As part of the communications plan for Jesus Swept, my new novel, I was asked to write a column about writing. This is the sort of thing I usually float by the blogosphere before I take it to the traditional media. Here's a first draft. All feedback most welcome.
The perfect swarm
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After twenty years of cranking out copy for business clients, I figured I’d written at least one of just about everything. Billboards for a herd of cows. Sales pitches to international tax lawyers. Animated videos. Web sites. Even news stories. If the job involved words, I wrote them.
Truth be told, I’m pretty good. On a good day, I can pull in a few Ben Franklins an hour – beyond my craziest dreams back in journalism school.
But no matter how much client work I got, something always seemed to be missing: My very own voice. Before long, I found myself moonlighting on my freelancing. I started writing fiction. And then I became a blogger. It all came together in a swirling swarm.
On the fiction front, ten years toiling on my first novel, Jesus Swept, transformed my business writing in ways both grand and gritty. It crystallized the value of a clear storyline, something I had always understood, but never really taken to heart. It crushed my clichés, drove adverbs into oblivion. And most exciting, it distinguished my personal style of business writing in a world gone wild with PowerPoint. Business readers can feel the difference.
Not surprisingly, the influence is bidirectional. The confidence required in briefing for Wall Street analysts finds a natural home in the words of my omniscient narrators. The challenge of squeezing a global brand into a five second web banner breeds a kind of precision that readers of literary fiction seem to appreciate.
From there, the shift into blogging was like hitting warp speed on the starship Enterprise. Talk about needing to buckle up.
My immersion in the blogosphere started four years ago with local politics in Chapel Hill, North Carolina. I had just finished the first draft of Jesus Swept and needed a break from editing. Blogging proved seductive. Within a year, I had started my own political blog – BlueNC.com – which now attracts nearly 6,000 unique visitors each week. It also sucks up at least five hours of my time every day.
Writing a popular blog feels like a cross between managing a small newspaper and babysitting, though some journalists claim those are the same job. Not only am I keeping tabs on the work of other writers, I’m constantly scrambling to deliver a steady stream of content that will keep readers coming back for more. I’ve come to understand the real value of pixels – which is as fleeting as the click of a mouse.
In blogging, every post and every comment is a field experiment. People either respond – or they don’t. And I know it instantly.
At first that kind of feedback about my writing was infuriating. How dare no one comment on my brilliant post? But it didn’t take long until I came to accept the absence of feedback as the most valuable kind of feedback I could possibly get. If my writing isn’t good enough to earn a few seconds of attention from busy readers, how could I ever hope to have a best-selling book?
So Jesus Swept went back to the drawing board. With one hand in the blogosphere and the other working for business clients, I started a grand revision of my novel, mixing all three forms – blogging, business writing, fiction – into a spicy soup.
To my wonderful wife, these different kinds of writing look a lot alike. They all involve me hunched over a keyboard, the blue glow of a twenty-inch Dell monitor ghosting my face to a digital shade of pale.
But no matter how it looks from the outside, I’ve learned these three kinds of writing are as different as earth, wind and fire – except when they’re not.