrors, fire hoses…how many metaphors can I pack into one post?

A long time ago, in an undergraduate fiction writing workshop, a female student {surprisingly, not me} raised her hand and asked the instructor:

“The stuff I write doesn’t feel like me. It’s like I look at my manuscript and say, who wrote that? I feel like I’m writing in…I don’t know…someone else’s voice.”

This was what our instructor, Stephanie Grant, had to say:

“Maybe you’re not writing your writing yet. You’re just writing writing.”

Cryptic?

Are you writing your writing, or are you writing writing?

My friend Laura Espinosa at Cottage Copy recently published a post about the issue of voice in blogging. She talks about what happens when you lose your blogging voice — when you drown it in a sea of shoulds — and how the pull of your authentic voice acts like a strong current, or a buoy, forcing you toward your own shore — or out to your own sea — or at least to stay above the waves. {Ocean metaphors mine. I seem to have a thing for them lately.}

A day before she pressed publish on this post, she and I were talking over Skype about our business lives, our blogs, and our voices.

Turns out we’d be swimming in common waters.

Later that night, I sent her this email:

I know how you’ve been feeling, Laura. Oh, do I ever. Been there with my own blog. Recently.

This post you’ve written — the one you’re nervous about publishing — is a very important one. We need this post.

Seven months ago, when I first started blogging in the online business/online marketing/social media corner of the blogosphere, I was determined to do everything right. {This is how I approach most things I bother to do.} I don’t like to get left behind. So I immediately sniffed out the gurus and masters and A Listers like the best trained hound dog in the unit.

I subscribed to a few hundred of the major and demi-major marketing and online business blogs. Eschewing Google reader, I had their posts delivered straight to my Inbox, sometimes waking up every morning to a queue three-digits full of new posts. And for a few months, I consumed them all straight through, never missing a word, a point, a tip, a tactic.

Like my friend David Crandall, I also read my way through multiple archives from my very favorite bloggers, some of them going three years back.

I read early in the morning on my BlackBerry while brushing my teeth. I read through the middle of the day in between marketing my own business and interacting with new and prospective clients. I read late at night, in bed, on my BlackBerry. I read at dinner with my boyfriend when he was in the men’s room.

After a month of this, I had screaming daily migraines and my eyes felt like they were twisted in their sockets. But I couldn’t, wouldn’t quit.

Other people have written that the information stream in our niche of the blogosphere is like a firehose. Bend down and try to drink from it and you get drenched. Or drowned. The water burns your skin, it’s so strong.

Eventually, I saw that it was in my best interest to cut back on my content consumption. I was trying to breathe, think, and create through an info glut. My brain was bloated.

I focused on creating my own content. And what do you know? My blog posts became a mash-up of other people’s content. I tried to “find my unique spin” {another guru/master/A Lister tip!} but sometimes I found I didn’t really have one. Either my experience was untried, or I simply didn’t care enough about the topic to dig deeper.

But I was writing “quality content,” so that was okay. I was “being helpful.” I was blogging about “valuable stuff.”

And you know what? My heart was in the right place. And the advice I gave in my posts was not 100% recycled. It was simply bolstered, informed, and, I thought, justified, by what I was reading elsewhere all over the internets.

I was a student of the Way, and this was not necessarily wrong.

But a couple months after the daily migraines stopped and my own content creation “machine” started up, I realized that oh. I was bored.

I had started only skimming 80% of the posts that landed in my post Inbox. Gulping down the bullet points and then hitting Delete before I could even feel guilty about it.

And my own blog writing was going…okay. I was steady, sometimes blogging as often as six days a week, but more commonly two or three days a week as my business blossomed and client projects took priority over the day’s blog post.

Then there came a day, about a month ago, that I had to purge most of my blog subscriptions. Not only was it not practical for me to keep up with 200 blogs a week any longer, but it also wasn’t wholly interesting {or even — valuable?} to me. I started zealously hitting Unsubscribe on every blog whose second, third, or fourth posts in a row had failed to highly amuse, inspire, or teach me something really deep and substantial that I wanted to learn. And that felt good.

So here’s what quickly dried up:

10 Ways posts. How To posts. List posts.

Yes, they still pop up once in a while, but when they do, they’re written by bloggers who are doing it somewhat ironically. And what comes after the bullets is so darn needful. It’s not what’s been recycled and re-said elsewhere.

And here’s some of who was left.

Bloggers with voice. Most of them teach deeply, richly, and experientially from a place of pure connection with what works. But most of them don’t worry about teaching all of the time.

Naomi {one of my original mentors-from-afar}, with her irreverent and balls-to-the-wall, let’s-get-real-here POV, and

Havi, with her poetically yoga-drenched, inventive-word-wielding blog {although I don’t always understand her, I always feel her}, and

Dave, who’s one of the best damn teachers I’ve ever experienced, anywhere, including all of undergrad, and all of my Master’s program, and the four years I spent teaching high school, and

Julie, with her multi-layered, sometimes cheeky, sometimes heartrending, always offbeat approaches to stuff that we easily overlook, and

Kelly, who comes atcha from a direction you couldn’t have anticipated and often makes you cry — or wince — but you recognize yourself in her, and

Sinclair, whose ideas appear to me like gorgeous Gothic cathedrals in the midst of gritty cities, and

Sarah, who gets vulnerable, and admits it, and who gave me a K-8 education in online business courtesy of her blog archives back in the Day of My Migraines, and

Danielle. Always Danielle {the midwife who helped me birth Abby Kerr Ink}, and

David, my friend David. David’s earnest, he’s excited and excitable, and he’s the real effing deal. I always look forward to his next idea, but there always is one. David’s brain is the opposite of stagnant.

These are just some of my blogging beloved.

So about a month ago I started thinking that I should be writing the kinds of posts that I love to read.

There’s a place and a purpose for formulaic content — the 10 Ways and the How To’s — but it wasn’t content that I could get excited about writing day in and day out. Even though I work as a consultant to creative entrepreneurs, I don’t want to be advising all the time. Don’t get me wrong — I know I’ll write these types of posts again. But they’ll be layered in with pieces that are quite unlike that.

I want to write about the stuff I really think about, not what I think people want to read about marketing/creative business. {This definitely goes against the what do your right people want? advice. But I’m taking a gamble that my right people think about some of the same stuff I think about.} Mostly, I want to take my blog posts in a more organic and holistic direction.

At the end of my life — because, let’s face it, we’re all numbered breaths here — I would be really sorry if I didn’t write my writing on my very own blog. And loads of it.

So my previous post, “Click,” was my first move toward writing the type of writing I want to read. Don’t know if it will resonate with everybody, but gauging from what’s gone on in the comments section of that post, I think it’s a pretty good start.

And I think I may have just written my next blog post with this email. :)

So please, Laura, boldly publish this post. We need it.

I really need you — YOU — to write your own writing. And you need me to write mine. We need to discover each other as counterpoints, reflectors, refractors.

Now over to you. In the comments, I’d love to hear if you feel you’re writing your writing yet. If so, how did you start doing that? If not, why not?