I’m gone again. (I’m actually perennially off in my own little world, but that’s not what I mean.) We’ve headed to the San Francisco Bay Area this past weekend for O’Reilly Publishing’s Maker Faire, which if you don’t know about it you should. Maker Faire is based on O’Reilly’s Make magazine, and it’s a huge two-day festival of Do-It-Yourself projects that will make you crazy to become a Maker so you can own your own lightning machine. It’s basically Burning Man for mad scientists. (Hi, Harley!) And today I’m going to tell you why I’m not taking my cat.

1. He does not like to share

   My cat and his brother have a long-standing routine in which one of them finds a comfortable place to sleep and the other turns up two minutes later and tries to lie down in the same place. Often they try to lie down on each other’s heads. This is, naturally, quite annoying to the one who owns the head, so after a certain amount of mutual grooming their conscientious tidying-up turns into bear-trap locks on each other’s spinal columns, and suddenly everyone is screaming.

   Makers and writers, however, have one big thing in common: we like to share.

   We like to share so much we’re willing to spend practically all our leisure time (and an unrecorded amount of ‘work’ time) sharing the visions that inhabit our teeming brains.

   Makers envision shareable material that can be built in their kitchens with a bit of papier-mache, alligator clips, small motors, and a whole lot of duct tape.

   Writers envision shareable material built out of words.

2. He thinks he’s more important than anyone else

   You know Zaphod Beeblebrox of The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, the two-headed narcissist who gets himself elected the President of the Galaxy and then kidnaps himself so he can steal the one-of-a-kind spacecraft Heart of Gold with its bizarre Improbability Drive? (If you don’t, then you haven’t been paying attention for something like thirty years.)

   And when Zaphod is put into the ultimate torture machine, in which you’re shown the entire universe and your own teeny, tiny, inconsequential place in it so that your brain implodes, Zaphod comes out utterly pleased with himself because it’s shown him the entire universe, and he’s the most important thing in it?

   Yeah. That’s my cat.

   But Makers and writers are not the centers of their universes. That’s the whole point.

   Makers live in universes populated by other Makers, with their infinite communal potential to create cool stuff nobody has ever created before, like the Leave Me Alone Box that, when turned on, opens up so a hand can come out and turn it off again.

   Writers, of course, live in universes populated by our characters. We’re not the centers of those universes. In fact, we’re not even visible in those universes. We are the Divine Scribes watching from on high and frantically recording everything so we can share it later with the occupants of other universes, universes to which we do not have the keys.

3. He can’t take deviation from his routine

   I’ve already mentioned my cat’s extraordinary faith in his own judgment, which leads him to do things like sit in a prominent place during dinner every blessed night (the top of a stepping stool, the middle of the kitchen floor, sometimes even one of our chairs at the table) with his back facing us so we will get the message that it’s time to stop dilly-dallying and give him his bedtime snack.

   He has the most articulate (and aggressive) back I have ever seen in my life.

   However, Makers and writers can’t afford to be locked into routine.

   If Makers refused to open their minds, they would be stuck inventing the same things over and over again. Lightbulb! Wow, amazing. Lightbulb! Yep, there it is again.

   And if we writers refuse to open our minds, we have no reason to write. We can’t all write Wuthering Heights over and over unto infinity, although I know some people would like to try. Emily Bronte already wrote it, and she wrote it beautifully, and nobody else is ever going to write it again.

   Really. . .done.

   We must write new stories, develop new characters, have our own special new perspectives, explore the same classic themes through the infinitely new variety of specific, perceived, telling detail that is the stuff of life on this earth.

4. He poops in the car

   And I’m not even going to elaborate upon this one.

   Suffice it to say, I’ve never met a Maker who pooped in the car. That’s where they carry their cool gadgets they’re taking to Maker Faire. It’s their transportation, the way they get where they want to go. If they ruin their cars, they can’t get anywhere.

   Now, we do see a lot of fouling of nests going on in the publishing industry these days. But writers’ imaginations are our transportation, it’s how we get in and out of our fictional universes, it’s where we carry the virtual pens and paper on which we record everything our characters go through. If we ruin our imaginations—skating on the thin ice of imitation and television and brand names and movie-inspired gore and instruction-manual sex and quick marketing-crazed lunges for easy bucks—we’ll never write anything worth the effort.

   So I’m going to condense all my writing advice to you down into five simple little words, and I hope you take them to heart. They have certainly served me well in my decades of professional writing and editing:

   Don’t poop in your car.

Happy Mother’s Day, all you mothers of children and all you people with mothers! The rest of you—those of you who hatched from eggs—Happy Mother’s Day to you too!

