The Grasshopper #19: Compared to What?
It’s a jazz vocal
The lyric reads, What is real, compared to what? It’s a tune by Eddie Harris and Les McCann*, and that enigmatic question (is it a question? I debated putting in that question mark) always intrigued me. Reality, as solid as it seems on a conscious level, becomes completely fluid to a writer, if you let it. And I personally believe you must let reality cease to be solid.
*this is a correction
Because, in fact, it is not. Getting all Zen about it, but everything is changing constantly and this offers endless possibilities for subject matter. Which brings me back to the subject of ideas. I have no lack of them but that is because I learned something the more I wrote. If you don’t have an idea what to write about, just do nothing.
The ideas will return.
Monday, Monday
It’s Monday morning as I write this and I woke up fresh out of ideas about what to write about. I’ve developed the habit of writing and publishing something every day and a day when I don’t feels off. But I do not want to write filler pieces just to keep the pace up.
I wrote that yesterday and ended up writing two articles, so don’t worry if you think you hit a dry spell.
Somehow we have to combine quantity with quality. I hate to generalize about writing online but frequency is important if you want to build a following or make money. But frequency can mean churning out version after version of the same article or worse, copying other people’s ideas. This is a big problem with my primary platform, Medium.
It’s jammed with meta articles about making it on Medium. When I first started there I was tempted to write about this stuff because I was learning, it was exciting or frustrating and I wanted to share what I found with other writers. But I quickly learned that a popular topic will be dominated by a few writers and the many follower writers will share the scraps.
The marketer in me knew this approach was all wrong. So I experimented with different topics, watching my stats to see which subjects both resonated and generated enough read time to earn money. Read time is the total amount of time paying Medium readers spend actually reading your stuff. It not only determines how much your share of the pot will be but it also gives you a sense of the potential of that ‘subject’ market.
As I’ve mentioned here before I eventually found my sweet spot writing about very topical subjects in the news, politics, climate, and current events. Fortunately these are a passion of mine so the fit was natural. But they have another advantage. Because they are very time-related, they have a limited lifespan. But on a constantly growing feed like Medium, on which thousands of articles are added daily, nothing is around very long.
There is a long tail but it can be very difficult to access, as your work recedes into the past, especially when it is behind a paywall that keeps it from appearing in searches. This is why feeding the monster daily is a requirement for success.
In case it appears I am consumed by avarice, get over it as a writer, because without some kind of financial lifeline, you will lose motivation and fall into a funk. My balance to this commercial mindset takes three forms: this newsletter, publishing articles I wrote for fun even if I know they probably won’t contribute much, and writing novels which may not see the light of day but satisfy something deeper in me.
But I really love the topical stuff and there is a big enough audience for it, especially given the incredibly unstable world we live in, a world where many of us are simply trying to sort all this bad stuff out.
Which brings me to the subject of idealism in writing, the notion that commerce or popularity implies you are being untrue to your muse. Get over that or you will limit your potential as a creative. As mentioned above, you can find ways to respect that muse and make a buck.
I suspect that muse is fully aware that you need to eat. As Mae West said, “I’ve been rich and I’ve been poor, and believe me, rich is better.” If you believe poor is better, you probably have not been poor.
What is real, compared to what?
Memes
These are concepts that come and go in society. One week everyone might be writing about ‘manifesting’ things in your life. Or ‘side hustles’ which are typically very poorly paying part time jobs. This week it is something called ‘quiet quitting’, which apparently means deciding not to do stuff at work that is outside of the scope of what you were hired for.
Jumping onto theme bandwagons is a sure sign of a writer that has no ideas with any depth, is a lightweight or worse, lazy. Even if you write for money you have to write as well as you can, strive to always improve, and build depth into your take on whatever you are exploring. Memes don’t have depth because they are, by design, fleeting.
The flavor of last week. All your base are belong to us*. Remember that one?
Dating back over twenty years, it is a meme, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_your_base_are_belong_to_us
Reads
I’ve been debating adding a section on what I’m currently reading, which is mostly novels. Substack, which is the platform that hosts The Grasshopper, offers a feature called Threads, which means I can dedicate a discussion thread to a topic and any reader can join in. I’m going to set one up later this week and it would be great to hear about recommended books.
So that’s where I’m going to be talking about what I’m reading that I think is worth checking out. Summer is, alas, winding down and fall is prime time for reading (and writing!) so I think the timing will work. We finally are getting real rain here and I can see things greening back up.
Thanks for reading, my friends…M
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