When I Unplugged from the Grid

I just spent a week “off the grid,” disconnected from anyone not in my direct line of sight. I wasn’t living alone in Arches National Park, the way Desert Solitaire author Edward Abbey did for a long summer in the late 1950s, but I read his tale while taking in the eerie quiet of a Virginia forest at dawn.  It was a week of many lessons on what our interconnected world means to me, and I’m still processing the experience. Perhaps your insights on life in a digital age can help me.

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I learned that for me social media is like a cigar. I’ve never smoked cigarettes but I very much enjoy smoking an occasional cigar, yet I often feel guilty when I do so because I tell myself that time could be better spent with more productive activities. And I find after a good smoke that for a day or two the nicotine continues to call to me: “I see you have a few minutes to kill. Why don’t you pull out that humidor and have a quick smoke. It’s better than just standing around, right?” That voice becomes softer with time, however, meaning I know I am capable of enjoying cigars as an irregular indulgence.

My week off the grid began with a family vacation in central and western Virginia, and occurred in three stages. In Phase One I was computer-free but still had a smartphone. That allowed me to tweet and Facebook when our restaurant in Fredericksburg, Virginia, shook violently; it turns out we were a mere 40 miles from an earthquake’s epicenter. That Internet access was quite helpful in filling me in on what had just happened, including the important fact that a nuclear power plant near us had been safely shut down. But this was a family vacation, so my focus was on face-time with my wife and two teenage children, not social media with non-family.

Phase Two found us in a rustic cabin in Shenandoah National Park with no wireless phone service or Wi-Fi. It proved to be a blissful three days, at least for me. I’d wake up at dawn and sit by our fire pit, reading Desert Solitaire, bonding with Abbey and his time alone in a national park. I shared his offense at the “petty tyranny” of technology created by human beings, whom he derisively called “tool-builders.” I lumped my smartphone in with his list of “automatic washers and automobiles and TV machines and telephones…  what intolerable garbage and what utterly useless crap we bury ourselves in day by day.” (Italics in original.)

Our second night in the Shenandoah we drove up to a lodge for dinner and discovered it had mobile access. My daughter and son pulled out their phones and hit Facebook. My wife checked her work email and quickly was sucked in to a crisis in her office she could at the time do nothing about. Me? I left my phone in the car and pulled up a seat to take in the large picture-window view of the sun setting magnificently over the Shenandoah Valley. To my left an older man stared at his Mac laptop screen, to my right a young woman’s face was aglow from her iPad. The sun was unconcerned, continuing to set despite its show being ignored. I basked in a sense of superiority, dismissive of those poor tool-builders with their electronic tethers. They were oblivious of my condescension as well.

By the time the vacation was done I discovered to my surprise I wasn’t quite ready to log into Facebook, to fire up Twitter. I felt unprepared for the onslaught, feared drowning in a digital flash flood, a less fatal form of the real danger Abbey faced on a raft trip through Glen Canyon (before the dam was built), the real danger I suspected many might be facing with the approaching Hurricane Irene. As it happened, Irene made the decision for me, knocking out our power and forcing me to preserve my smartphone battery for emergency purposes, not social media. Thus began Phase Three.

In the first two Phases I had chosen to go off-grid, to embrace nature and the Now. In this final phase, the choice was removed from me. Maybe I was channeling the libertarian independent spirit Abbey espouses in Desert Solitaire, but I wanted my level of connection to be my choice. After all, Abbey chose to live in Arches, and chose to leave when the summer was over. I would gladly have reconnected to the grid Saturday night, when I couldn’t watch hurricane coverage on TV, when my kids were at a relative’s home for the night, and when my wife had gone into work for an overnight shift managing her news organization’s hurricane coverage. I have friends, real and virtual, up and down Irene’s path. I was curious to know how they were doing. But to be honest, I was just hungry for personal interaction. I wasn’t up for Hurricane Solitaire.

