alainlatour.com

Read my tagline above.

In it I promised, when I started this blog, to write about writ­ing. I also promised to write about jour­nal­ism and media.

Though broad, these top­ics are at least related. Yet I also promised, as if media and writ­ing and jour­nal­ism weren’t under­go­ing such tremen­dous changes, to write about fit­ness and style, adding, for good mea­sure, the words “and more.”

Such a broad scope seemed to val­i­date what my friend Vincent once said about me: “Alain veut tout faire.” (Alain wants to do it all.)  Vincent, in case you didn’t catch on, didn’t mean it as a compliment.

Time ini­tially val­i­dated Vincent’s point. I hes­i­tated between too many top­ics. I wor­ried about bor­ing imag­i­nary read­ers. I jot­ted ideas and drafted posts and trashed them all, becom­ing oddly fond of the paper-crushing noise that my iMac spits when I drag a doc­u­ment onto its bin icon.

One morn­ing, as I perused my RSS feeds, it dawned on me that most of the blogs I fol­low con­cen­trate on one theme only, with the occa­sional digres­sion into a related topic. This made me con­clude that I’d never become a suc­cess­ful blog­ger, not as long as I failed to focus on one topic and one topic only.

The prob­lem was that I didn’t think I could limit myself in such a way, partly because I’m eclec­tic by nature, and partly because I don’t con­sider myself an expert on any one topic.

And so, like the prover­bial ostrich, I dug my head into the sand to stop wor­ry­ing about the blog. Until Luciano Pavarotti pulled it out—my head, that is.

It wasn’t Pavarotti him­self who did it, not least of all because he’s dead. It was Chris Guillebeau of The Art of Non-Conformity blog, who to val­i­date a point quoted Pavarotti as say­ing, “Some singers want the audi­ence to love them. I love the audience.”

This started me think­ing. I’m sure Pavarotti did love the audi­ence, but I’m also sure he loved singing more than any­thing else. I’m sure he’d con­tinue to sing for the mere plea­sure of it. Even if no one lis­tened to him. Moreover, I’m sure that’s how Pavarotti started—by singing for him­self and by him­self. That must also be how Hemingway began writ­ing and how Van Gogh began paint­ing and how Michelangelo began sculpt­ing. They may have  reached a point when they loved their audi­ence (or needed it, which is not so good). But I’m cer­tain they loved doing what they did, audi­ence or no audience.

So, at this point in my career, If I’m going to write, I must write because I want to, about what inter­ests me, and not about what oth­ers say.

Have many blog­gers suc­ceeded in reach­ing a wide audi­ence because they con­cen­trated on one theme? Yes. Does this mean I have to do the same? Maybe not.

In the end, it comes down to this: in order to shine, you must be authen­tic. You can’t ignore advice, but you can’t force your­self to adhere to it at the expense of your uniqueness.

I hope I will find an audi­ence. And when I do, I will love this audi­ence. In the mean­time, I can only afford to love writing.

In University of Toronto Mississauga’s Professional Writing Courses I learned about the impor­tance of free writ­ing or stream of con­scious­ness writ­ing. Yet I, like most PWC stu­dents, never did it consistently.

My research shows it works—it helps you warm up, teaches you to bypass your inner critic, improves your flow, damp­ens stress, and on and on. I will do it ten min­utes every day for a week and report back.  I will be using the excel­lent  Write or Die: Dr. Wicked’s Writing Lab. If I do this for a whole month, I will reward myself by buy­ing his $10 desk­top version.