Deviant Rambling

I find that I write for different levels of consumption.

When I first started, I was writing to myself, for myself. This writing is pen and paper in a journal style writing. The only people who see this are the few people inside my circle. I consider this privileged information, not in the “keep this secret from the world” way, more in the “I grant this privilege to you, to occupy my headspace with me”. I don’t do this as much any more, and have found pen and paper to be too cumbersome for maintaining any kind of consistency.

This blog is the next level, a open valve of my stream of consciousness. As ideas come up, I post them. Through this medium, I distill the diamonds from all the rough stuff and try to hone them into more perfect versions of an idea. This has provided me the most consistent means of getting the words out of my head and into the world. I’ll admit it is verbose, but it’s just an open channel. Direct communication from my mind to the pages of this blog.

The third level is the sort of thing that is acceptable for public consumption at large. I only have one thing that I’m currently working on that is in this category. This is, however, an important milestone for my development. I need to create something like this that has my best attempt at refinement. If I hope to reach a larger audience, I need to create a product worth consuming. I have an understanding that the first two levels listed aren’t really going to make a living for me. This third level is crucial to take the starvation out of my choice of art.

I have some very real concerns that I am too contrarian to create anything at the third level. I knew that there would be some pushing against myself to create but thinking about pushback from the world at large is a different beast altogether. It isn’t that I’m bothered by opinions, it is that the idea of constant confrontation doesn’t suit me. I write in a manner that is provocative, and that is going to get me into bad faith arguments. Both sides will be trenched and never budge, and I’ll have to let bygones be all the time. My inner lawyer is screaming “ARGUE!” but I will have to listen to the voice and let it pass.

Writing should be a conversation, and if I push everyone out who means well, then I abandon the quest for more information. Even the kind of information I might disagree with.

Not everyone can be as lucky as I am to just drop everything and pursue what I want to do on a daily basis. Different situations call for different amounts of pursuit.

No matter your living situation, though, you can make time for your passions. The quality you get out of this time is worth the trade off in lesser quality activities: those things that don’t serve you in return.

There will never be a shortage of excuses why you shouldn’t do a thing. It’s up to you to collect and highlight all of the reasons you should.

One of the many places I applied to write blog posts for responded with a form-letter-email rejection today. This is a reminder that rejection is built in to this process, but it didn’t prepare me for the gut check that rejection always gives a person.

“What the hell is wrong with what I wrote?!” – The question that immediately sprang to mind that has no answer. A few minutes after I felt this, it melted away. This will be more often than not, that’s just how it goes. It isn’t personal, it’s just business.

Odds are I won’t be a perfect fit anywhere if the content is something I have to phone in or if I have to rein myself in. I just have to keep trying and trust the process. I get something out of every attempt, and every time allows me the opportunity to continue to write and get better.

This happens to me often:

I wake up with no idea of what my day will consist of. Suddenly a whim presents itself that I have to focus on. Everything else becomes completely out of focus and that idea burns bright, completely consuming me. Yesterday that idea was to carve wood so I made an attempt with zero previous knowledge.

As is often the case, my first attempt was unskilled and clumsy. What I’m searching for is not skill in the effort. I am searching for the feeling that what I am doing is natural, even in the struggle.

Today, the idea that possessed me was inspired by something I wrote earlier. I want to express the concept visually. I want to draw it but I don’t want to do it with physical medium of any sort. I want to do it digitally. So I start down the rabbit hole of how to draw on the computer/tablet/whatever you got. The feeling I’m after is here, in this idea, so I am going to spend my day trying, even if it involves failing.

It has become increasingly apparent how out of touch with the world I am. I feel as though I’ve been disconnected from the channels that virtually everyone else is locked into.

What drives modern society? Politics, celebrities, fashion, sports, finance, etc. None of this interests me. It makes me feel like a pariah because there is nothing in me anywhere that drives me to seek these things.

Politicians have fully sapped my faith in humanity. The past 6 years have been a truly exhausting gauntlet of terrible behavior on full display in Washington and at the state level. How can I be bothered to give a fuck about people who clearly have zero connection with the reality of their constituents?

Celebrity is a common aspiration but do you honestly want that life? Privacy would be impossible and you’d have to be hyper considerate of every move you made for the rest of your life. Imagine a room of 100 people you don’t know staring directly at you, hoping you’ll look back. Now multiply it by 100,000. How quickly do you want to leave this imaginary room? But you can’t, because that’s your life now.

Fashion has never interested me because I am too utilitarian. Even as I wrote this I was going to mention it as a part of my particular form of masculinity, but it is a little more than that. It isn’t just because I’m a man that I could give a fuck about my attire looking smart at all times. I live a simple life and that requires simple choices with clothing. Does it serve a function? Then it can be included. Is it for looks alone? Then it can be safely placed in the mountainous “never” pile. Makes me sound old and boring, two distinctions I’m not afraid of.

Sports have been an axe I’ve never stopped grinding. What in the actual fuck is with our collective obsession with sports? People base their entire identities around teams of talented, athletic millionaires who have nothing in common with them. I live in a college town in the Midwest. Notre Dame is a prestigious university catering to super qualified candidates from all over the country. The people I see sporting Notre Dame gear around here have never set foot in a college classroom but they have this imagined sense of entitlement. Like their proximity to something great makes them greater. It doesn’t. This form of insanity is one I will never be able to wrap my mind around, I fear. It is only a fear because it makes it harder for me to relate to a huge portion of the population.

