Day 35 of 100 Days of Blogging: Textured Perfection
I started this blogging exercise after being pitched by my creative partner Andre, that marketing guru Seth Goddin had created this challenge as a prompt to encourage writers to work on the craft…..I hadn’t yet joined the cult of Seth G. but something intuitively inspired me to take the exercise bait.
I’ve been engaging with Seth’s work now despite my initial reservations about taking advice from yet another white male pop icon, but also trusted Dre’s recommendation, and as I began engaging his work, I realized that he does have a special thing about the way he thinks in terms of systems and impact.
Now this isn’t a blog simply to gush about Seth Goddin, I’m sure there’s plenty of other blogs, articles and reviews to do that but one thing that I love about the way Seth talks about his success is not skirting around “The Work”. Seth reiterates the process of doing a thing until you become proficient at it, and in writing and art, doing a thing until you find your own unique voice. So often, successful people skirt over the painstaking efforts and labors that were invested to achieve their success or perhaps its easy for an onlooker to forget to pattern recognize all of the work that was invested to build something or for an artist to discover their voice. Seth continuously encourages his audience to get back to work, and get back to the exercise of working in you craft. When I take this mindset about blogging and writing habitually in general, it allows me to distance myself from feeling the pressure of every piece of writing needing to feel like my magnum opus.
With so much digital space and so many voices being given platform, I historically have gotten discouraged from even working on my writing craft by the daunting reality of my work being just another grain of sand in the beach that is the internet. What I’m starting to understand about developing oneself as an artist and finding authenticity in ones unique voice and perspective, is that you have to do the craft enough to feel confident speaking in your unique voice in whatever your medium is, music, graphic design, poetry, fiction etc.
I kind of want each piece of art to have a texture that feels unusual and or pleasurable. I get discouraged when I engage with my own work and it doesn’t invoke a textured immersion into the art…..
I think because my first medium of creative expression is poetry, and because poetry is so steeped in intuitive process for me, and because poetry seemingly has more room for unique structure in working with and within language than other writing mediums seems to have, I believe I misappropriated my expectation for all artistic pursuits to feel as natural as writing poetry feels for me……additionally, I also forget often that I have been consistently writing poetry since the age of 12, so that’s over 19 years (dam I’m getting old) of working on that particular craft. I have not put in nearly the same amount of consistent work in writing prose and essays.
I am enjoying the commitment this blog challenge has instilled in me to work on my craft and let go of stifling perfectionism or fears of failure. Furthermore, what is there to fear when nobody but your best friends and your dad read your blogs!!!!
