A Chasing After Wind

Seven years ago, my best friend Jason introduced me to blogging. I started with one called NotWriting.com (Stuff one writer does when he should be writing) and eventually created the one you’re reading now.

For the most part, it’s been a fun ride. A number of people have contacted me, praising my work, and I’ve been able to use the blog as a sketchbook, a testing ground if you will, for various styles and subjects. I made some people think, I made some others laugh. In light of these points, blogging has been a success.

So, then why am I hanging up my blogging cleats? There are many reasons.

• Among the white noise of countless bloggers and Twitterers screaming, “Look at me! Look at me!,” I believe the only way to stand out is to not be a part of that noise.
• I think a hell of a lot of people are writing blogs, but few people are reading them.
• A lot of blogs appeal to very specific audiences and are stultifying to readers not from their tribe.
• The writing and maintenance of this blog dissipates my creative energies, keeping me from focusing on my real writing.
• The quick and easy nature of blog publishing conflicts with how I prefer to write—in drafts.
• I don’t want to contribute to the devaluation of writing as a paid skill by giving away the stuff for free anymore.

Those are the quick reasons, and I realize that some of my statements are debatable. I don’t care. They’re my reasons and I’m not interested in debating them.

As you see, I’ve unpublished most of my entries. If scarcity of a thing makes it more valuable, perhaps some of my entries will rise in value through omission. From now on, I may post an occasional thought or two here, but if I do it will be strictly as its name suggests—a web log, as in “Captain’s Log….” Down the road, I may decide to “reboot” the blog, but only if I come up with a value proposition I care to invest in.

This decision goes along with a monastic paring-down I’ve undertaken recently in all aspects of my life. Last night, after 4+ years, I cancelled my Publishers Marketplace account, erasing my online shingle to the publishing industry, as well as my ads for my PI novel series. Why? Because I didn’t want them hanging in the background, giving me false hope that a miracle-working agent or another movie studio (like Warner Brothers, two years ago) would see my online presence and “rescue” me from ignominy. No thanks, I’ll forgo the false sense of hope and take the ignominy.

Not only am I burning my ships, I’m burning them five miles from land, diving into the shark-infested waters and swimming to shore—with a knife clenched between my teeth. I’m closing up shop on NotWriting. I’m taking down my main website, including most of the free content I had there, and possibly moving some of that content to this blog. I’m giving away three dozen books on writing and the publishing industry because I’ve learned they’re all crap—full of recycled platitudes and Utopian visions of how the industry operates. (They also all send the tacit message that you the writer are not enough, that the answers are always “out there” someplace. Well, friends, let me assure you that the answers are most definitely NOT out there. You have to go within, find your own truth and just keep at it.)

All of this paring-down—particularly of my online presence—will have the effect of making me a little less exposed, a little more scarce. One of my role models for this anti-marketing approach is a painter who lives across the street, D. Francis White. If you do a Google search for this guy, you’ll find practically nothing. But his work (which you can only see in his studio) is amazing, and it’s all master-level quality. Last year, when I offered to create a web site for him, he said he didn’t want one. He wanted to be somewhat difficult to find. (He has a modest display in the pharmacy bay window a block away, with a cryptic set of directions on how to get to his studio.) “Besides,” he said, “I’m not trying to become rich and famous. That’s not why I do this.” His work is incredible—it really is—and I have to wonder how much of its high quality comes from his choice not to dissipate his energies on sales and self-promotion.

My wife and friends have heard me mention the following metaphor several times in the past month; I have a habit of playing with new ideas until they’re in tatters, then groping around for the next one. Here it is: There’s a reason why many Zen monasteries are high on mountain bluffs and that when a prospective student shows up, the monks shout at him and dump water (or worse) on him. It’s to keep out all those who are not truly dedicated. It’s how they weed out the dilettantes.

Make no mistake, down the road, when I have a new work I’m proud of that I’m trying to promote, I’ll be back—in some fashion. It’s just that, in the meantime, this “look at me, look at me” stuff reminds me of the line from Ecclesiastes 1:14: “I have seen all the works that are done under the sun; and behold, all is vanity and a chasing after wind.”

I gave the blogging/online promotion thing a go—a 7-year go—and I don’t think I gained a hell of a lot from it. I concluded that I’m better off focusing on my craft, on becoming the absolute best writer (not blogger) I’m capable of becoming. I can’t worry about the market. I can’t worry about whether, and to what extent, people have heard of me. I can’t try to get “their” attention. I have to focus on dedication and the art, and that’s it.

To my loyal readers, I say thank you from the bottom of my heart, and I ask for your understanding about why I’m doing this. I want to become a better, deeper writer and in order to do that I have to burn some bridges—chief among them, my blogs. If my work has given you any pleasure over the years, I’m glad, and I hope that I can count on you as a reader once I’m ready to put my work back into the world again. Best wishes to you.

This is Orcutt, signing off.