trying something new

“Of course you’re not sure it’s going to work. How could you?” – Seth Godin

I’m reading The Practice by Seth Godin, and it’s dense. Pithy. Deserves a slow read or multiple rereads, because every sentence packs power.

But what I’ve gotten from it as far as I’ve read is if we want guaranteed results, we follow a recipe someone else prepared. We do the same formula that has been done before and proven to work out. We are, essentially, corporate drones.

I don’t actually feel that there is anything necessarily bad about corporate drones. If I’m buying something from a brand, I expect it to be a certain way. I want my Band-Aid to be sterile and stick to my skin, my pizza from ChiChis to taste like ChiChi’s pizza, and my lip color to be as advertised. The production can be repeated. Indeed, it’s desirable.

It doesn’t work that way for creativity, though. At least not for me. And not for writing.

I spent all last month writing a book for National Novel Writing Month—and I have no idea if it’s going to work. How could I?

While I’m aware that there are charts and graphs for plotting fiction, beat sheets and story markers, at some point, I was just on my own writing about something that I felt like writing about. Just because. (It was a dark academia mm student-teacher interracial romance set in 1947, if you must know.) I’m going to set it aside and finish something else, but I needed to just be purely creative for a month. Let myself not do something with the end result of a commercial product. To be, like Seth Godin says, fly fishing without a hook. I was just practicing the cast.

I feel that way about this blog. I tend to have certain topics I return to over and over—mental health, writing, sort of self-help-y stuff—because that’s what’s on my mind. But I don’t know if this blog is going to work out. If “what I feel like writing a blog post on” is sufficient branding to make a blog.

But I guess I don’t know any other way. I simply do not want to write all the time on a predetermined topic. I want to write about things I’m excited about. Only thing is, I don’t know if it will work out. How could I?

I do hope that those of you reading will find a nugget in here somewhere that you can carry around with you. That by reading something I write you will in fact feel heard—an interesting phenomenon.

But will it work out? I have no idea.