Abbey celebrates his independence in Desert Solitaire, yet most of the narrative in the book involves his interaction with others — his colleagues in the Park Service, a cowboy he sometimes guides steer with, his companion on that Glen Canyon rafting adventure. At one point he admits that “Aloneness became loneliness and the sensation was strong enough to remind me (how could I have forgotten?) that the one thing better than solitude, the only thing better than solitude, is society.” It’s worth noting that he concludes the book’s Author’s Introduction with the following sign-off: “E.A., April 1967, Nelson’s Marine Bar, Hoboken.” It’s hard to imagine a place less suited for solitude than a bar in a New York City suburb. He’s recalling fondly his time off the grid in a place nearly at the center of it.

And here I am, recalling fondly my time off the grid in pixels displayed on the grid, in a blog post that hopefully will spread on Facebook and Twitter.

I’m still sorting out the lessons here. But my takeaways include the following: 1) Communicating with virtual friends comes in second to face-to-face time with loved ones. 2) A little time off the grid is a great way to reconnect with your environment, and with yourself. 3) It’s nice to have some control over whether you are on or off the grid.

Have you had any cold-turkey breaks from social media? Do you moderate your use of it? Would you consider it an addiction? I’d love to hear your personal insights and experiences.

UPDATE 9/2/11: It seems Mr. Bacon is on the lam, out of reach of my frying pan. He’s made his way over to Milliver’s Travels, the comprehensive travel web site run by Milli Thornton. I don’t know what I’m going to do with that guy.

UPDATE #2 9/3/11: My tweep friend Andrea (@yarnsuperhero) just informed me that today, the Saturday before Labor Day, is International Bacon Day. As if Mr. Bacon didn’t have enough reason to get a big head. I’m hoping he doesn’t know. He won’t learn here, he’s too important to read my blog.

When a Blog Post Goes Viral

I received a bit of a jolt yesterday morning when visiting my WordPress dashboard. The vertical blue bars showing daily page views were all but nonexistent. Then I realized it was because the scale had changed. The bar on the far right, showing that day’s views, was climbing right off of my screen.

My latest blog post on a writer’s must-read list had just gone viral. I watched, with a few clicks of the refresh button, as it hit 200, 300, 500. Within an hour it had hit 1,000. At the end of the day it had reached 4,000, and it’s continuing to get hits on its second day as I type this. (Update: While slowing, the clicks continue. As of 8 am ET on Wednesday the 20th we’re approaching 8,000).

That big blue bar of views was as dramatic in its rise, and as surprising in its appearance, as the state capitol building in Lincoln, Nebraska, I encountered on my cross-country road trip interviewing artists.

This is startling. While I love traffic to my blog (what blogger doesn’t?) my primary motivation isn’t hits. I’m not selling anything with this blog. I don’t run ads. I don’t search-engine optimize posts and headlines. So what was going on?

A quick investigation gave much of the credit to The Huffington Post, which featured the post in their Books section. I believe Huffington Post discovered it as a result of it being tweeted by “Advice to Writers” author Jon Winokur, whose Twitter feed @AdvicetoWriters has 71,136 followers and, perhaps more importantly, is on 4,710 lists (including my WritingInspired list). His tweet was then retweeted like nobody’s business, as was one from the Huffington Post. Later that day it was tweeted by @randomhouse. Yup, they’ve got a few followers.

What has this been like? Exciting. Surprising. Confusing. Embarrassing. (That last one stems from the fact that while pleased enough with it the post to upload it, it’s hardly the one I would have chosen to introduce myself to the universe. I didn’t even bother to include my signature touch, a photo that is only marginally relevant with an unorthodox caption.)

The post had been doing pretty well on its own. It had received just under 500 views from Friday (the day I uploaded it) through Sunday, putting it in my top quartile of my posts to date. But this is an entirely different scale, as the disappearing blue bars for Friday, Saturday and Sunday attest.

The Artist’s Road is less than a year old, but I blogged for six years prior to this on two other blogs, and was blessed to see a handful of posts go viral. A post I wrote for a now-defunct think tank’s blog about my personal experience with inaccuracies on Wikipedia spread once it was promoted by Pulitzer-Prize finalist Nicholas Carr.

In perhaps my proudest moment of blogging, a post I wrote for my previous employer the Copyright Alliance went viral to positive results. I blogged about an online “magazine” titled, cheekily enough, “Pilfered,” consisting solely of photographs stolen online and reprinted without compensation of the photographers, or credit, or permission. My post spread through the photographic community, prompting a barrage of pressure on the magazine, and I believe I played some role in the magazine shutting itself down shortly thereafter.

