Unfocused Life, Unfocused Blog

For a long time now, I’ve felt unfocused in my life.  Professionally, things are going well, chugging along at a decent pace while keeping me busy.  Personally, my spark has been missing (which I will chalk up, in part, to my environment) and I’ve been feeling unfulfilled in a creative sense.  Work provides some mental stimulation, but really, it pays the bills and isn’t supposed to give me a feeling of satisfaction beyond a job well done.  The nerd is alive and flourishing, leaving the artsy side to languish in disuse.

Thankfully, I’ve been able to keep up a decent run with my blog, writing in spite of its lack of focus as well.  This doesn’t just affect me personally, it affects any of my attempts at building a readership.  Without a clear message being delivered (I write about THESE things and I do so regularly), it’s hard for people that don’t already know me to relate.  Currently my subject matter ranges from writing related posts (even though I’m not published) to whatever pops out of my head that day.  Output like that will not have them itching to check for new content every day.  Celebrities get away with that because fame is what lures you in.  If I’m lucky I’ll be added to a RSS reader, where my sporadic posts can be assimilated with the hundreds of others in queue and then casually scanned before being marked as read.

A good friend of mine (and author) told me the key to my fiction is to figure out what I want to say.  My technique was good enough to convey a story, but was missing the passion of a message dying to be told.  That advice—as good and truthful as it was—paralyzed my fiction writing for almost a month.  I was having a hard enough time coming up with story ideas that didn’t fall apart within the first few paragraphs.  Now I had to make sure I was actually saying something worth writing down.  Since then the last time I dove in passionately was the Flash Fiction Carnival in August, not very prolific to say the least.  He understood what I wanted to achieve was more than simply putting a "cool idea" on paper and was only trying to help make me a better storyteller, not encase my mind in writer’s block, yet I couldn’t help repeating his advice in my head like an OCD mantra. 

Granted, many stories which are successful (some novels and series as well) don’t have strong messages hidden in them.  It doesn’t make them bad per se, just more along the line of beach books.  Only when lining up several of these efforts next to each other do you notice the lack of underlying passion.  You can see it in painfully commercial films by the same director, performances from actors "phoning it in" for the paycheck and novelists cashing in on their earlier bestsellers by rehashing plots.  Success is achieved (relatively), monies accrued and notches put in belts.  They move on to the next thing without ever looking back.  That might work for me in the short term, getting me some sort of momentum, but eventually it would catch up with me. 

Which brings me back to my lack of focus.  Without drive in my creative efforts, I’m just strolling along waiting for something to happen.  Like Hugh McLeod (from gapingvoid.com) so eloquently puts:

 

"If your biz plan depends on you sud­denly being ‘dis­co­ve­red’ by some big shot, your plan will pro­bably fail. Nobody sud­denly dis­co­vers anything. Things are made slowly and in pain."

 

By the end of October I’ll have kept this blog going for 6 months (which is another post altogether), but other than allow me to clock in 33,755 words written, it hasn’t done much else.  You may say 6 months isn’t a long enough time to accomplish anything.  I beg to differ.  If you’re 100% focused in what you’re trying to accomplish, then you’ll kick ass in amazing ways.  

 

Man vs. Debt

Man vs. Debt is a good example of the obsessive focus needed to make your mark.  Adam Baker’s burning desire to eliminate the mountain of debt his typical American lifestyle had accumulated ($80,000 in non-mortgage debt alone), not only shot him halfway across the world, but led him to chronicle the adventure along the way.  On his blog’s six month anniversary he posted a fantastic article titled "How NOT To Suck At Blogging" which is a 4,000 word blueprint of how he’s achieved this runaway success. With 97 comments on that post, 3,693 followers on Twitter and almost 2,000 folks subscribing to his RSS feed, I can safely say the strength of his message is working.  Did I mention this was accomplished in 6 months?

 

The Art of Nonconformity

Maybe 6 months is too short of a time and he’s just a fluke.  Is 9 months more reasonable, because that’s how long it took Chris Guillebeau to transition his life into being a fulltime writer.  His blog The Art of Nonconformity chronicles his passion for helping others through his writing, living life without boundaries and traveling to every country in the world before his 35th birthday.  His e-book "279 Days to Overnight Success" details how he created his blog with the goal of supporting himself thru writing for it fulltime.  To say this man is focused is an understatement.  His stats are equally solid with 292 comments on his "Overnight Success" book and 19,052 followers on Twitter.

 

Both are excellent cases of what intense, passionate focus and a strong message can achieve.  It’s not even the numbers that are impressive as much as the following these guys have cultivated.  Chris fully supports himself through the e-books and real books he puts out.  Adam is poised to easily parlay his story into book deals and lucrative endorsement scenarios. 

So far I’m an excellent case of how lacking focus can let you write over 30,000 words without saying much.  I know it’ll eventually come to me, through my continued writings (blog & fiction) and in moving my life toward more creative endeavors.  In the meantime I’ll just have to stomach the frustration and fumbling in the dark. 

Thanks for stomaching my rant and letting me vent into the void.

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Tagged as: Adam Baker, Chris Guillebeau, Creativity, Hugh MacLeod, Unfocused, Writing