Tag: writing

Writing to be read

Last week I had a short humor piece published in McSweeney's Internet Tendency. It's been exciting not only because I adore McSweeney's as a publication and am honored to have a byline there, but also because it reminds me how fun it is to have my writing distributed for others to read. And, it's the second time it's happened that way in as many weeks.

I've had that excitement to some degree or another in a few other places: as a reporter and editor for my high school and college newspapers, as a writer for a satirical high school publication (called The Hierarchy of the Zucchini People, naturally), having some creative writing accepted into literary magazines, as an occasional columnist for my local city newspaper, and as a long-time blogger.

Still, I've been conflicted at times about calling myself a writer. And while I subscribe to the notion that one can be a thriving writer even if no one is reading your stuff, it does feel pretty nice when the universe affirms the value of something I've written.

Yes, this website is a largely built around my writing, my longest standing byline of them all. And some of my posts here have seen thousands of views in a day when they're linked from Hacker News or Reddit. But most of the time there are a few hundred visits per day at most, and many of those are to the same handful of technical articles; I don't publish here consistently enough to draw much of a regular readership. It's easy to think of it as "just a blog."

So If I'd posted the above humor piece on this site and linked to it from my Twitter account, I'm guessing it may have been seen by tens or maybe hundreds of people. I might have gotten a comment or two, maybe a few likes from my Twitter followers, and that would be fine.

By publishing on McSweeney's, it's been very different. My own tweet about the piece has been viewed over 13,000 times, the link clicked many hundreds of times. It's also been fun to see other people sharing and discussing the link on Twitter, and presumably on other platforms too.

Most commenters see it as "that new bit from McSweeney's" and not anything from me in particular, just as we tend to associate writing from The Onion or The New York Times with the publication more than the author. That's okay with me - I'm happy to contribute to what McSweeney's is and does in that way.

It also makes me appreciate publications that are open to submissions and that lift up writing done outside of the traditional publishing model (Longreads, part of the Automattic family, not least among them).

I plan to continue putting most of my public writing on my various personal websites. But I have lots of ideas for other publications and media that I could submit to and work with, and myriad notes on possible book topics, editorials, screenplays, journalism projects, short stories and more that I'd love to pursue. Seeing my writing being enjoyed by others certainly encourages me to spend more time on all that, and to live further into the part of my identity that is and probably always has been, "writer."

Article on Strong Towns

I've been enjoy and appreciating the articles on Strong Towns for a while now. They bring a provocative and practical long-term view to the conversation about how cities and towns in North America can become strong and resilient. Their mission and approach line up so well with the advocacy work I've done in my own community, and the thinking that I see leading to great results in communities around the world.

Now it's an honor to have one of my own essays on community building appear in Strong Towns. I wrote about how to get a response from local leaders when you need to get something done. Most of what I write on RichmondMatters.com is specific to life in Richmond, Indiana, but in this case it turned out that with a few refinements to the original article, the information might be relevant to a national audience.

I hope it helps someone out there find a way forward on positive change they're pursuing in their own town.

Figuring out what to write

I've started about five or six different posts this past week, but none of them have made it to "Publish." No matter how firmly I was convinced when I sat down to write that I would make it through to the end, one of these blogging insecurities always managed to creep in. I was even trashing drafts of tweets, sure that I would just waste some of the most frequently wasted digital space. Ugh.

I want to write about elections and politics in the U.S. But I have spent so much time reading other people's commentary and I'm in such a dark place about finding any hope in political systems that I just don't have anything all that constructive to say.

I want to write about the people I know who have recently died of cancer, or who are struggling with it right now. But I don't have the patience to find words that move through the anger and sadness toward something good, or even useful.

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Getting started owning your digital home

My recent post about owning our digital homes prompted some good feedback and discussion. When I talk about this topic with the people in my life who don't work daily in the world of websites, domain names and content management, the most common reaction I get is, "that's sounds good in theory, I'm not sure where to start in practice."

So, here are some of the basic things that pretty much anyone can do to get started having and owning your digital home.

Find a domain name

On the Internet, your domain name is the root of your digital existence. It's the address on your home, your entry in the phonebook, the shingle you hang out so that anyone and everyone can find you. While the domain name system (DNS) has changed a lot over the years, it's still the starting point for establishing a long-term presence on the Internet that you control, independent of other tools, services and providers you might use.

My domain name is "chrishardie.com." It's not only the URL/address of my website, but it's the domain where my primary email address lives. Whatever content management tool might power my website at any given time, and whatever server my email might live on or whatever email program I might use to read messages, I will always have my domain name to point me and others to those places.

Having a domain name is relatively inexpensive; in most cases it's $10-15/year, less if you register it for multiple years at a time. When I see people who pick email addresses derived from their Internet Service Provider (e.g. Comcast, Verizon) or from some free online email provider like Gmail, and then see the time it takes them to inform friends, co-workers and family when they change that address to something else, I know it's worth those few dollars to have a consistent address that doesn't change unless I want it to, and that doesn't depend on someone else's business model to exist at all.

