Pic from Advertising Week – digital storytelling presentation
The lines to get into the sessions at Advertising Week are long. People begin to queue in The Times Center 30 minutes before the start of each one. This makes for an opportunity to chat with people I might not otherwise meet. I ask them about their businesses, their marketing challenges, and what they hope to learn in these sessions. They’re quick to tell me the good stuff – the popularity of their brands and the ideas that went right. What’s more interesting to the writer in me lies in the grey messy mass of TBD initiatives.
One Director of Advertising at a large consumer packaged goods company told me that they’ve made a fortune on the back of an animated character who represents the illness their OTC medicine is meant to eliminate. Now in the age of social media, consumers want to interact with that character but since he is the animated representation of the illness, he’s not going to sell product for them via Facebook.
“So what are going to do?” I asked.
“That’s a good question,” he said. “We have no idea. We fight a lot over it.”
If I was at Advertising Week representing a company, I don’t know that I would be so bold as to ask pointed questions without easy answers. It’s liberating to be there to dig, write, and illuminate the stories that are not so readily seen. It’s freeing to be there as someone just trying to learn rather than someone who’s trying to teach. It’s fun to be marketed to instead of being the one doing the marketing.
Every writer, regardless of genre, benefits from writing and reading fiction. Fiction is the place we go to find light when everything around us seems so dark. It’s our playground where anything and everything is possible. Fiction helps us to connect with our mind’s deepest secrets and desires. It’s a gateway to higher consciousness.
This weekend I started reading The Age of Miracles by Karen Thompson Walker. I can hardly put it down and when I do, I can’t stop thinking about it. It’s one of those books that lives with you for a long time. Its bizarre tale unfolds through the eyes of Julia, a grown woman who reflects back on her youth just before and just after a fantastical event that turns the entire world on its head. It reminded me of the value of purely fictional stories and the role they play in our real lives.
Our lives are largely works of fiction – stories we make up, stories we tell to others, and stories that others tell us. The events of our lives run through a filter that colors them, changes them, gives them meaning. That filter is responsible for our individual human experience. In this way, fiction doesn’t mean “false”; it means “with perspective”. The words of fictions are some of the truest words we can ever read or write because they come so directly and purely from the heart. Maybe that’s what makes it so difficult to write; maybe that’s why it sticks with us for so long.
File this one under things that make me immensely grateful. I looked at my slate of writing for this week and it includes:
1.) Making 9/11 a national holiday
2.) How to ask for help when in the midst of personal crisis
3.) Yoga
4.) Apartment Hunting in NYC
5.) How to maintain top website load times
6.) Health-supportive cooking
7.) Yoga
8.) Doggie daycare and boarding
9.) The value of digital marketing for start-ups
10.) Drones for journalism
11.) Pest control
12.) Voice-controlled image editing
13.) Book reviews – how to get press for your start-up, how computer programmers maintain a healthy lifestyle, and learn to program by building video games
14.) A fundraising appeal letter for an animal shelter
And then I’m going to wrap up the next edits for my first full-length play and work on Your Second Step. This is the life and career I’ve always dreamed of. Gratitude doesn’t even begin to explain how I feel. I wish for everyone, everywhere to have a heart this full.
Have something you want me to write about? I’d love to hear from you!
When Julia Child was 37 (the age I am now), she began to cook because she loved to eat. She had no prior experience in the kitchen, and yet she gave herself over fully to the craft that captured her imagination. It took her a long time to reach the success she ultimately had as a cook, but she kept at it even in the most trying times and circumstances.
Julia Child was lucky financially in that her husband had a very good job and she wasn’t on the hook for her own rent. I have to keep a roof over my own head (and Phin’s) and food on the table (and in Phin’s bowl.) So I will have to continue to work in the vocation of business (which I love) in order to do that – for now. But here’s the difference going forward – it’s all in service to my craft as a writer.
