I’ve been meaning to comment on this article from Snarkmarket for a few days. That I haven’t until now is just more proof that I’m a bit out of sorts.
The key bit:
Flow is the feed. It’s the posts and the tweets. It’s the stream of daily and sub-daily updates that remind people that you exist.
Stock is the durable stuff. It’s the content you produce that’s as interesting in two months (or two years) as it is today. It’s what people discover via search. It’s what spreads slowly but surely, building fans over time.
I feel like flow is ascendant these days, for obvious reasons—but we neglect stock at our own peril. I mean that both in terms of the health of an audience and, like, the health of a soul. Flow is a treadmill, and you can’t spend all of your time running on the treadmill. Well, you can. But then one day you’ll get off and look around and go: Oh man. I’ve got nothing here.
But I’m not saying you should ignore flow! No: this is no time to hole up and work in isolation, emerging after long months or years with your perfectly-polished opus. Everybody will go: huh? Who are you? And even if they don’t—even if your exquisitely-carved marble statue of Boba Fett is the talk of the tumblrs for two whole days—if you don’t have flow to plug your new fans into, you’re suffering a huge (here it is!) opportunity cost. You’ll have to find them all again next time you emerge from your cave.
Man, oh, man, do I ever understand this. With a recently released novel that I’m actively promoting — my schedule here — and a full-time job and a marriage and needy dogs and football and a Wii that simply must be played, I’m finding it more difficult than it’s ever been to just write.
I’m not, by the way, suggesting that anyone feel sorry for me. I’m the luckiest bastard in the world to have a novel and a full-time job and a marriage and needy dogs and a Wii that simply must be played. Thousands, perhaps millions, of people would trade places with me in a heartbeat, even if it meant taking on my horrible fashion sense. I get that.
I’m simply saying that I’m struggling with the balance. I’m sure I’ll find it. I have to find it. Aspiring writers are told at every juncture that they need to have a platform, that writing well isn’t enough, that they have to drum up interest in their work. All true, but also all beside the point if the work suffers.
Johnathon Schaech’s character in “That Thing You Do!”, Jimmy, got almost everything wrong in the movie — he walked away from Liv-Freakin’-Tyler! — but was unassailably correct on one thing:
“The point of all of this,” he tells Mr. White (Tom Hanks) while the manager is regaling the band with all the fun they’ll have in California, “is to make more records.”
Amen, Jimmy Mattingly.
Thus concludes today’s flow. Stock awaits.
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January 26, 2010 at 1:58 pm
JW
So here I am, in the middle way, having had twenty years—
Twenty years largely wasted, the years of l’entre deux guerres
Trying to use words, and every attempt
Is a wholly new start, and a different kind of failure
Because one has only learnt to get the better of words
For the thing one no longer has to say, or the way in which
One is no longer disposed to say it. And so each venture
Is a new beginning, a raid on the inarticulate
With shabby equipment always deteriorating
In the general mess of imprecision of feeling,
Undisciplined squads of emotion. And what there is to conquer
By strength and submission, has already been discovered
Once or twice, or several times, by men whom one cannot hope
To emulate—but there is no competition—
There is only the fight to recover what has been lost
And found and lost again and again: and now, under conditions
That seem unpropitious. But perhaps neither gain nor loss.
For us, there is only the trying. The rest is not our business.
–from “East Coker,” by TS Eliot