Red Maple by Bruce / Flickr

Passion has become a cheap word. I’m starting to roll my eyes when I hear it. But it hasn’t always been this way.

It all started when I read a 2010 post by Siddhartha Herdegen, “Why You Don’t Need Passion to Be Successful.” It was the first time I questioned one of my dearly held personal values: passion for my day-to-day work.

For the past year, I’ve been on the admissions committee for the E-Media Division at the University of Cincinnati, and I’ve become numb to students who claim, “[x] is my passion.”

If true, who cares? Every other student has a passion, too. What matters is how that translates into action. Show me what you’ve done because of your passion. Show me through action that you really mean it and aren’t flirting with it. Show me that you’ve struggled and remained resilient. Show me that you have discipline.

Recently, I ran across this quote:

Passion is the quickest to develop, and the quickest to fade. Intimacy develops more slowly, and commitment more gradually still.

—Robert Sternberg

I’ve taught hundreds of students with passion. I teach few students with commitment to do the best work possible.

I think part of the problem is how we define passion, so allow me to introduce Herdegen’s definition:

Passion is a deep connection to an idea, a strong bond which creates a feeling of desire. It contains elements of both commitment and excitement but is not limited to them.

Passion plus commitment is not too common in my experience. More often you find:

• a person with a passion for something but lacking talent (sometimes due to lack of ability to practice for the time required, lack of a mentor, etc.)
• a person with a talent for something without a passion for pursuing it
• a person with either talent or passion but no ability to commit (whether through life circumstance or otherwise)

I run into all of these types—at school, at conferences, in daily conversation.

It seems like the cultural myth these days is that we ought to be pursuing our passion; otherwise we will be unhappy. I’m not so sure that’s true any more. As long as we do work that feels satisfying—that complements our personal values and strengths—we can all do just fine, especially if we have relationships that are also fulfilling and satisfying.

There’s another category of person I haven’t mentioned: those struggling to figure out what their passion is. The questions I then pose are:

• What are you avoiding? (There’s a reason, and don’t feel guilty about it.)
• What activities or interactions do you most look forward to, anticipate, and hope for more of?
• What activities or interactions do you value or prioritize on a daily basis?
• What activities can you get lost in? (Time stops; you’re in the flow.)

The answers might not lead to “passion” + “commitment,” but I think they help pave the way to a happier life.

Joe Vastano

In the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, Joe Vastano has a lovely essay on how writers have to acknowledge the duality inside them in order to achieve artistic triumph. I couldn’t agree more. Here’s a brief snippet:

Creative people are walking paradoxes; both shrewd and naïve, libidinous yet prudish, and so on. I believe that this paradox forms the basis of the creative tension so essential to artistic triumph—the friction of opposites setting fire to that “third thing,” which goes by yet another name: the Sublime.

Go read the entire essay, “Into the Sublime,” and see what other gems await in Glimmer Train’s latest bulletin.

Sometimes I find myself defending social media to the experienced user and beginner alike. It can be easily accused—and rightly so—of being full of shameless self-promoters, shrill marketing, and naked people.

That’s only one side, though, and it doesn’t have to be the side you engage in or tolerate. Just because you have to throw away junk mail, turn the channel during a commercial, or ignore a telemarketer doesn’t mean you’ll decide to stop receiving mail, ditch the TV, or lose the phone. You get smarter about how to avoid (or stop) the behavior you don’t like.

I’d like to share with you 6 brief stories of how social media has enriched my life in ways that couldn’t have been possible before—and why I continue to be an advocate for it and teach it as a way of building platform.

1. Darrelyn Saloom

I first met Darrelyn at a Writer’s Digest event in December 2008. (Here’s a story she wrote about that.) When she attended the event, she was not involved in social media. Within six months, she started participating on Twitter (@ficwriter), and writing guest posts for my blog at Writer’s Digest. Without this online glue to keep us in frequent contact, I would have likely forgotten about her, and the relationship would’ve faded away. Instead, her social media participation grew, we stayed in touch as she attempted to get her book published (she now has a deal!), and I now write this post on her farm (in her writer’s studio!) in Louisiana, my first trip to the state.

2. National Endowment for the Arts

In summer 2010, I was contacted out of the blue by the NEA. I had never before been in touch with the organization, nor had I ever met anyone there. The director of literature at the time had read a Publishers Weekly article that mentioned my Twitter presence, then read more about me here, at my own website. Because of my expertise in social media, he e-mailed me to see if I would be interested in participating on a grant funding panel focused on audience development in literature. And that’s how I came to serve with the NEA.