Perhaps a better analogy for that blue bar stretching to the sky would be one of these windmills I saw rising out of Minnesota farmland.

This latest viral phenomenon comes right at a moment when I was thinking of shutting down this blog.

I absolutely love writing it — I’ve enjoyed using it as an exercise to grow as a writer, to provide resources to creative peers, and to learn how to de-program the journalist in me and put more of myself into my writing.

I’ve particularly valued the virtual friendships I have formed through this blog, and am so grateful to its loyal readers (some of whom I thank by name at the end of this post).

But on Sunday, after spending hours on the first “packet” due to my MFA instructor (30 pages of original creative writing and a 7-page critical essay), I wondered if it was reasonable to continue to indulge myself with this blog. It requires time and creative energy. Perhaps it was best to put it on ice for awhile.

But by Monday morning, when my browser opened to my WordPress dashboard, I had already decided to stick with it awhile longer. My compromise with myself was to blog a little less often, two days a week rather than three. But I realized this blog is now part of my creative path. My life mission right now is reconnecting with my muse, and stepping away from The Artist’s Road would be stepping off of that path.

So seeing that ever-rising vertical blue bar, I believe, was my muse’s way of telling me I’m right to stick with it. After all, I’m not chasing clicks. I receive qualitative value by having an outlet to flex creative muscles and a way to connect with creative and supportive peers. But it still feels nice to get quantitative feedback, especially when it’s positive.

My only regret is that once this bubble bursts, until that tall blue bar rotates off of the little chart through the passage of time, my other bars will remain minuscule by comparison.

Now comes shout-outs to some of my most loyal blog readers and Twitter pals in no particular order; like in an Oscar speech, I must note that I’m sure I’m leaving some folks out, and my sincerest apologies to those individuals. If you’re one of them, call me out in the comment field below.

A huge whoop to Milli (@fearofwriting), Amy (@AmyBuchheit), Charlotte (@wordstrumpet), Kate (@KateArmsRoberts), Sue (@Sue_Mitchell), Tanner (@tannerc), Jessica (@JMcCannWriter), Cheryl (@CherylRWrites), Carrie (@ArtistThink), Bell (@startyournovel), Melanie (@DoseofCre8ivity), Jolina (@Jolina_Joy), Paige (@PCrutcher), Liz (@lizmassey68), Mari (@mischief_mari), Elizabeth (@elizabethscraig) Anita (@anitabondi), Melissa (@CrytzerFry), Callie (Notes From Naptime), David (@DavidBGoldstein), Ollin (@OllinMorales), Ian (@IanAspin), Sion (@parisimperfect), Carolyn (@carolynsolares), and Danielle (@Danielle_Meitiv).

When Should You Promote Older Posts?

Perhaps there are too many exobytes of data now for search engines to categorize. Maybe demonic SEO gurus have finally crowded out reasonable online queries. Or maybe it’s because it’s the end of the world is this Saturday. All I know is I spent several fruitless hours recently researching a simple social-media etiquette question, so I’m turning to a more credible source — you.

In the spirit of posting old content, here's my kids in 2004. The tubes represent the Internet, the netting... oh forget it.

What is the etiquette surrounding promotion of old blog posts?

Milk has an expiration date. Blog posts often don’t. So logic dictates that if there is value to be gained from a new post, value can also be found in a “classic” post. So I should just tweet and Facebook the heck out of posts both old and new, right?

Here’s what I learned from my Googling: 1) You’ll increase traffic to your sites by promoting older posts. 2) There are tools that will automate that promotion.

Here’s what I didn’t learn: Do people want to see links to old posts?

I have a mixed reaction to such promotion myself. Because my Twitter and Facebook feeds are really more about promoting links to other resources on creativity than my own site — and one out of every three posts on this blog is a compilation of the best links I promoted that week — I click on a lot of Twitter and Facebook links. A fairly high percentage of the posts are not current. My take on this?