We always celebrate Mother’s Day at our house as a day of gratitude, and I have some serious gratitude to express today.

Last week I was finishing up work with Stu Wakefield on the second novel of his Orcadian Trilogy, Memory of Water. Stu is so sweet and smart and talented, and he’d already been a Kindle #1 Best Seller with his first novel, Body of Water, and he approaches the craft with such utter joy and utter dedication. . .

. . .and as we came to the end of our time together he sent me a video he’d made about working with me.

And my heart promptly burst.

What can I say to you, Mister Wakefield?

Thank you.

Cats don’t act as though you’re the one bright ray of sunlight in an otherwise clouded existence.—Raymond Chandler

You all know my cat. He sits on my blog banner staring into space with the studied expression of someone who is being prevented from walking on a desk he knows perfectly well he walks on all the time when I’m not looking.

He’s my inspiration.

1. He is undeterrable

   When he wants something, he gets it.

   If it’s not lying around where he wants it, he yells. If I don’t respond, he yells louder. If I still don’t respond, he comes and finds me.

   If it involves walking on a desk upon which he is forbidden to walk, he waits until I leave the room and then he walks on it.

   This is how writers act about the stories we so desperately want to write. Time and again, our stories fail to come out right. So we write them again. And again. And again. And again. . .

   Until we get what we want.

2. He knows what he likes

   Specifically, what he likes is lying on my shins.

   Now, do I always want him on my shins? No, I do not. Sometimes I prefer to move my legs once an hour or so, at which point I disturb him, and he gives me a look that tells me exactly how heartbreaking it is to own an insensitive blockhead for a human being.

   Then he settles back down again. Because he likes it there.

   This is why we write what we write. Not because someone tells us to. Not because writing is going to make us rich. Not because we have a guarantee that if we write something we find boring and insipid that it will morph our lives out of what they are now into some daily routine for which we have always longed.

   But because we like it.

He’s passionate

I know—cats are known for being indifferent hipsters in black turtlenecks and berets.

“I am zo tired of zees world before me,” says the caricature cat. “When will zey understand my geniuz?”

But cats aren’t indifferent at all. In fact, they’re the most emotional pets I know. Dogs like sticks and barking. Horses like eating and running. Rabbits like hiding. Canaries like flinging seed. Turtles like pretending to be rocks. But when was the last time you heard any of them purr?

Writers don’t write because books are sticks or food or shelter or things to be flung. (Well, sometimes that.)

We write because writing—exploring the vast panorama of human nature through very particular character traits, following devastating motivations wherever they naturally lead, picturing specific events in which wherever those motivations lead is just exactly where the characters don’t want to go, and then polishing, polishing, polishing the prose through which we’ve create these scenes until it does to the reader exactly what we want it to do—makes our insides feel good.

Writing makes us purr.

3. He doesn’t mind complaining

   I have yet to meet a cat too demure to object. And I’ve lived with a lot of cats.

   Some will snarl. Some will hiss. Some will fight back. And some will take you apart from the elbows down if they feel it’s necessary.

   But they do not roll over on their backs and expose their bellies when they feel threatened.

   Writers, especially in the early years, must fight an enormous urge to make things nice for our characters. We like them! That’s why we hang out with them! But happy characters are excruciatingly dull characters when they are put into their settings, the stories that bring them alive.

   What readers really want is protagonists willing to scratch and tear their way out of every single situation they don’t want to be in.

4. He trusts his own judgment

   Oh, it’s so easy to get derailed. It’s so easy for writers to doubt ourselves and begin to wonder whether or not this whole business of writing is not just an inanely bad idea.

   But not him. He makes decisions about his life and follows through on them, no matter how hard I try to convince him he’s wrong.

   Does he feel like carrying his food, piece-by-piece, out of the cat room and dropping it in the kitchen traffic lane, where he eats it at his (extremely slow) leisure?

   Then that is what he does.

   Does he feel like crying at the front door five minutes after he’s just come in because he likes seeing his human beings turn the knob, even if he has absolutely no intention of going outside again?

   Then that is what he does.

   Does he feel like expressing his displeasure with my decisions about what he is allowed to do or not to do—regardless of how or why—by leaving little calling cards that I will later have to clean up, in high dudgeon, with a sponge and bucket of soapy water, roundly cursing him and all cats that came before him?

   Then that is what he does.

   Has any of us ever managed to convince him that these ideas are not, in fact, the sterling guidelines for successful living that he so fervently believes they are?

   No.

   No, we have not.