3. Dan Blank

Several years ago, I compiled and blogged about a list of people who I thought provided the best insight (via blog) on the publishing industry. One of those blogs was by Dan Blank. Being the wise blogger that he is, he e-mailed me a thank-you when he saw the mention, and we started exchanging messages and looking for each other at industry events. Currently, we use each other to bounce ideas off of, and we support each others’ efforts in service to the writing community, since we have similar philosophies and practices. I suspect that we’ll hatch a very cool partnership project before it’s all over!

4. Jeanne V. Bowerman

One day (well, perhaps on many days), Jeanne saw me tweeting about bourbon, and decided to say something, even though we’d never had any previous contact. We bonded over drinking on Twitter, then later, she decided to trek from New York to Cincinnati to attend the 90th Writer’s Digest anniversary party that I was organizing (plus meet with a business partner in town). We hit it off marvelously, I asked her to write an article for Writer’s Digest magazine, and we’ve been supporting each others’ efforts ever since, both in person and online. Here’s a post I wrote about Jeanne last year.

5. Brad King

I first became aware of Brad King through his talk at TedxCincy. After his talk, he asked via Twitter who wanted to get together for lunch. I responded via Twitter, although ultimately we didn’t go out for lunch together. However, we stayed in each others’ memories, and when he saw me on the speakers’ roster for SXSW 2011, he dropped an e-mail asking if I’d like a pick-up at the airport in Austin. (Yes, Brad is that nice, adventurous, and awesome!) I went to dinner with him and two others headed to SXSW, and got a wonderful introduction to the spirit of that event. Brad is now writing a series of guests posts on this site.

6. Porter Anderson

As many of you know, Porter is responsible for weekly round-ups here on this site, Writing on the Ether. So how did this partnership start? The beginnings go back to Twitter. He e-mailed me in December 2010, to point me to an article suitable for my old blog series, Best Tweets for Writers. Over time, we communicated more and more on Twitter (especially via DM!), and met up at a few conferences. Then, a few months ago, I invited him to contribute, and he graciously accepted. (What I’ve done for him is up for debate—except add more work to his daily load!)

While you’re smart enough to catch onto the pattern in these stories, here are a few of my own observations:

• Relationships that start online are often solidified offline.
• Relationships that start offline can continue and grow through online media.
• There’s a trust-building process. It takes time for the relationship to take off, because as we all know, when it comes to strangers on social media, we have to be wary of people who may be out solely to take advantage of our goodwill.
• Even the smallest moment of reaching out to someone else on social media can turn into something big and meaningful for your career.

Many other relationships and opportunities have come to me due to social media and changed my life—not least of all, my current job—but this post has to end somewhere.

Let’s hear stories of hiw social media has changed your life. Please share in the comments!

I’m starting to find that the same dilemmas come up again and again when I talk with a group about online media and marketing.

These are dilemmas that I can’t solve. They boil down to three questions you have to ask yourself—and be able to answer honestly—to find a path that’s your own, not mine.

1. Are you creating primarily for yourself or primarily for an audience?

Almost all of my advice is based on the assumption that you want to entertain, inform, or increase your audience. Not everyone is concerned with this, nor should they be.

If you’re producing work for an audience, it means:

• playing by at least some rules of the industry
• caring what others think of your work
• interacting with your audience and being available to them
• doing things not for your art, but out of service to your audience
• putting on a performance, or adopting some kind of persona
• marketing and being visible

If you’re creating for yourself, it means:

• the act is worthwhile regardless of who sees your work
• fulfillment comes from your struggle with the practice, not from distribution or feedback

Of course, you may be creating for both yourself AND an audience. But some artists who believe they are producing work for an audience aren’t willing to make the sacrifices required to do so. Which means there’s another level to this.

Are you:

• creating for an audience
• creating for an audience that earns you money

Once money enters the equation, you have to start sacrificing more of what you want, and bend to the demands of the market. (Or find a generous patron or foundation!)

What is it that you truly want out of your creative endeavors? Do you really know?

2. How much of yourself are you going to share? And which part?

Let’s assume you do want an audience (of any size). It necessitates some kind of persona. Deciding not to have a persona (removing yourself from visibility, Pynchon style) is a persona.

You can’t imitate someone else’s persona. You can only be yourself. Some of us think famous people are (or ought to be) aloof and distant, so we imitate aloofness, even when it has nothing to do with our personality.

After I give talks about digital marketing, relationship building, and social media, inevitably one person will come up and say, “I don’t want to be visible online. I just want people to read my stories.”

That’s a rather boring proposition in this day and age.

So you have to ask yourself—even if you’re shy or think you’re boring—what part of yourself are you going to share and put on display? It’s got to be something, so let’s make it interesting. Let’s really dive into the fiction of who you are OR aren’t. Make up something you can believe in, so others can believe in it, too. (That’s what we all want, most desperately. Meaning.)