I’ve been writing every day, on the side, for 6 years and I’ve loved every second of it. This summer, I wrote my first full-length play and worked on full outlines for several other writing projects. The goal is to eventually write full-time. I don’t know long it will take to make that happen but that’s what I’m working for and towards. I don’t know how long it will take – it could be a dream many years in the making – but that’s the mountain I’m climbing, small step by small step. And I’m fine with however long this journey takes. That clarity is liberating and empowering.
In early 2009, I started writing a business column for Examiner.com. Over the course of 15 months, I published 130 articles, many of them interviews with entrepreneurs. Invigorated and inspired by President Obama’s election, I wanted to lend a hand to entrepreneurs who courageously moved forward during the darkest days of the economic recession. I knew I could do that through my writing. I also wanted to find the courage to start my own business so I thought interviewing brave entrepreneurs would help me, too. A number of them became friends of mine; all of them provided me with the inspiration and confidence I needed to strike out on my own. Quite a few of them – OXO, Airbnb, Behance, Squarespace, and Divvyshot among them – have gone on to experience phenomenal success. I wrote first e-book based on 27 of these stories. You can download that book for free here.
I stopped publishing on Examiner in mid-2010. Since then, I’ve been involved with a lot of different ventures and Examiner.com has grown substantially. Now I’m returning to it to honor and serve entrepreneurs again. Even though I stopped publishing, Examiner never removed my column. You can still see all of the pieces I wrote from 2009 – 2010 and starting today you will be able to read all my new features going forward. Today’s piece is my SXSW V2V wrap-up. I’ll publish the links to all my future stories on this blog, my Facebook page, and my Twitter feed. You can also subscribe to my column by clicking here.
Singer Robin Thicke has something to celebrate. After 10 years in the business, the 36-year old has his first #1 album with Blurred Lines. His first album never got out of the triple digits. Think Thicke has grit to stick with it for all these years? The band Black Sabbath recorded music for 46 years before their album, 13, hit #1 in June. The crackerjack team over at Rovio Entertainment created the wildly popular app, Angry Birds, after creating 51 other apps.
Age has nothing to do with it Hollywood, Broadway, Silicon Valley, and American Idol have created a culture obsessed with youth. The wild rise of Steve Jobs, Mark Zuckerberg, and other tech moguls in their 20s has caused a dangerous and unfortunate fixation on youth among the venture and investor community. Many VCs and investors refuse to even hear the startup pitches of any founders older than 30. We bemoan getting older and so we nip, tuck, pluck, lie about our age, and workout to the point of breaking our bodies, never happy with how we look or where we are along life’s path. Robin Thicke is 36. Ozzy Osbourne is 64. Peter Vesterbacka, one of the Angry Birds creators, is 44. If you think you have to be at the top of your field before you see your first wrinkle or gray hair, think again.
Success takes time and talent
When we aren’t as successful as we’d like to be at something right off the bat, we often throw in the towel. Too often and too soon, we sulk back to our homes, hide under our beds, and hope for brighter days ahead. Sometimes we resign ourselves to the idea that time has passed us by. Don’t do that. Figure out what worked, what didn’t work, and try again with this knowledge in-hand.
If your work isn’t its own reward, then find other work
Success is a personal and daily process. Even if I never receive any kind of critical acclaim as a writer, I’ll never think of the time I spend writing as a waste and I’ll never stop writing. The act of writing, putting my story out there and knowing that it helps others, is all the reward I ever need from it. Certainly critical success on a large scale would be lovely, but I don’t sit down every day and write with that as a goal. I’m trying to tell a story as honestly and as clearly as possible. If you’re working only for external rewards, you are wasting your time and setting yourself up for enormous disappointment.
If you found work you love, stick with it. If you get up every day, excited to create something, then keep creating. If your work fills your heart as it grows your portfolio, then you’re on the right track.
Ira Glass, I love you. I love you for so honestly putting it out there: storytelling is a craft, an art, and it takes a really long time to get good at it. And the only way to get good is to try over and over and over again. Write. Write. Write. There is no substitute for practice. There’s no shortcut. It takes blood, sweat, tears, and time.