Often there is real wisdom to be found in the older post. I may even retweet it, as I did this week with a great 2008 post I found that highlights commonly misused words. But at the same time I sometimes feel a bit tricked, particularly if the date of the post can’t be found or is buried somewhere out of clear view. After all, if I’m promoting the Creativity Tweets of the Week, can I really promote a post from three years ago?

Again from 2004. Let's pretend that's the World Wide Web. Yeah, that works.

Part of my struggle here may be because I come from a breaking-news journalism background. I didn’t worry about someone reading my past reporting because it was, by definition, old news. However, an insight on tapping one’s creativity doesn’t grow stale.

I have yet to send a single tweet or Facebook post promoting an older post from this site. There’s material there for me to promote — I’ve put up almost 90 non-time-sensitive posts since launching last October. But how will those old links be received by someone who follows the link? Will they be delighted to find something of use? Or will they wonder why I sent them off into the past? Will that make them more or less likely to return?

If you’re a blogger, how do you handle promotion of archival posts? If you enjoy good links on Facebook or Twitter, what’s your reaction when sent to an archived post as opposed to a new link?

How To Annoy Friends and Alienate People

ALERT: This is not just another post about “How to Use Twitter.”

A few months before I joined Twitter I attended a panel discussion on social media. A self-described Twitter expert was filling in us novices on this magical pixie dust technology. He talked about how to schedule tweets and use tweet-management software. Yet he talked as if my Twitter following had already gathered, a mass of devotees in St. Peter’s Square watching for my white smoke.

From the back of the conference room I asked him how you get followers to begin with.

A protest I stumbled across in front of Berlin's Reichstag in October 2008. I have no idea what they were protesting, but it seemed vaguely technology-related.

“Send good tweets,” he said.

At the time I found that comment absolutely moronic. I now realize it was a statement of genius. I have had to learn the hard way, however, what a “good tweet” is. It’s actually “good communication,” something that dates back to grunts in caves.

“Gruhh.” (That was tasty mammoth meat, Ord.)

“Ruggh.” (Thanks, Naal, it took Grok and I half a sun-cycle to bring the bastard down.)

There are many things to love about our 2.0 world, but 2.0 evangelists do not make that list. They seem to believe time began with the first tweet. You can’t have a 2.0 without a 1.0. Our social media world is not revolutionary, it is evolutionary. (More on that in a moment.)

As loyal readers know, I’ve begun advising individual creatives on blogging and social media. Some of the great feedback I received on a recent post about whether a creative should blog has inspired me to share another lesson I’m providing in these consulting sessions.

The lesson? Social media is not new. We’ve been doing it our whole lives.

It’s called communication.

Let’s go back to the “good tweet.” Remove the word “tweet” and substitute “communication.” With caller ID and voice mail, we can screen our phone calls today. Which phone call — which “communication” — are you more likely to answer? A call from a telemarketer or a call from a friend? Wait, before you answer that, let’s clarify which friend. A friend who always has suggestions for fun activities or a friend who wants to bitch (yet again) that her boyfriend won’t leave his wife?

If there were a STASI 2.0 (on the woman's T-shirt), I don't think that version of the East German secret police would be sending "good" tweets.

The lesson here is that when we answer the phone, we want a positive experience. It’s possible the telemarketer is selling something we desperately need at just the right price, but our experience is the opposite, so we’re not likely to answer. And as for our friends, those who bring positive energy are going to make us want to take their call more than those who are simply looking to take. At least the telemarketer is promising us something in return for our time and money.

In our social media world, we are all empowered to filter our communications. I can follow you or not follow you. I can friend you or not friend you. And even if I follow you or friend you, I still don’t have to pay attention to you. My eyes are capable of motion. Your tweet or post can be ignored.

We communicate every day, over the breakfast table, at the office, in the supermarket checkout line. If we spend too long asking in our communications without giving, we learn the ineffectiveness of that approach. Those same lessons are true in social media.

But because the platforms of social media are new, many promoters of these platforms overlook the fact that it’s not about the medium, it’s about the message.

Back to the notion of evolution vs. revolution. Here in the United States we’re starting to see news articles and columns about the Civil War, as it was 150 years ago this spring the war began. That war marked a communications revolution.

