There's a problem brewing, slowly but eventually, I want to be widely read, loved adored admired, copied plagiarized and generally given the treatment all second- and third-rate writers are given. Which means eventually these will have to be written for somebody that's not me, and be published in a platform that doesn't involve the one person who checks it once in a while, because I tell them to when they ask what's new I say, "as you know from my blog". I can see the stats. Nobody is reading me. I don't even give these a second look, not even to edit, so why should everybody else.
You could argue, and by 'you' I mean just myself as there is nobody else here really it's a sad lonely existence we have don't we, well it's not the problem of the platform, it's a problem of content. You don't write anything anybody will want to read ever, have you tried changing that. And yes, hundred percent true, I concede, but I don't do that because it's not a requirement that's been imposed on me by anybody. I'm in the lawless west of writing, doing what I wish and not following the rare rule I will set up for myself here and there.
To solve that, we need to think from the point of the publishers, imagine what they will want from me, and follow those rules. Once the constraints are set, the content will follow.
The first constraint -- I know this from my time working for the papers -- is that you always avoid using the first pronoun 'I' in the pieces, unless absolutely horrendously necessary. Even under exceptional circumstances, using the personal pronoun for more than twice or the very maximum three times is not recommended. Beyond that and you're not getting published, unless you happen to have written a much beloved young-adult fiction series about a boy wizard's adventures in his school and his battle against the evil villain who orphaned him as an infant.
Since I have limited success with writing books about wizards, I'm thinking of going the other way, checking how much "I" is being used and strategizing around it. This is not the first change of this kind in this blog. About 14/15 months ago I went on a similar project but instead of reformulating the entire piece to avoid the pronoun, I stopped using it where it was sorely needed. So instead of "I'm loving this what a lucky guy I am", it'd be "loving this, wat a lucky guy am' etcetera. Yes, it went with the letter of the rule, one could argue it was in exact opposition of the spirit. The rule is meant to encourage the writer to restructure the piece, to think in a manner that's more conducive to telling the reader that things are not about the writer's live, it's just a perspective. Didn't work that way though.
With that in mind, that's where the future is headed, it's becoming clear, I don't want to live in the echochamber of my own thoughts, not because it's not fun or that I'm an openminded person, but because I have crap ideas not worth exploring. I need to get out in the world, really learn and taste and understand. For that I must make myself vulnerable, open to being hurt, attacked provoked and made fun of. And there lies the growth.
I'm a pretty pro-growth guy these days. Interesting right?
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