Thank you for encouraging writers everywhere to keep going. Check out Ira’s video:
I’m learning this lesson in spades this summer. I’m in the midst of working on a handful of stories that have been churning in the depths of my mind for years. I’ve worked on them in fits and starts, stopping short when I would hit a roadblock that I couldn’t figure out how to remove. And so they’ve sat, unexplored and never shared.
“I’ll think of something eventually. I’ll meditate on it. I’ll just leave it alone and somehow it will fix itself.” I would try to make myself feel better with these affirmations. Really, they are just excuses.
The thinking doesn’t help. The meditating doesn’t help. The leaving it alone doesn’t help. The only thing that fixes writing is more writing. Yes, you have to lean into your writing, especially when you don’t know what to do.
You have to say to hell with the fear of writing garbage. All writers write garbage. It’s part of the process. It gets edited out later. Ditch the fear of being a screw up, of being wrong, fear of putting crap on the page and having it stare back at you. Write anything and everything that comes into your mind. The devil, and the answers to my roadblocks, are in the details and those details only step into the light through writing.
Once I committed to take action, I stopped being a writer and transformed into an observer. I follow my characters around as they tip-toe, stomp, saunter, skip, hop, and run through my imagination and the world they create in it. Rather than writing a story, I decided to trust my characters; those highly flawed, beautiful, totally irrational beings create something much more authentic and poignant for themselves than I can build for them. I set them free and let them act the way they want to act and do the things they want to do. They mess up. They hurt each other, and themselves. My instinct is to protect them like I protect my friends and my family, but that doesn’t serve anyone and it’s not my place.
I love Anne Lamott. She is among my favorite writers because of her raw, honest turn of phrase and her fearlessness that allows her to cut right to the chase. In her efforts to thoroughly understand herself, she is a mirror for her readers.
In 2009, she wrote this gorgeous article in O, The Oprah Magazine, about how to be who you are meant to be. Her advice is this: stop. Figure out what to stop doing, who to stop pleasing, and where you don’t need to be. It’s akin to the advice that learning what not to do gets us closer to figuring out what to do. And then I would also add that you meditate because while you may be able to stop physically, you need to also give your brain a break from its tireless whirr of thoughts.
Enjoy this article and then tuck it away in your folder labeled “inspiring writing to read when I’m feeling down on my luck.” You are not alone in the pursuit of your own greatness; we’re all here with you, doing exactly the same thing.
“We begin to find and become ourselves when we notice how we are already found, already truly, entirely, wildly, messily, marvelously who we were born to be. The only problem is that there is also so much other stuff, typically fixations with how people perceive us, how to get more of the things that we think will make us happy, and with keeping our weight down. So the real issue is how do we gently stop being who we aren’t? How do we relieve ourselves of the false fronts of people-pleasing and affectation, the obsessive need for power and security, the backpack of old pain, and the psychic Spanx that keeps us smaller and contained?
Here’s how I became myself: mess, failure, mistakes, disappointments, and extensive reading; limbo, indecision, setbacks, addiction, public embarrassment, and endless conversations with my best women friends; the loss of people without whom I could not live, the loss of pets that left me reeling, dizzying betrayals but much greater loyalty, and overall, choosing as my motto William Blake’s line that we are here to learn to endure the beams of love.
Oh, yeah, and whenever I could, for as long as I could, I threw away the scales and the sugar.
When I was a young writer, I was talking to an old painter one day about how he came to paint his canvases. He said that he never knew what the completed picture would look like, but he could usually see one quadrant. So he’d make a stab at capturing what he saw on the canvas of his mind, and when it turned out not to be even remotely what he’d imagined, he’d paint it over with white. And each time he figured out what the painting wasn’t, he was one step closer to finding out what it was.
You have to make mistakes to find out who you aren’t. You take the action, and the insight follows: You don’t think your way into becoming yourself.