3. What is your killer medium?

For me (personally), it’s not the book form. It’s the workshop or the conference keynote. It’s the ability to answer any question thrown at me. It’s my desire to be of service in a personalized way.

Speaking about writers specifically, the book is often assumed to be the most authoritative and important medium, but that’s only because we’ve all been led to believe that (through a culture that has created The Myth about the author as authority).

It’s a Myth, neither good nor bad. Just a belief system that, increasingly, we’re all moving away from.

Creative people too often pursue mediums that have been pushed on them by other people, and because it’s the well-worn path. As Robert Frost says, take the road less traveled. It makes all the difference.

The following is excerpted from The Memoir Project: A Thoroughly Non-Standardized Text for Writing & Life by Marion Roach Smith.

It would be impossible to count up just how many people over the years have come into my class hell-bent on writing a revenge tale. So here’s some hard-won advice:

Never write a story because you want to exact revenge or betray someone.

Your story can be about revenge, absolutely, but the story itself should not be wielded as a blunt object, a cat-o’-nine-tails, or a bludgeon.

Instead, while writing about the hideous aspects of life, you should attempt to teach us something about the behavior of those involved, about your behavior, about all human behavior. Let us into your story by shedding light on our own dilemmas, fears, happiness, or wide-eyed wonder.

Pretty big requirement, isn’t it?

It should be, or else all memoir would be sniveling, and I’m really interested in someone else’s sniveling only if it somehow elevates my own. So remember, just like doctors do, “First, do no harm,” and don’t get suckered into a revenge-to-nowhere tale, where you ask forever how you can get back at someone without ever quite doing so.

Asking the question “What is it about?” will prevent that kind of useless exercise. Ask that, and while the answer might be, “revenge,” you will end up writing a piece on how you tried to get some, what you learned along the way, or how you plotted and plotted and where that led you.

Writing a tale that seeks revenge, you’ll quickly see that tale as merely a list of hurts, which, when you get to the end of that list, is a list that may not interest even you anymore. Revenge as a topic is good; as an intent, it’s not. This is another benefit to writing with intent, instead of writing for exercise.

Not to go all bumper sticker on you, but learn to write with intent and you might learn something about life—as you will when you learn to reduce the essence of the piece to a single totemic emotion such as “pity” or “joy,” a single experience such as “freedom” or “redemption,” or even a single phrase such as “the dramatic story of a family’s struggle with Alzheimer’s disease.”

That may take some time. But you can do this now: You can decide on a genre—humor, perhaps—and choose how to illustrate it.

Here’s how you do it. Say aloud to yourself, “This is a piece of humor, and the illustration is that day at the proctologist,” or “This is a tragedy, and the illustration is finding those Polaroids,” or “This is about how anger withers the soul, and the illustration is my uncle Henry’s struggle for revenge.”

What will not work is the phrase “This is a tragedy and the illustration is my marriage.” This is too big. On the enormous topic of your marriage, look instead for the moment it shifted—the discovery of the Polaroids that revealed where it is your spouse would rather be; the first time your wife didn’t get choked up at someone else’s wedding; alone, trying to snap the safety clasp of your bracelet after the death of your partner—and we will see the tragedy. Capture the moment of “aha!” and you’ll find one specific story that you can drive forward.

Do you see what is happening here? You are shifting yourself—your story—into a new position of importance, where you are no longer the center of the tale. Repeat: I am not the story. Exactly. You are the illustration. You are the picture in the frame, the lozenge in the wrapper. Get that, and when you do, you will see how your story—the illustration of the theme—gets shifted to the second phrase of this sentence and, by extension, to its proper place.

Marion Roach Smith has taught a sold-out class called “Writing What You Know” since 1998. She is a graduate of St. Lawrence University and the author of The Roots of Desire and Another Name for Madness. A former staff member of the New York Times and a contributor to NPR’s All Things Considered, she writes and records daily and weekly spots on Martha Stewart Living Radio.

Melanie Rae Thon (photo by Andi Olsen)

In the latest Glimmer Train bulletin, there’s an amazing piece by Melanie Rae Thon, “The Heart Breaks, and Breaks Open: Seven Reasons to Tell a Story in 2011.” Here’s a small snippet:

… [E]very time you remember an episode of your life, you are reinventing it: embellishing, deleting, altering it through fusion and imagination.

If you cannot imagine, you cannot remember.

There is no such thing as “I.”

Re-membering is transformation!

Every person on this earth is a storyteller.

Click here to read the full piece.

Click here to read the entire Glimmer Train bulletin.

Buddha once said that just as we can know the ocean because it always tastes of salt, we can recognize enlightenment because it always tastes of freedom. There’s no essential difference between real love and enlightenment. While many people see commitment as a trap, its healthy versions actually free both lovers, bring out the flavor of their true selves, and build a love that is satisfying, lasting, and altogether delicious.