5. He spends practically all his time in dreamland

   He eats, drinks, sharpens his claws, and bathes. Then he kicks his brother’s butt, curls up with him, and goes back to sleep.

   Now, he happens to be a fortunate creature in that someone else buys his food, provides his clean water, and gives him someplace to sleep in comfort out of the weather.

   But I also yell at him for sharpening his claws on perfectly good claw material—especially the leather armchair I inherited from my grandfather—and give him hell for all the fur his bathing leaves on my furniture.

   So the business part of his life is kind of a draw between us.

   Fortunately for him, a good three-quarters of his life has nothing whatever to do with any of this. He’s someplace else. . .living the lives of innumerable thrilling imaginary kitties.

   Oh, yes.

   A writer should be so lucky.

You guys, I interviewed Jenny almost two years ago about humor writing, being a humor writer, eating other humorists, and—especially—the book she was writing at the time. Well, guess what? Last week Jenny’s memoir hit #1 on the New York Times Best Seller List. So all of you who were saying two years ago, “Jenny, your book’s going to be a best seller“. . .buy yourselves a drink!

You were absolutely right.

Jenny Lawson is the Bloggess—funny, profane, twisted, and golden-hearted, she’s been blogging since 2006 and now drags a following of almost half a million page views a month. She’s been interviewed pretty much everywhere, and she does interviews herself as well. She also writes a parenting column for the Houston Chronicle (which she shares with Mindy) and a humor column for Sexis Magazine (yes, it’s about sex). She’s caused an online uproar over Dr. Pepper that was picked up by AOL, been blocked on Twitter by William Shatner, and been voted #1—and disqualified—in the 2009 Shorty Awards in the category of government, for which she won her title of Czar of Nothingness from the mayor of Martindale, Texas (and in which capacity she designs awards for nothing in particular to give to yourself). She speaks on the subject of humor at the Mom 2.0 Summit and also at BlogHer, to which she is this year bringing her Traveling Red Dress to share with others. Plus, she found James Garfield at an estate sale.

Jenny, I know you said you were done interviewing for the season, then agreed to this one anyway. So I will try to keep it short and succinct. What makes funny funny?

I think what makes funny funny is the unexpectedly random being taken seriously. I think most of us think bizarrely strange things all the time and never share what’s in our heads for fear of being ostracized, but I’ve given up on ever fitting in, and so I just decided to write it all down.

Using dead kittens to make gloves for the homeless, what I would do if I was attacked by a zombie baby, open angry letters to German Princesses who are stealing my look. . .that sort of thing. I think people laugh because it’s bizarre and they feel better about themselves in comparison, but a small part of them is nodding in recognition because they too once wondered why Jesus wasn’t considered a zombie.

Is there a line you won’t cross as far as alienating readers? I don’t mean offensive material, but hostility. How do you manage to keep being charming and funny about things like fear, anger, anxiety, without ever coming across as whiny and annoying?

I write way more than I publish, and I edit a lot, but I’m still pretty whiny and annoying. I try to avoid writing about anything that would legitimately hurt someone reading it. Offending people is fine. Hurting them? Not cool. I’m lucky to have friends that I can call up and read a post to, and they’ll laugh hysterically and then say, “That was awesome. And you can NEVER, NEVER publish it.” Good friends make good editors.

What is your relationship to your humor writing? Do you ever reach a point where you’re frustrated with translating darkness and pain into something people can enjoy? Or is there a light in the depths that you can always depend on to continue to add meaning to your life?

I have a dark sense of humor, so it’s natural for me to find the humor in some of the most terrible parts of my life. I write about depression and anxiety disorder and miscarriages and having a number of autoimmune diseases. Even in the darkest corners there are still things that make me laugh, and those are the things that save me from the dark. It sounds odd, but I think some of my funniest work has come from my biggest personal trials, and I think people can not only relate to that, but it helps them see that there is a light out there.

Also, I think it’s nice to give people the chance to laugh at something that’s typically a sacred cow or that is always treated with sadness and reverence. The funniest jokes are the ones told in the front pew of a funeral when you know you’re not allowed to laugh. The difference is that I do laugh. And then I blog about it, and everyone else laughs and relates a horrible story that ended with laughter, and suddenly my whole blog is filled with hysterical stories of tragedy. That’s kind of an amazing thing.

Can you talk about the difference between saving your self-esteem by writing humor about having no self-esteem and actually having no self-esteem? Or is that getting too dark for an interview about humor writing?

I struggle with low self-esteem, but blogging has helped me tremendously to see the value in myself and what I do. I think there’s a difference between being self-deprecatingly honest and beating yourself up about things you can’t change, and I’m finally learning the difference.