When the American Continental Congress in 1774 sent a list of grievances to Britain’s King George III, they had to wait months for the petition to reach the king, and still more months for a reply. (FYI, the King’s reply was a “bad” tweet; he said if the colonists continued to make demands they’d find themselves hanging from trees. A revolution ensued, not a communications one, a guns-and-cannons one.)

This was an intimidating mob, but somehow your faithful correspondent made it out alive so he could share these photos with you.

Mere decades later, when Abraham Lincoln wanted to know what was happening on a Civil War battlefront, he would walk a few blocks from the White House to the War Department and read the latest telegraphs coming in from one of his generals. That was not an evolution in communication, that was a revolution. Distance went from being everything to being nothing.

We’ve had instant communication for more than 150 years. The telegraph evolved into the telephone, the telephone into the Internet, the Internet into Facebook apps that tell you when your high school crush has changed his status to “single.” But the sooner we stop thinking of our digital age as a revolution — the sooner we realize that communication remains communication regardless of medium — the sooner we’ll be able to write a “good tweet.”

If you’ve found your way here, you know your way around the interwebs. What are your thoughts? What lessons have you learned?

7 Steps to Writing Success

I was one of thousands of writers who descended on Washington, D.C., last week to soak up the wisdom of skilled – and successful – creative writers at the Association of Writers and Writing Programs (AWP) 2011 Conference and Bookfair. I attended about a dozen sessions and had many phenomenal conversations with many compelling creatives.

I’ve synthesized the key points I heard throughout the conference into 7 key points, which are summarized below. Apologies to all of those great speakers whose wisdom I’m conveying without direct attribution. I’ll give you all credit in forthcoming blogs, when I break out these points in greater detail. In the meantime, enjoy, and please share your own thoughts.

1. Write for yourself.This can sound like a cliché, but it’s critical. Imagining an audience and then writing purely to that audience will often lead to disappointment. But what does that mean, “write for yourself?” It means a successful writer writes first to please herself. If you don’t crave spending time with your words, you can’t expect others to feel differently. Of course, no agent or editor is going to be interested in a piece that is so navel-gazing that it’s inaccessible to others. But you can embrace the revision process to take the words
   

   A modestly recognizable residence in Washington, D.C.

   that speak to you and find ways to craft them to speak to a larger audience. And don’t limit yourself in this process; there are plenty of people who your words may touch who may not be part of whatever audience you imagine.

2. Build an online community. Yes, yes, you’re supposed to blog, be on Facebook, tweet. When, you ask, am I supposed to actually write? It’s an excellent question. But despite the solitary nature of writing, it has always been beneficial to have a larger network of fellow creatives, whether in school or in a salon. You can form and grow a virtual salon through social media. Once you stop thinking of social media as a platform to market your work and instead as a way to put value out into the universe and receive value in return, you’ll start to see the benefits. Those could come in terms of support and encouragement, but they could also come in the form of professional opportunities.
3. Build your platform. This in some ways is more important for nonfiction writers – an amazing novel will excite the publishing industry regardless of its source – but this ties in with the previous point regarding an online community. A “platform” can be seen as the potential to increase exposure for your own work. Agents and editors agree that writers are now expected to proactively market themselves. A writer who has a platform – defined here as connections, important to fiction and nonfiction writers – is a writer who will be more likely to get that first contract, and future ones.
4. Don’t neglect research.This is true with the writing itself – your novel’s story may be fiction but your details of place and time must be as “true” as possible – but here I’m referring to your outreach into the publishing world. Does that
   

   Some art across the street from the residence pictured above, popular with pigeons

   literary journal say on its web site that it’s not looking for poetry? Then why are you submitting a haiku collection? Does that agent focus on young adult fiction? Then why are you querying her about a nonfiction book chronicling your years as a groupie for Phish? If you do your homework before reaching out – take a moment to discover if that agent named “Robin” is male or female, to start – you’ll already have edged out the many writers who haven’t taken those basic steps.