Read more at Oprah.com.

A nice companion piece, also by Martha Beck: “How to Love More By Caring Less” (very Buddhist in its approach as well).

Alan Watts

I am always sincere, but never serious.

—Alan Watts

When I started my first professional blog, I struggled to give it a name. While I thought I could offer helpful information, the truth about writing advice is that it’s only helpful if you’re the kind of writer who benefits from it. Not all writers do (or can). Plus there are always exceptions to each piece of advice.

That’s why I ended up calling the blog There Are No Rules. (I’ve made an archive of the best posts—click here.)

My hope was that even if people read a lot of my prescriptive advice, the name of the blog itself would offer a meta-commentary—or a wink and a nod—that I’m playing the advice game, and you’re allowing me to play the game by listening and granting me some kind of authority.

A personal anecdote: I grew up in a family that didn’t crack many jokes. In fact, I was always afraid of people making jokes around me, because I was the sort of person who easily served as the target. (I was the biggest nerd in school.) I hesitate to say I grew up humorless, but it took a while before I knew how to relax. This dynamic still comes into play when I’m among strangers. Since my default is sincerity, especially in unfamiliar situations, I also take everything said as sincere, and sometimes I realize a few seconds too late that what I’m hearing is a joke. There are times when people even have to explicitly state—upon seeing the reaction on my face—”I’m joking.”

I’m afraid this can make me very dull at parties. I’m sincere to a fault.

However, I am not serious, and the Alan Watts quote above is one of my very favorites. Every once in a while I like to remind people: Know that I’m sincere, but never serious. Forge your own path; write your own rules.

Inside a Buddhist temple in Chiang Mai, Thailand

“The master in the art of living makes little distinction between his work and his play, his labor and his leisure, his mind and his body, his education and his recreation, his love and his religion. He hardly knows which is which. He simply pursues his vision of excellence at whatever he does, leaving others to decide whether he is working or playing. To him he is always doing both.”

—Lawrence Pearsall Jacks

What’s the most common advice you hear at writing conferences? That it all takes a lot of work. That there aren’t any shortcuts. That you have to put in the time.

Of course, that’s common advice about all types of things in life. People even talk about how much work is required for lasting, romantic relationships.

I don’t want to pick an argument with those who defend the value of good, hard work.

However, I would like everyone to stop feeling guilty about the time they spend “playing” online—especially on social media.

Yes, of course it’s possible to waste a lot of time on such things. But it’s also possible to PLAY and WORK at the same time.

If your play is building stronger connections to other people, opening your mind up to new possibilities, spreading the word about what you do, or helping you understand things about yourself and your writing, then continue to play.

If your play is allowing your mind time to work out difficult problems, giving you an opportunity to recharge, or reducing stress, then continue to play.

If your play is not at all serious or productive, and has no point whatsoever, then continue to play. That is real play, after all. (And sometimes, as Americans, we’re just too damn serious and insistent on productivity.)

Caveat: There’s a difference between play and escaping from or avoiding things we fear.

Hopefully you know the difference. (Refer to the quote above.)

A list on my work monitor

I love making lists. Big-picture lists, daily lists, grocery lists, checklists … you name it, I list it.

I even make little list tools that sometimes other people enjoy. (For example, click here for my Weekly Goal Sheet. Here are specific instructions on how to use it.)

Lists are a personal thing—they speak to the ineffable in us—which is why it’s so enjoyable to look at how or what other people list. Once there was someone who found my lists so representative of me (or perhaps so neatly adorable) that he kept one as a memento.

This month’s Glimmer Train bulletin offers a thoughtful piece by Yelizaveta P. Renfro. She describes how lists play into her creative writing process. (My process is rather similar!)

My stories and essays begin with lists. On whatever is at hand—and often in the margins or endpapers of books I’m reading—I jot down fragments in the order that my mind offers them. This first step is a purging of these pieces, without structure. It’s notating in shorthand what will go in the container, whether the container is an essay or a story. 

Go read the full piece for excellent insights and inspiration.

For more celebration of lists (or voyeuristic peeks at others’ lists):

• To-Do List. A new list is posted every Monday.
• Milk Eggs Vodka. A wonderful website + book that focuses on grocery lists.
• If It Won’t Fit On A Post-It, It Won’t Fit In Your Day. Fabulous advice for managing your daily to-do list.
• Action Method journals. This is a marvelous tool (and method) for list makers.

Also—I’m curious about other writers’ lists. Want to share a picture of yours, along with an explanation of how you use lists? If enough people are willing to share, I might start a feature on this blog. Drop me an e-mail or leave a comment if you’d be willing to participate.