If you were on a desert island and forced to choose which of your fellow castaways to eat, in what order, and they were all different famous comedians, who would you eat first? Last? Never? Why? At which point would you get eaten?

I’d eat Sarah Silverman first because she’s a vegetarian and grain-fed beef is delicious. I’d eat Eddie Izzard last because I’d want someone to cheer me up after eating Sarah Silverman, and he always makes me laugh. I don’t think I’d get eaten because I’m always sick, and I’m on a chemo drug for my arthritis, and so I’m probably too dangerous to eat. But they’d probably drown me pretty early just for being annoying. And for eating Sarah Silverman. People love her.

You mention in several interviews that you got into blogging so you could write a book. You mention somewhere else that you’re working on a novel. Are these the same book?

It’s just one book, and I’ve been working on it for the last six years, although I’ve only been really serious about it in the last year.

I have yet to see anyone ask you about the book, itself. (Maybe I didn’t read enough of the interviews.) What is the premise? the basic idea?

It’s a book about my life, about all the times I’ve ever embarrassed myself. It’s awful. And probably hilarious when read by people who didn’t have to live through it. My current working title is Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, and it’s KILLING ME. It’s so easy to write a blog because if I don’t like it I know I can just delete it later, but with a book it’s set in stone forever. Also, it will be the heaviest book in the world because it’s written on stone.

You’ve said you have always been a writer. Do you expect to write more once you get the hang of it?

I’m hoping that my next book will be easier, and I’m tempted to quit, but my agent (I still feel weird saying that) thinks I have several books in me. So I’m just nodding my head and going with it. This particular book focuses on my family as a child and my family now, and my stories are so baffling that I actually had to send photos of the things I was writing about to my agent just so she’d believe me. I’ve had a very strange life. A good life. . .but a strange one.

You’ve said it’s taking a long time to write. Why, do you think? Are there specific aspects that you’re struggling with?

I’m struggling the most with finding a way to tell my story without being disowned. The problem is that when I start writing about my life it’s not just my story anymore. It’s my parents’ story, and my in-laws’, my husband’s, my daughter’s. . .it’s hard to share completely in a funny way and not run the risk of over-sharing someone else’s story. That’s why in the introduction I explain that this book is only 90% true, so that whoever is mentioned in the book can say that whatever ridiculous thing I wrote about them is made up.

The funny part, though, is that I ended up not sharing some great stories because, even though they’re true, no one but the people who actually lived through it with me would ever believe them.

Only a few weeks after this interview, Jenny’s book, Let’s Pretend This Never Happened, sold. For the record, I immediately offered to teach her how to use a semicolon correctly. I think. I may not have said it out loud. But I was serious.

The photo of Jenny on the right in her famous Traveling Red Dress was taken by Karen Walrond, author of the photography book, The Beauty of Different. The Dodo Award was created by Jenny, Czar of Nothingness.

I wrote this one day a long time ago out of sheer, overwhelming gratitude for my craft.

And you know what?

I’m still grateful.

1. You have all the tools you need

   They’re right there at your disposal: the world, your five senses, literacy, a brain. You will never need anything more.

2. All you have to do is be a recorder

   Record, as faithfully as you know how, the world around you as you perceive it through your five senses. Even one or two senses will work. Even one.

3. The more you do it, the more you love it, the better you get at it

   The attention you pay to it makes it flourish. Your passion for it feeds it. Over the course of your life it becomes exactly what you, personally, need it to be.

4. Writing is a human activity

   It is one of the gifts the gods have given us just for being us. The more you write, the more human you are. The more you reach out to other writers, the more human your world is.

5. You are not your fiction

   When you create a fictional world, you are multiplying your experience of life. You get to be someone else, living another reality, and at the same time still be you. The more times you multiply your life, the more living you can do in this brief handful of years you have been allotted.

   But the real you, in your real life. . .that’s the one that counts. And no matter what happens in your fiction, you will always have that.

6. You are not alone

   Now more than ever in history you are surrounded by others—thousands of others—who also love this craft that you love. And the Internet gives you a way to be in touch with as many of them as you like, which is something writers have never, ever had before.

   The community of writers in your lifetime is mind-boggling. Your literary soul mates are out there.

7. The creation of fiction gives your heart depth

   The exploration of the world through the lens of your individual perceptions and choices makes you a better person.

   Inside every writer burns the wild, unreasoning, piercing hope that life can be transformed through experience into something more than what it seems to be.

We can transcend the madness.

(Also, we have Western Spaghetti.)