I can’t tell you what your next action will be, but mine involved a full stop. I had to stop living unconsciously, as if I had all the time in the world. The love and good and the wild and the peace and creation that are you will reveal themselves, but it is harder when they have to catch up to you in roadrunner mode. So one day I did stop. I began consciously to break the rules I learned in childhood: I wasted more time, as a radical act. I stared off into space more, into the middle distance, like a cat. This is when I have my best ideas, my deepest insights. I wasted more paper, printing out instead of reading things on the computer screen. (Then I sent off more small checks to the Sierra Club.)
Every single day I try to figure out something I no longer agree to do. You get to change your mind—your parents may have accidentally forgotten to mention this to you. I cross one thing off the list of projects I mean to get done that day. I don’t know all that many things that are positively true, but I do know two things for sure: first of all, that no woman over the age of 40 should ever help anyone move, ever again, under any circumstances. You have helped enough. You can say no. No is a complete sentence. Or you might say, “I can’t help you move because of certain promises I have made to myself, but I would be glad to bring sandwiches and soda to everyone on your crew at noon.” Obviously, it is in many people’s best interest for you not to find yourself, but it only matters that it is in yours—and your back’s—and the whole world’s, to proceed.
And, secondly, you are probably going to have to deal with whatever fugitive anger still needs to be examined—it may not look like anger; it may look like compulsive dieting or bingeing or exercising or shopping. But you must find a path and a person to help you deal with that anger. It will not be a Hallmark card. It is not the yellow brick road, with lovely trees on both sides, constant sunshine, birdsong, friends. It is going to be unbelievably hard some days—like the rawness of birth, all that blood and those fluids and shouting horrible terrible things—but then there will be that wonderful child right in the middle. And that wonderful child is you, with your exact mind and butt and thighs and goofy greatness.
Dealing with your rage and grief will give you life. That is both the good news and the bad news: The solution is at hand. Wherever the great dilemma exists is where the great growth is, too. It would be very nice for nervous types like me if things were black-and-white, and you could tell where one thing ended and the next thing began, but as Einstein taught us, everything in the future and the past is right here now. There’s always something ending and something beginning. Yet in the very center is the truth of your spiritual identity: is you. Fabulous, hilarious, darling, screwed-up you. Beloved of God and of your truest deepest self, the self that is revealed when tears wash off the makeup and grime. The self that is revealed when dealing with your anger blows through all the calcification in your soul’s pipes. The self that is reflected in the love of your very best friends’ eyes. The self that is revealed in divine feminine energy, your own, Bette Midler’s, Hillary Clinton’s, Tina Fey’s, Michelle Obama’s, Mary Oliver’s. I mean, you can see that they are divine, right? Well, you are, too. I absolutely promise. I hope you have gotten sufficiently tired of hitting the snooze button; I know that what you need or need to activate in yourself will appear; I pray that your awakening comes with ease and grace, and stamina when the going gets hard. To love yourself as you are is a miracle, and to seek yourself is to have found yourself, for now. And now is all we have, and love is who we are.”
“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.” ~ Charles Buxton, British brewer, philanthropist, writer and legislator
Now that I’m on the downside of an intense freelance assignment that helped me cover all of my living expenses with consulting work within 6 months of going on my own, I’ve given myself an additional 6 months to make a go of this freelance life. The first 6 months was about simply proving that I could make ends meet out on my own. The next 6 months will take on a more strategic approach.
I’ve been thinking a lot about bigger life goals for this next 6 months rather than short-term skills I’d like to enhance or short-term experiences I’d like to gain. For example, I have a few writing projects floating around in my mind. Some of them are close to 15 years old. As I went to my yoga class yesterday, I began thinking about them and my initial reaction was “if only I had the space in my mind and in my calendar to work on them.” That thought stopped me in my tracks. If I don’t have the time to pursue them now, when I have maximum flexibility with my schedule, then when am I going to pursue them?
On the subway to yoga, this quote by Charles Buxton flew into my inbox. Alright Universe, I hear you. Thanks for the reminder – we are capable of making all the time we need to do the things we really want to do.
“You will never find time for anything. If you want time you must make it.” ~ Charles Buxton, British brewer, philanthropist, writer and legislator
Christa Avampato 