Finance quickly places all of us into the categories of “have” and “have not”. The articles and news I see are almost always about imaginary people living imaginary lives. It always feels like an angle is being worked to sell something to the exact people who don’t need to be buying anything. If it’s about retirement, then it leaves a whole bunch of us out because I think that ship sailed long ago. Want to talk about finance? Let’s talk about how many people spend their entire lives with car payments. Or about how even the fortunate few who pay off their mortgage still have to rent the land it’s on from the government forever. If money is your god you picked the wrong religion and hell is on earth.

I am happy not to be a player in these insane games. But I do look out and watch the world go by and wonder if any of them feel the same.

There seem to be countless websites out here telling prospective writers that a quick way to monetize their creativity is to write about writing. Write about the business of writing and how to best navigate those obstacles.

When you have zero of the requisite knowledge about the business of writing, it is impossible to write about how to acquire said knowledge. This feels like a sick joke to weed out those among us who don’t have the stomach for the more unsavory (cheap) things we have to do to make a living at this craft.

This is, of course, if the person in question is a generalist. Specialists can cater entirely to a niche market and monetize with relative success. Unfortunately I find myself in the former category. Any specialized knowledge I possess is the kind I wouldn’t want to sell for a living, as it has to do with the career I hated but kept because it was a safe play. If the decision is safety or meaning, I choose meaning every time. Every time I make that choice, I simultaneously bolster my principals and condemn my chances at traditional measures of success.

Life is a series of choices: some simple, some complicated. Making my first priority to live a principled life makes for more complicated choices, but greater perceived satisfaction with the outcomes.

In my opening research of the gigs available to entry-level writers, I am noticing recurring themes. For blog writing, it is all about making sure to cleverly disguise all of the keywords the client needs in their posts. They are telling you what to write, but not how to write it.

Since these are, albeit low, paying gigs, it is writing for money. But I see this as shady or disingenuous for some reason.

The irony is not lost on me here.

I am trying to make a living getting paid for the words I choose and the order I place them in. If someone else tells me the words and anything about the order, I see it as somehow less valid. This is a ridiculous stance to take, as it sets me up for failure. It makes it hard, if not impossible, to distinguish between the two types of writing, and I cheapen both of them in my mind. Then I convince myself that my original pieces will be to achieve the same, hollow goals. If I can effectively convince myself of this made up fact, I stop writing entirely and part of me dies, death of a thousand cuts style.

It is incredibly easy to get into your own head about what you put out into the world, create arguments for why it should never see the light of day, and perform a conceptual abortion. It’s a good deal harder to be completely vulnerable and release what aches to be out of you.

I push myself further every day to find the courage to be completely vulnerable.

Since my dad passed away in February, I’ve been writing a fictionalized version of the events he had to live through. I wasn’t able to occupy his mind or body during the two months he was in the hospital. This much is obvious. But it is my intention to give him a proper eulogy through this story.

I will write everything I know to be true about who dad was and do my very best to write it from his point of view, in his voice. It will be a short story since it only comprises of two real months of time, but it will have all I can give to the loss.

Honoring dad is important to me. Honoring him in my way would have been important to him.

In my search for writing gigs, a problem of conscience comes up.

If I start writing content aimed at directing traffic and adding eyeballs to sales material, am I a part of the problem? Does my contribution to this meaningless traffic undercut any inherent value my writing has in the future? Or do I just accept this is a rite of passage to do what I want to do? Is there any way of knowing the real cost to my integrity after I’ve released the posts to the world?

It’s entirely possible I’m overthinking this to sabotage myself. Something about the work I’m applying for feels cheap, but the work I’d go do in real life is somehow even cheaper. Getting a regular, 9-5 grind job would provide nothing of value to the world AND it would make me hate my life. Writing content, even meaningless content, lets me do what I love and get paid for it. It feels as though the art is in being able to separate the feelings the cheapness causes, and transmuting those feelings into something beautiful.

This space will remain dedicated to transmutation. If my creative soul is on the line, I’ll go down swinging.

Since I’ve decided to pursue my future in writing, it occurs to me how little I know. Thankfully I enjoy researching. I believe we are always better off for having learned new things and this is no exception.

As with so many potential directions, it can be hard to know where to begin. Since I am pursuing gigs in the digital space, I consistently see information regarding SEO. The birds-eye view of the concept is just to get specific words into your content to better rank you in search results. Better placement in results means more traffic. This seems like a relevant strategy from a bystander’s point of view. I can count a handful of times where I got beyond the 2nd or 3rd page of search results and it was only because I wanted to learn every possible thing about a topic.

The first page results told me all I needed to know. Every page beyond that was a casualty of too much information.

The places I am applying to appear to be content farms who are aiming at optimizing their place in this pecking order. The blog posts will be targeted at targeting. The entire purpose of these posts will be to rank higher than the competition and as a result of the traffic, make more sales. What they are selling? Who knows. Most of the work will be ghostwritten, so my name won’t be attached to it. For better or worse, no one will know I was involved except me.

This does make it feel like the work is cheap or even meaningless, but I know this is part of the “hard work” in this field. I’m not afraid of hard work and at least I’m going to get paid for something I create. Chalk it up to necessary evil.