Many years ago when I used to hang out all the time in the bars of San Luis Obispo, California, a good friend and I were sitting on the curb outside our favorite dive with our feet in the gutter at around midnight one night talking deep in our cups the talk of life.

“Victoria,” he finally said, “we’re poet drunks.”

“Mark,” I said solemnly, “we’re not poets.”

It wasn’t strictly true—I was, in fact, a poetry major at Cal Poly State University at that time—but we laughed anyway.

Hemingway hunched over his typewriter with whiskey at his elbow, Faulkner holding court grandly drunk when he came to New York to see his editor, Carver and his wife and friends hashing over the meaning of love as they drank, Fitzgerald going so white when the booze hit Hemingway thought he needed an ambulance, Jean Rhys in her borrowed cottage in winter mourning her lost past over a bottle, James Thurber blind and hysterical with delerium tremens at the end of his life, Jack Kerouac deliberately drinking himself to death when the media named him a ‘beatnik’ instead of an artist. . .

We all know the myth.

1. We write to explore our worlds.

Probably all of us poor misdirected writers have, at one time or another, walked the streets of midnight alone with our fists in our pockets, our chins in our coat collars, our footsteps ringing in our ears. We’ve all looked through lighted windows as we passed, at life going on inside without us—all the strangers, all the stories, all the gestures and interactions and words and unspoken messages, the devastating secrets that will never be told.

We’ve all wondered about our own isolation, our own internal sargasso seas.

And we’ve taken those images and experiences and questions home with us and tried to work with them in the words on the page, which is the only way some of us know how to work with things.

Yes, the streets outside your house are your world, and if you’re smart you spend some time every week out there with a notebook and pen jotting down descriptions of the people and places and things you see out there, the telling details of your vivid life. But then you have to take those notes home and put them them into your stories. Practice recording life as you live it until you can make it vivid even in stories that well up without your permission from your subconscious.

This is the bedrock of what it means to you to be alive.

2. We write to create tribe for ourselves.

Writing is about finding others who see life through the same inexplicable, convoluted, bizarre lenses that we do.

When we go to bars we go to deaden ourselves to the differences between people so we can feel bonded to pretty much anyone who wanders in and appropriates the barstool next to us.

“I know egxactly what you mean. I have always tripped over my shoelaces too! hic!”

I’ve sworn blood kinship to people I had nothing more in common with than the cheap cans of beer we both happened to have in our hands.

We, as human beings, are truly that desperate for tribe.

But when you stay sober and write fiction, you find extraordinary, magical characters blossoming right out of the pages—people who make jokes you find hilarious, who suffer tragedies that break your heart, who fascinate you in just the way you long to be fascinating, who feel and think and act exactly like you do.

You love them! They totally understand your world.

And the deeper you dig into your own idiosyncratic take on the details and convolutions of life and bestow those unique qualities upon your characters and plots, the more complex and realistic and distinctive they become. And the more complex and realistic and distinctive they become. . .the more other people—total strangers—recognize them as part of their own tribes.

This is the human glue of fiction.

The Art & Craft of Fiction: A Practitioner’s Manual
by Victoria Mixon

We talked last week about an alarmingly bizarre piece of writing advice one of my clients got from an agent in response to her requested full manuscript. We also talked about exposition & telling and why they’re pretty much exactly the same thing, even though I know we out here in the bathosphere of professional fiction sometimes like to sit around chewing the fat over the fine points of complex technicalities.

1. Exposition is authorial commentary

   I advocate minimizing the use of exposition.

   This is because it’s a great deal of what we usually write when we’re still mulling over our stories in early drafts—lots of stuff like, “This was interesting, because she really hadn’t ever thought much about rabbits, and suspenders reminded her of her uncles,” and, “If only he had known about the sad, heartbreaking history behind the woodshed he’d have thought twice before buying an ax,” and “Again, they wondered why the operator kept buzzing through.”

   That’s all useful to us as writers, but it can safely be edited out once we figure out how to “Dramatize!” as Henry James said. “Dramatize!”

   Drama is the good stuff that moves the story out of the writer’s head and into the reader’s.

   We also call that stuff “scenes.”

2. Run-of-the-mill authorial commentary is supposed to be edited out of final drafts

   Sadly, though, exposition is often used these days in published fiction to skim right over scenes without delving into the vivid details that bring characters alive. The overwhelming telling doesn’t get edited out. So exposition winds up being used as a crutch rather than a technique.

   Why does this happen?

   Because the publishing industry has morphed in recent decades from being about storytelling that lasts—which has always been financed, it’s true, by a great deal of mediocre mass market shove-a-matic fiction—to being entirely and completely about slipping those ole wallets out of readers’ pockets.