5. Be open to the wisdom of others. Remember the first point, where you’re writing to yourself? By definition that writing is going to be personal, a sharing of your heart. So does it feel good when an agent tells you he won’t circulate your novel until you change the ending? Or when an editor tells you that entire subplot with the minor character’s pancreatic cancer has to go? No. You probably won’t even like the removal of a semicolon on page 47. But you know what? Others don’t know your heart, but they may very well know a thing about writing, and about maximizing audience. If an editor sends you revisions and recommends taking a few days to scream and throw things before responding, take her up on it. One key to remember is that these agents and editors are your allies. It is in their best interest to ensure your writing be as good as it can be. Work with them.
6. Be patient. Your novel is done. You managed to get an agent, and she got you a contract with a great publisher. Now you’re told your book is scheduled for publication in two years. What? The solitary writer, who chooses how to spend each day, can be forgiven forgetting that there are many other people out there following their own timetables. Yes, you spent two weeks polishing that query letter, and it will only take the agent a few minutes to read it. So why the wait? Well, perhaps if you end up signing with that agent, you’d like him to spend some time working for you, putting you ahead of a blind query letter. That delay in publication? Maybe it’s to allow time to edit the manuscript to perfection, to find the perfect cover art, to build buzz through galleys. If you are a writer down to your soul, you will be writing as long as you can express a coherent thought. So expand your time scale a bit, and know that with patience the high points you dream of will come.
7. Keep creating. When that high point does come – when you secure that agent, when you sign that contract, when that book hits the streets – what then? It’s natural to have a letdown, to feel a loss, an emptiness. The longer you spent with that writing, the more profound the loss may feel. Start by being kind to yourself. Do you love movies and haven’t seen one in a year? Go to the multiplex. But also keep writing. The writing may end up trite. You may spend three months and find you’re in a dead end. But writing is like exercise. Step away too long and it’s that much harder when you start up again.

Is there something you feel was left out? Do you take issue with any of these points? I want to hear your thoughts. You can also check out Caleb J. Ross’ AWP blog, full of great insights (he’s channeled a lot in #2 above).

(Photos above taken by me a couple of weeks ago with my Evo while killing time waiting for a lunch.)

The Importance of Civility

ATTENTION: See update below (1/21/11)

There is no debating the rise of incivility in our political discourse here in the United States, or the reality that vitriol is undermining the very functioning of our democracy. What is often overlooked is that we are all to blame for this crisis. That is the message of my editorial today in the San Jose Mercury News newspaper.

Here in the United States the topic of civility has been front-burner, given the tragic shooting in my native state of Arizona of U.S. Representative Gabrielle Giffords and many others. The motives of the killer remain unclear, but the anger-filled rhetoric we hear and read every day is very real.

The current debate is why the San Jose Mercury News ran my editorial, and I’m grateful to the editor there for giving me a platform to espouse my thesis of a “digital hollows.”

I have argued for some time now that the onslaught of information in our interconnected age has combined with our use of self-filtering technology to isolate us from points of view that clash with our own biases. We place ourselves in hollows — often pronounced “hollers” — little different than the rural residents of early Appalachian settlements.

This isolation leads to a hardening of positions and an increasing intolerance of other opinions, and it spreads rapidly and virally.

A little over a year ago I launched a movement to increase civility across the globe, at least online, with iCivility.com. I didn’t set out to radically overhaul the political discourse here in my adopted home, Washington, D.C. I set a more modest goal — improving discourse in our online world.

About a year ago I was introduced before a speech. The think-tank president introducing me commented on my launch of iCivility, and said “Patrick Ross has accomplished a lot of things in his time in Washington, but I’m afraid with this new effort he’s doomed to fail.”

I suppose it all depends on how you define success. If success is an Internet free of vitriol and ad hominem attacks, then yes, I am destined to fail. But if I manage to a few open-minded individuals with my message of civility; if those individuals share the message with a few friends; if as a result a handful of those online proactively moderate their own rhetoric and encourage moderation in the rhetoric of others; then I would call that a success.

If you share my view that civility is critical to society and political discourse, I encourage you to share this blog post with your online friends. Together we can make a difference together.

UPDATE: (1/21/11) I’ve received a lot of positive feedback since my call for increased civility ran in the San Jose Mercury News, and traffic at iCivility.com has been up. But many people have told me I need to expand the campaign across other social media, and I now have done so. Please “like” iCivility on Facebook and follow iCivility on Twitter and let’s make a difference together.