• Adding Back the Joy

  Filed under Coolness
  Jul 19

  You ever see the movie ‘Big’ with Tom Hanks and Elizabeth Perkins where Josh, a 12 year old boy makes a wish into a magic wish machine and literally grows up over night?

  There is a scene in the movie where the grown up Josh invites Susan, his co-worker he met at a stuffy corporate get together to his apartment after a date, and he invites her to jump on his trampoline. And at first, she half heartedly does a simple bounce on the mat where her feet don’t even leave the surface and then suggests they get a drink. Josh then gets on the trampoline with her and literally teaches her how to jump on th trampoline and have fun. And after that, her life changes to include more joy.

  I watched parts of that movie the other day and it really occurred to me how much I could relate to Susan.

  Somehow, some way, in all my workings in Internet Marketing, I’ve forgotten how to have fun. I’ve concentrated so much on title tags, conversion and making sure that one’s web site talks about subject matter that matches what keywords people search for that I’ve just stopped having fun with the whole ‘Internet thing’.

  I see web sites like Dooce.com which ramble on about this and that and the nothings of Heather B. Armstrong’s day, and I feel my brain melt. But she makes enough money to live off that site. (Live very well, I’m sure…estimates say she makes $40K off that site each month.) Her makes money not because she optimizes her title tag, it makes money because she entertains an audience who can relate to her day to day musings. It is clear that she has fun with what she writes. It is a job, but she enjoys it.

  Let me make that more clear: she makes a lot of money and she doesn’t give a rip about search engines. She writes to entertain.

  When I was a child, I used to spend hour after hour typing stories on my mother’s typewriter. I had about 100 or so pages of one particular story that I made up as I went along. I loved it. I got to use my imagination, and anything went because I didn’t worry about what anyone else had to say. It was my own little world that I could control. I could make the villains — usually a snotty girl who resembled someone in my class — as mean as I wanted and I could have the heroine win. I wrote for the pure joy of getting my daydreams out of my head so I could make room for more daydreams.

  Even as a moderator at WebmasterWorld, I loved writing funny stories about my day for the foo section just to make people laugh and see what they would say. Or, I’d reply to someone else’s post just to add comic value. Sometimes, I’d spend a couple hours on one post just to make it just right. And people did find my posts entertaining. And I did it just for the pure joy of writing. (Because everyone knows that Brett Tabke is too tight to pay anyone a dime…but that’s another story for another time.)

  Last year, I started writing again. I wrote a first draft in NANOWRIMO just to see how far I could get. I didn’t worry about if any of it made sense, or if the punctuation was correct, I just wrote to see how much I could get done in one month. Since nobody but me would see the story, I felt free to do with it what I wanted, and just write to write. Literally, hours would pass before I’d see the clock. There was such a joy to this type of creative activity that I didn’t want it to stop.

  I started GreenEyeWire with the idea that I was going to promote my knowledge of search engines and usability. But frankly, that type of writing bored me. So I didn’t do it. Now, I see that maybe I don’t have to.

  I always dreaded writing a book only because of the long process of actually getting the book published. The usual process is: pour your heart and soul into a book, print off a few chapters and send it off to publisher who often don’t read or comment on your work for a year or maybe more. It may take years for someone to finally see your work and agree to publish it. The process is really ridiculous and antiquated, and I’ve often wondered when the Internet will finally bring a stop to that.

  And then, I see this video where author John Scalzi says he didn’t do any of that nonsense for his last few books.

  Social media, or Web 2.0 if that’s what you want to call it allows people like Heather B. Armstrong to ramble on about her day and get paid for it, and authors to be published on their own terms.

  Honestly, for the first time in a long time, I feel inspired that I can write what I want to write and actually be paid for it. I don’t *just* have to stuff for search engines.

  So, with that in mind, I am going to get myself in the swing of writing by doing a blog post a day for a month. I’ve heard that it takes 20 something days of doing something to make it a habit, so hopefully, rambling on this blog will make me *make* time to write. And I’m not going to give a rip about search engines at all. I’m just gonna have fun with it.

  4 Comments

4 Responses to “Adding Back the Joy”

1. 

   BillMan said on July 22nd, 2008 at 7:54 am

   Fascinating– I haven’t written anything worthwhile in years, and was just commenting that I needed a stimulus to get me moving again. There you are, trying to start wrting just for the joy of it again.
   Here you are, trying to regain the joy you once felt on the web and have more fun like you used to. There are times I dread even playing a game on the computer because I use them so much at work.
   Remeber the time you called us pathetic because we were exchanging messages with each other from within the same computer lab?

2. 

   Heather said on July 22nd, 2008 at 8:10 am

   Wow. I meant to add that to this post: you were the first person who got me involved in the writers group on the mainframe back at K-State. And here we are, in contact again.

   Synchronicity is amazing…isn’t it?

3. GreenEye Wire»Blog Archive » Calling out Billman & Why The Bicycle Exchange in Carrollton Texas Rocks! said on July 26th, 2008 at 4:21 pm

   [...] So, today, I make a challenge to you, Bill. I challenge you to put up your own blog and start writing. One post a day for 30 days. You long to write. You know you do. And the thing is, it doesn’t have to be especially good. Just do it to bring back that little bit of joy in your life. [...]

4. Bookmarks about Writing said on December 24th, 2008 at 8:30 am

   [...] – bookmarked by 3 members originally found by RLCheerchick123 on 2008-11-16 Adding Back the Joy http://www.greeneyewire.com/coolness/adding-back-joy/ – bookmarked by 6 members originally found [...]

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