   Successful authors are pressured to churn out more and more books faster and faster. Authors who don’t arrive on the publishers’ doorsteps with massive followings are often summarily booted out high windows if their first novels don’t bring in big bucks.

   And the worst part of it: many publishers have stopped editing manuscripts altogether, so whatever early drafts their authors (particularly big names) churn out go straight to the presses without editorial interference—still full of their authorial commentary, which is the exposition we writers accidentally write as we explore our novels.

   Publishers’ editing is becoming a dying craft.

   It’s a self-consuming cycle of failing literature.

   Now those early-draft unedited novels full of exposition are seen by newbies to the industry as the models upon which all fiction must be formed, although they’re the lowest-common-denominator of our day.

   A whole generation of publishing professionals is growing up without even knowing about the existence of editing techniques, as though no publisher’s editor had ever sweated long hours in the office over polishing good writing into beautiful prose, or spent weeks and months (yes, even years) working over and over scenes and storylines and character development with their authors, guiding the translation of narrative summary into narrative—as though professional editing itself were meaningless to fiction.

   A reader’s nightmare.

3. Lack of editing is killing the craft of fiction

   Remember John Gardner and his wonderful, immortal discussion of fiction as a “vivid continuous dream”?

   Remember Maxwell Perkins, wonder-editor of Charles Scribner’s Sons who ‘discovered’ and edited Hemingway, Fitzgerald, and Thomas Wolfe? He famously told James Jones, author of From Here to Eternity, “You explain too much, you use too much exposition. Put it into action and dialog!”

   Exposition is not more commercial than scenes.

   It is simply common in today’s early-draft unedited fiction.

   Actually, dependence upon heavy exposition isn’t even a new literary crime. It’s always been a problem in throw-away fiction, the cheap stuff nobody remembers. Vintage fiction, of which I am a minor aficionado, can occasionally be full of it. (In the 1920s, H.P. Lovecraft wrote a whole lot of treacly, emotional exposition. Wow, he could be a terrible writer.)

   And the less fiction is taught and mentored and edited by editors through whose hands pass the literature of an era, the worse that fiction turns out to be.

   Take note, folks: this is what it’s like to watch your era’s literature die right there on the vine.

Charles Dickens is now and always has been an enormously commercial author. That’s because he filled his novels with vivid scenes and mostly left the reader to decide how they felt about them. So did Jane Austen. And Arthur Conan Doyle. And Emily and Charlotte Bronte. And Dostoyevsky, Kafka, Colette, Gordimer, Cather, Conrad, Bowen, Fitzgerald, Hemingway, Faulkner, Bowles, Updike, Salinger, Bellow, Carver, LeGuin, Chandler, Nemirovsky, Tolkien, Peake, and “I Am a Camera” Isherwood.

Every one of these authors is still making money for publishing houses.

Because stories that rely on scenes to show the reader things about which they might have feelings—rather than on exposition to tell that reader how to feel—is the stuff of fiction. . .in fact, the stuff of great literature.

And it’s commercial.

So yesterday I was trading email with the fabulous Therese Walsh of Writer Unboxed about the guest post I was writing for them, and we were kvetching about the state of the publishing industry, and I quoted that one great line out of the otherwise completely forgettable 1980s movie, Young Guns II.

You know the line.

And she laughed so hard she said she wanted it on a T-shirt, but I didn’t have an extra T-shirt or the ability to put a quotation on one if I had it, so I wrote a guest post for her about it instead.

However, since I’d just written two draft posts for her on other topics and they’d both turned out ranty, I got off the subject of Young Guns as quickly as possible in this one. (I’m pretty ranty about bad 1980s movies.)

Instead, I wrote about what to do when you’re caught between the Self-Loathing Phase of Revision and your Delusions of Grandeur. Because, honestly, we writers do spend an awful lot of time on the pendulum between the two extremes.

Come over and join us—we’re talking about coping with this writing life today on Writer Unboxed.

I don’t really have an introduction for this. I’m just going renegade on my own blog and talking about blogging instead of fiction this month.

1. It’s a playground

   Remember in grammar school when the bell would ring and everyone’d spill onto the playground at once and the volume of voices would be simply deafening? And you had to work your way through the crowd to find your friends—who maybe were in different classrooms—and then go off to your designated favorite spot to play?

   But you first had to make those friends, and you had to discover that designated favorite spot?

   That’s the blogosphere: a playground the size of the entire planet. At eternal recess.

2. It’s a cocktail party

   I used to go to a lot of parties in my twenties, and I spent quite a few hours sitting in the corners of people’s living rooms watching everyone else visit in states of great animation. They all looked like they were having such a good time that I never really noticed the other people sitting in the other corners.

