Being Yourself is the Way
The only one
Third mail in the series: You are the Path.
If you missed the first one: here.
If you missed the second one: here.
Thank you for the good feedback on the first two emails.
We're at the end of this program but next week... surprise, surprise.
No one follows you for "advice."
Ok maybe, but… not only for this.
If that's the case, it's a bit sad if you're a blogger or a writer.
It means you've built an audience of leechers ready to abandon you as soon as they've wrung out everything there is to get from you.
Writer’s version of being smashed and ghosted.
Ouch.
Your audience follows you because of you.
They appreciate something about you.
Your energy.
Your worldview.
Your flaws.
Your phrasing, your favorite metaphors.
Your uniqueness.
Your crazyness.
The feeling your sentences give when they touch their hearts.
The vast majority of writers try to be experts. Writing bios in the third person, boasting that they had conquered Persia at the age of 14, just before making their first million the following year.
Thinking that if they're good enough, people will connect with them. Whereas a reader is looking for an emotional connection. This something different who will make him feel understood and seen.
Experts are like those guys on TV shows. Oyster-like charisma. Forgettable. Replaceable. Generic. The perfect son-in-law. But boring as hell.
The writer isn't an expert. Or he'd have pursued a science degree. The writer is an eccentric. A philosopher. A weirdo. An extreme. A passionate. He's not there to think. He's there to make people feel. To light embers in hearts.
Don't put words in my mouth. Of course it's good to have knowledge. But if you take the angle of knowledge alone, you risk burning your wings in the long run, because you're writing to feel yourself. Not to carry around the same mask that never leaves you in the corporate world.
What builds an audience?
If there’s any secret: YOU
What you've been told to hide, your intensity, your nostalgia, your strange metaphors, your sarcasm, your excessiveness, these are your superpowers.
Stop cutting words.
Stop restricting your voice.
Stop hiding.
Stop writing while trying to be "taken seriously."
Start writing as the most authentic version of yourself.
Starting now.
What emotions consistently show up in your writing?
(Are you secretly always heartbroken? Always furious? Always delighted?)
What themes obsess you?
(Death? Reinvention? Childhood? The end of the internet?)
What phrases do you consistently use?
(It's not a habit, it's a signature.)
What makes you tick?
What hills are you ready to die on?
What kind of writer do you want to be?
What is the writing legacy you want to leave behind?
What do you want to share with others?
What are the greatest life lessons you've learned?
Exercise: Write Your Unfiltered Writer Bio
Your Mission:
Write a new version of your "About Me"
Not that weird version where you talk about yourself in the third person.
Common.
“Dylan has had a passion for words ever since he was a little boy.”
Tf is this lool?
Make it wild, strange, poetic, stinging, and raw.
Forget "appropriate."
Be you.
With the sole aim of meeting the readers who will adore you.
How can you meet them if you're hiding?
Tell me:
What breaks your heart?
What lights you up?
What do you refuse to keep quiet about?
Pretend you escaped a literary cult and came back to tell the truth.
Write the version that makes you smile and think, "Wait... this is actually awesome."
Tomorrow is the last lesson.
Be ready.
See you soon.
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