The Grasshopper #21, What is Good?
You don’t know if your stuff is good and you can’t worry about it
You can’t know. Only readers know. But that doesn’t mean you put crap out there. You write, rewrite, edit, and publish and then you either forget about it and then find out later that no one read it or that it went viral.
That’s the nature of writing online. You don’t have editors, you only have reactions from readers and you can’t do anything about it, except…
You can learn something about what resonates with readers. But this is a real double-edged sword because you run the big risk of imitating yourself. Which can work for a while. But if you have a viral story lots of readers will see it and because a lot of those readers are writers or want to be successful some of them will copy you and that will kill the originality, maybe.
It’s a real Catch 22 situation. Which you should spend exactly zero energy worrying about because this is the nature of the beast, if you do this kind of writing.
Topical or evergreen?
This week’s newsletter is a little late. Monday was Labor Day and I didn’t labor, if you can call writing labor. Instead I grilled some beautiful ribeyes at a friend’s. That’s definitely not labor!
But, here we are back at it, having tilted our way into fall, just like that. My writing is neatly divided into two categories, the topical stuff, mostly politics, I write about on Medium, and these more evergreen writing lifestyle things here at The Grasshopper.
The topical stuff has a limited shelf life. When I belatedly discovered the marvel that was Joan Didion after reading The Year of Magical Thinking, which is evergreen in its subject (grief, not much more universal than that), I went to the library to get more of her stuff.
Libraries are disappointing these days. There was one book of hers in Fiction which I took but discovered was not fiction but a collection of essays from the early nineties and late eighties. Topical things like political conventions and crime in New York.
Wonderful writing, but out of its time, not unlike the stuff I write daily for Medium. And no, I am not comparing myself to Joan Didion! But given my subject right now, she offers the most recent example I have of a writer who did both topical and evergreen stuff.
I’m very happy doing both, in fact, this newsletter has been liberating because I can write about what I want and know that a few souls might read it and be encouraged to do some writing of their own. Or painting or making Tik Tok videos or crafting. Whatever flips your switch, but the point is that doing this stuff is important to who we are as people.
There is something about humans that makes us create and when you take that away society and life become untenable. Creating is a form of meditation, a topic that deserves a whole newsletter of its own.
So, I’m rambling a bit but maybe that is the residual effects of the long weekend. This morning I wrote a discouraging thing about Trump and his use of Judges to stall legal proceedings. Towards the end of the piece, I broke through the fourth wall and wrote conversationally directly to the reader about what was going through my mind as I wrote it.
This feels like a kind of breakthrough right now but I’ll have to think about that a bit more. I tend to get more personal with my evergreen content here, mixing up pure writing process observations with more personal stuff, like this. Comments are open so if you find this annoying let me know.
Getting all Zen about it
“When you see plum blossoms, or hear the sound of a small stone hitting bamboo, that is a letter from the world of emptiness.”
Shunryu Suzuki, Letters From Emptiness
I saw the above phrase somewhere recently and, as usual, it annoyed me. But I’m not sure why. To get Zen about something is to find yourself in a flow state, where you act without thinking. To me that is the place you need to get to as a writer.
I have a great friend who writes well but doesn’t trust herself as she writes to get from beginning to end first, So each word and phrase is labored over, as they are written. I’ve been there when she is struggling to get an important email right and it is painful for me to observe the struggle.
Generally, when I was working in marketing, I’d get a request from others on the team to look at something they had written and labored over. My typical response was to read it, make sure I was clear on what they were trying to accomplish and then spend a few minutes writing an entirely new version, which they usually used.
It’s not bragging, I just had a hard time reading work that had been labored over because I no longer work that way. I’m not sure I ever did. I like to get a picture in my mind, forget about it, then quickly write it out. It’s really about laziness on my part. If I had to struggle with each word, writing would not be enjoyable anymore.
It’s why, when asked what kind of writing I do, I always used to say, ‘anything but technical writing’, manuals and instructions, etc. My brain doesn’t work that way or, realistically, it doesn’t want to work that way. It’s like that left brain, right brain stuff, except that I can never remember which side of the brain was supposed to be the creative one.
I’m left-handed so maybe my sides are switched.
Ironically, I had a job as Director of Marketing in an early stage tech company that created sophisticated software for technical communications. So, I had to market to tech writers. I discovered they are a very different breed of writers, very regimented and inflexible. I suppose that is a requirement for writing that must conform to legal and technical scrutiny.
It was an uphill road for me. It wasn’t until I attended a conference for this kind of writing that I fully realized that it was an entirely different planet. No getting all Zen there. You can’t go with the flow when you’re writing an ordered task list where going out of order might mean crashing a plane! Or blowing someone up.
That was a great job with a great company but I may not have been the best fit for some of it.
The things you find yourself doing to make a living as a writer…
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