   Eventually I’d figure out where the kitchen was—there’d be a stream of people going in and out like ants—and I’d go in there and get a drink. And since getting a drink is one of those social things people do with strangers, sometimes I’d bump into some other poor soul who had also come to get a drink because they didn’t know anyone.

   And we’d sit down on the floor together and visit in a state of great animation.

3. It’s a railway station

   If we stayed in the kitchen long enough, other lonely people would wander in. We’d hail them from the floor, and they’d sit down with us.

   Then someone else would come in. And someone else. And the party in the kitchen would be bigger for awhile.

   Then someone would leave to use the bathroom and never return. And someone else. And someone else.

   This back-&-forth would go on all night.

   Sometimes for days.

4. It has historical precedence

   In the nineteenth century, bloggers were called pamphleteers and they had to pay for their own printing. Then they’d run out and distribute their pamphlets all over the city. People would read them and write angry or appreciative letters to the editors of the newspapers.

   And the pamphleteers would rustle up the cash to pay for another printing. Huge, long, involved debates went on this way.

   History in the making!

5. It is addicting

   Because blogging is almost free, the one serious constraint to unlimited opinion-making is now gone. And once you develop an opinion-making voice and get involved in an on-going community of opinionators, the conversation becomes greater than the sum of its parts.

   You realize blogging not only has historical precedence, it is a historical precedent.

   You are part of history.

6. There are too many bloggers out there to follow all the ones you want

   Which makes it a little sad when it turns out you can’t possibly keep up with everyone you want to keep up with, because you have a livelihood to make and a mortgage to pay, so you still wind up spending most of your time working.

   But you know the conversation is going on out there, with or without you, and you rush into the kitchen every now and then just to find out whether or not they’re playing kickball.

7. People will swipe your stuff

   Yes, as in all walks of life, there will always be someone who wants credit for being part of the conversation but doesn’t have anything interesting to contribute. So they lift material from the sites of people who do.

   NOTE: I do not mean quoting a paragraph or two with a linkback, which is intended to serve as the jumping-off point for discussion or to interest readers in a blog post you just really, really like. That’s all good clean fun. I mean lifting most or all of a post without so much as a by-your-leave.

   There’s no point to it. Why would you want to lift from someone when you could simply ask permission? Or, better yet, just enjoy what they have to offer where it already is?

8. You have protection

   Some people do this because they don’t understand the blogosphere. Thousands of newbies start blogs every day. (I did it once, too.)

   And some do this under the mistaken assumption that the Internet is anarchy and there’s nothing you can do about it if they behave badly toward you. I call those people “rancid peanuts.”

   Fortunately, they are wrong.

   My sys admin knows to contact an ISP and have a chat with them about one of their hosted sites. ISPs are usually really nice about simply removing swiped material, and they can get quite annoyed at bloggers who make a pain of themselves by swiping material repeatedly or from various bloggers. (For the record, it’s not a very good idea to get your ISP annoyed at you.)

   But ISPs consider it good form for us to send the site a Cease-&-Desist letter before we get around to contacting the ISP. “Cease” means “knock it off,” and “desist” means, “I said knock it off.” *

   Of course, we always send a very friendly little note before a Cease-&-Desist letter, just saying, “We notice you have posted stuff that’s copyrighted. Please cut it back to the normal one or two paragraphs with a link. Thanks a bunch!” because we realize a certain number of these people aren’t consciously trying to be rude, they just don’t know what they’re doing.

   And that generally solves the whole thing. **

   * Definitions taken from the Dictionary of Victoria, which is not by any stretch of the imagination a legal reference, not even in my novels. Although it might be one day.

   ** And you can always get a lawyer. I’m not a lawyer—I don’t have the attention-span. But we never take legal advice from anyone who swipes my stuff. That wouldn’t make sense, would it? Nobody in their right mind takes legal advice from someone antagonistic to them.

9. You will make friends

   This is, hands-down, the best reason to blog: because the blogosphere is chock full of other kids just like you who would like to join you playing in your designated favorite spot.

   I work from home, which means I don’t hang out with anybody around the water-cooler during the week (except my husband, who also works from home, and even then we wind up IMing each other from our offices next door to each other in our attic).

   Social isolation is becoming a phenomenon in modern industrialized society, especially in the US, where the 60-hour work week is, unfortunately, not uncommon these days. Americans have become used to socializing at work.

   Guess where they’re socializing?

   That’s right. Online.

