“Well Crap!”
“The job of promoting you lies with you, nobody else.”
--Jeff Herman
I’m terrible at promoting, or maybe just lazy. Writing is what I do. Selling? I don’t want to do it. (Even if I’m not charging.) It’s promoting the thing you hold dear.
I am grateful that you guys found me and are reading this blog. Actually, I don’t know how you found me, except that a damn writing blog sounds like a good idea. Maybe somebody has my back.
If you are a writer, I congratulate you for putting your feelings on the line. I commend you for being willing to say what you want, when you want, in what manner you want. Maybe nobody will read it, but you did. You got it out. It’s your expression. Promoting is exposing your baby.
No wonder we writers don’t want to do it.
It’s introducing your baby, when my response might be, “Yea, it’s a baby all right.”
Gosh, I thought she was beautiful.
Promoting, putting your work out there, telling people about it, advertising? Steven Pressfield would say I have RESISTANCE, sometimes called procrastination, which he writes about a lot.
It was fascinating, though, when he was in limbo, depressed, had no direction or inclination to have one, that the one thing that got it out of his slump was to write. After sitting down at the typewriter and writing, he went to the sink and happily washed the dishes.
He had broken through.
Natalie Goldberg was one of the first people to say that writing was a healing endeavor. Now, it’s all over the place; journal to get your feeling out. Pressfield said that first writing was crap. But it was his crap, and it burst the damn of his resistance.
Some people write good stuff yet don’t like the process. I always wondered about that. I’ve been watching a cooking competition show out of Australia called '"My kitchen Rules," and the judges can tell when there is love on the plate. When the cooking team of two is stressed out, or squabbling in the kitchen, the judges say it shows on the plate. (They are under a time crunch, which adds to the pressure--create a gourmet meal, and do it fast.)
Wouldn’t a page written with love have the same effect?
What about writing that is unhappily squeezed out? Wouldn’t that show as well?
But then maybe the page finds its audience. You know, different strokes for different folks.
Oh, writing’s a business? I thought it was play.