In my opinion, your domain name should be something personalized, but not so specific to where you live, how you make a living, or what you find interesting right now that it will become outdated when you move to a new place, change jobs or update your interests. Your domain name doesn't even need to mean anything at all, as long as it's memorable enough for you and the people you share it with. If you're having trouble finding a domain name you like, this generator will help with some ideas.

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Owning our digital homes

Over the course of my life, I've built few things that reside permanently in the physical world. There's a small foot-bridge over a winding creek a few miles from where I live that I helped to bolt together. There's a school building in southern Alabama whose ceiling joists I helped frame in. I weathered a few splinters to help build the deck on our house. A few half-finished knitting projects linger. I've installed a window here, hammered some metal in a forge there.

Beyond these and some similarly inconsequential offerings, most of my life's work and creations have come in the form of things published in the digital world: essays, photos, lines of code, blog posts, songs, podcasts, and database rows. Where a carpenter might wander the streets of his city admiring the houses he built, I must wander the hard drives, websites, .zip/.tar archives and code repositories of my world to remember what I've created.

Where these digital products of my life and work reside, who has control of and ownership over them, and how long they might persist is important to me.

This is why I try to use this site, chrishardie.com, along with a few other carefully chosen services to make up my digital home. It's part of why I love WordPress as a tool for publishing. And it's why I worry about others who take for granted that the digital things they create will always be there, accessible, under their control, searchable/viewable in a way that makes sense to them.

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Blogging insecurities

(In a future post I'll discuss this list and where it fits into my own experience of writing and blogging. For now, I give you a partial list of blogging insecurities as collected from many conversations over the years about what keeps us from hitting "Publish" - please comment to add others you've encountered.)

What if my words doesn't make sense?

What if someone else has already written a better post about this topic?

What if my post is too long?

What if my post is too short?

What if the moment has passed?

Should I update or replace my WordPress theme before writing this?

My TTFB seems high, maybe I should fix that before publishing?

Maybe I need a new keyboard that will help me write better?

What if there's some more important use of my time?

What if I'm not meant to be a writer?

What if I offend someone with my views?

What if I don't challenge or provoke any useful conversation with my views?

What if this post is too personal?

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Interview with author David Ebenbach

davidebenbachOne of the things I appreciate most about living near a small, excellent liberal arts college is that it brings amazing people with amazing talents into my community, even if for just a short while. Sometimes I only get to encounter them for a single lecture, presentation or performance, but other times I'm fortunate to make deeper connections that continue on.

I'm glad that when author David Ebenbach was teaching at Earlham College a few years ago, there were opportunities to become friends with him and his family, and to start to get a sense of his love of (and gift for) the craft of writing. David now teaches at Georgetown University and he has published a number of books including Into the Wilderness, a collection of short fiction, and The Artists Torah, a guide to the creative process. David's written many different stories, poems and essays that appear in print and online.

As someone who enjoys good writing, aspires to do more writing myself, and who follows some of the "behind the scenes" in the world of authors and publishing, I was excited for the opportunity to interview David. We got to talk about his experiences as a writer, his take on modern publishing, and his own creative process: Continue reading "Interview with author David Ebenbach" →

Writer's block

One of my favorite magazines, and one of the only ones I subscribe to, is The Sun. It's an ad-free publication of interviews, short stories, poems, and reader-submitted material that tends to engage the human experience in really amazing ways. It's sort of a hidden treasure in the world of magazines - either people tend to love it, or have never heard of it. They have a section every month called "Readers Write," where they pick a theme and ask readers to submit personal stories and experiences that relate to that theme.

Almost every month, I see the list of themes and think about what I would write about. I start to compose the words in my head. And then I look at the submission deadline for that topic (usually just weeks away) and then at the publication target for accepted pieces (usually many months away), and I tell myself that I'll come back to it later to actually send something in.

I've been a subscriber of the Sun since 1999, and I have not yet gotten around to submitting anything to them. I'm not sure if it's because I can't experience the instant gratification of having my writing accepted (or rejected) like I can with a weblog. Or maybe it's because I still have such a hard time letting myself write about things that other people are writing about. Or maybe it's because I know I would be submitting something for someone else to judge or value, and I'm not confident or vulnerable enough. Or maybe it's pure laziness, apathy.

Whatever it is, it's a form of writer's block that seems ridiculous and intimidating to me, yet very important to overcome.

When it's all already been said

One of the things that is difficult for me to deal with in the world of blogging and even just editorial/public writing in general is that for any given issue, it often feels like every possible perspective has been rendered by others in so many different ways well before *I* get to that issue. This has gotten "worse" with the advent of blogging, where those viewpoints are often published within minutes or hours of any given piece of information becoming available. So by the time I develop an opinion about something, I'm often left with the sense that it would be a waste of my time to say roughly the same things that have already been said, with only a minor degree of personalized presentation.
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