10. Most of your readers will be invisible angels

    And this is the second-best reason to blog: because, in spite of a handful of rancid peanuts out there, by far the majority of folks in the blogosphere are innocent and good-hearted, just looking to make friends. We read blogs, we talk about them with others, we pass the word around. Often we don’t have time to comment, but still, it’s lovely that we have time to read.

    I know you guys are out there. I’m out there too. We can wave to each other in passing—hi!

11. Blogging is a ridiculous word for something that is changing the world

    It comes from the term “web-log,” which comes from a mash of the terms “World Wide Web” and “log.” A log is a kind of regularly updated record or journal. Sea captains use logs to record their progress at sea. Pilots use them to record their flights.

    Bloggers use them to record everything.

    It is a strange and wonderful phenomenon. What is it all about? How it is changing society?

    We don’t really know yet. But when historians look back on this era, they will look back on the meta-blog that is the blogosphere.

We’re in the middle of a post that was, originally, going to “very quickly” teach you everything I know about social media, all of which I learned from Jenny Lawson, the Bloggess. This all started when I asked myself, “Is blogging over? Should blogs now be books?” and then, “But how does anyone find the time to write either?” Then my post about the Bloggess kind of got away from me, especially after I got started on how hard Jenny works on her strange and wonderful charity projects.

So just pretend this is me talking very quickly:

1. Write way more than you publish, and edit a lot

   That’s almost a direct quote from Jenny, and although I already knew about what she was saying when she said, it’s been enormously important for me to remember in this new medium.

   It’s so easy to take the freedom of the blogosphere for granted. This is all of us out here on our zillions of blogs: “La la la la la la belch la!” That’s called the first draft.

   Even if you have only one reader, polish your work to its most powerful shine for that one person. And if you don’t have any readers at all, polish it for yourself.

   It’s worth it.

2. Know a little something about SEO

   It’s not complicated, but it does help readers who want to be somewhere get there. Jenny is so casual about it you really have to pay attention to what she’s doing to realize she’s been doing it all along.

   She’s actually much more reliable about it than most bloggers I know. She does a number of things I know about but never get around to. And I promised myself I’d be better about that this year.

   So far?

   Not really.

3. Work your butt off

   Even more than practicing good SEO, though, Jenny works. And not as a marketer for herself—as a social service for others (for others!).

   That’s social media.

   In just the past year, she has operated three distinctly different major charities through her blog (some of them stranger than others):

   The traveling red dress
   Holiday gifts for poor families
   Care packages for homeless children

   • The traveling red dress is a fancy custom-made dress she bought for herself that others longed for with such passion she sent it on a journey around the world, loaning to one follower after another, until the poor dress wore out and she had to ask for donation dresses to continue the journey—which people gave.

   • In December 2010 she announced that she was giving gift certificates to the first twenty needy commenters who couldn’t afford gifts for their kids. She got twenty needy commenters almost immediately and then, unexpectedly, a commenter who said, “I’ll take the twenty-first.” Jenny worked for days—eventually exhausted and sick—to handle the succeeding flood of requests and offers, pairing up the needy with the generous, until she’d funneled through her blog over $40,000 to give strangers’ children a happy holiday. (This past December she handed it off to an official charity, but it still happened again.)

   • And just recently her endless search for celebrities who will send her photos of themselves sporting random household objects spontaneously combusted to include not only Jeri Ryan with a spatula, but Matthew Broderick with a spoon. She turned the ensuing explosion of followers sending photos of themselves with natty cutlery into another fundraiser, raising over $1200 to send care packages of blankets, stuffed animals, and books to homeless children. And then Brian Boitano got in a bidding war with Matthew Broderick over the strangest kitchen implements they could pose with, and I do not think it is ever going to end.

   Do you work that hard in social media? I don’t work that hard in social media.

   Jenny’s astounding success has not exactly been an accident.

4. Don’t get your panties in a twist when it turns out other bloggers will always have more followers, more commenters, more awards, more stats, et cetera, et cetera, et cetera

   I like to compare my stats to Jenny’s because she’s something like exponentially to the power of 100 ahead of me, so I’m never in danger of falling into the dreadful bog of competition—”Oooh, I’m sneaking up on her! Now we’ll find out who’s got the best unicorn.”

   Even Jenny is not the most visible blogger out there. (Hard to believe, I know.) Celebrities drag followings of millions on Twitter, more people have seen the photo Demi Moore took of herself in her bathroom than I’ve ever met in my life, and most of the bloggers who win the Bloggies in the humor category don’t even make me laugh.

   But for Jenny, you know, what she’s got going is just right.

   And when I look around, there’s that epiphany I keep coming back for:

   Me too.