Sterling Terrell

recovering economist

A Letter To Every Email Unsubscribe

A Letter To Every Email Unsubscribe

To every email unsubscribe I have ever had:

I am sorry.

I am sorry you had to go.

Sorry that I could not live up to your expectations, sorry that I posted something that offended you, or, worst of all, I was boring.

But here’s the thing…

Nothing I write is about you. (Unless I’m spilling your secrets)

I don’t write for you or to you.

I simply write publicly.

And anyone that cares to watch is welcome to peek over my shoulder at this little archive of a blog I keep.

So I guess – I’m not actually sorry.

Stick around for my par writing – or don’t let the door hit you on the way out…

See, the truth is that none of us write all that well.

I am always reminded of this post below.

Here are:

10 Non-Obvious Things I’ve Learned About Writing, By: John Sadditon (and this post is 🔥):

1. Most of your work is done in your head, throughout the day and night. If I were to venture a guess (because that’s what it is)… I’d say that it’s a ratio of 100 to 1 where for every hour of writing that I do, I’ve already spent 100+ hours thinking about that topic. Maybe, even, into the thousands or tens of thousands of hours. Writing, as a wholistic discipline, is one of the most inefficient uses of one’s time, but, when done masterfully, it can start wars (or end them).

2. The act of writing is still a 1-to-1 relationship with time — either you’ve maximized it or you’re wasting it. You get what you put in, nothing more and nothing less. Every keystroke is a commitment; every pause, deliberate. If you spend 5 minutes penning 500 words then you’ve written 100 words per minute. If you spend 50 minutes with the exact same outcome, then, you’ve wasted time.

3. Your ROE (Return on Edits) is a lot lower than you could possibly imagine — desperately lower. In other words, spend less time editing and more time just capturing your thoughts. A nice bonus is that when you do this your writing sounds a bit more authentic as well. The “rough edges” and grammatical mistakes give color to an overly doctored and clinical world.

4. The Muse is real — she just doesn’t give a f**k about your schedule. Show up and she will sometimes reward you with her matchless presence. But, if you don’t, she’ll never appear.

5. Becoming a writer is easy. Quitting is even easier. Professional (vocational) writers don’t write because they love it — they write because they are called. Sometimes, if they are lucky and super-blessed, they will also love it too. But, that’s apparently rare.

6. Honest writing is honestly hard, mostly because we’re literally in the process of self-discovery as the words flow out of us. It’s quite natural to write something only to realize that you vehemently disagree with the very thing that’s still (digitally) drying on your notepad. Sometimes, I’m so disgusted with what I just wrote that I literally have to get out of my chair and walk away! Writing forces us to commit to a side; sometimes, it requires us to think deeply and even defend it.

7. Your writing is shit. It’ll be shit for a long time. Heck, it’ll be shit forever. Everyone’s writing is shit. Mine is the best shit ever. We’re all writing things that, if not today will eventually embarrass us mercilessly tomorrow. Who cares, keep going.

8. Count how many times you censor yourself while you write. Now, multiply that number by 5 as that’s how many years it’ll take you to work yourself out of that nasty habit. If you’ve done it 3 times, it’ll take you ~15 years to get that out of your system; hopefully faster.

9. You may discover that your love for writing is less than your love for the discipline of writing. These things are different and it’s important that you understand the difference. And no, I can’t tell you what that difference actually is — that’s a personal story of self-discovery.

10. Writing will make you a master communicator, full-stop. If you don’t think you have room for improvement in that department then you’re already self-selected yourself out of the running and you should expect mediocre outcomes. I have yet to encounter anyone who communicates professionally who doesn’t also write (and read!) copiously. I’m sure they are out there though.

So I’m just a writer struggling in all of this mess.

Anyway.

I made a joke about how good I was at losing email subscribers a few weeks ago and then it just got worse.

Haha, bye Felicia!

How Comedy Is A Distortion

How Comedy Is A Distortion

This line that comedy is a distortion jumped out to me.

It stood out because I immediately knew it was true based on the way I naturally tell stories.

See, stories are funnier when they are exaggerated.

You can make nearly any story funny if you work a little with this.

Someone didn’t go to school while they were sick.

They were “making sure the flu was evenly distributed around the campus. Because they are for equal opportunity.”

A headmaster didn’t give the rules for visiting the girl’s dorms and a student asked how many times before expulsion – they asked: “How much for a season pass?”

Heck with enough practice exercising that creative muscle and that might be a good recipe for starting to write your own jokes.

  1. Think of a true story.
  2. Exaggerate it until it’s funnier.
  3. Rinse, repeat.

I had a short-lived but troublesome worry. What if writing comedy was a dead end because one day everything would have been done and we writers would just run out of stuff? I assuaged myself with my own homegrown homily: Comedy is a distortion of what is happening, and there will always be something happening.

-Steve Martin, Born Standing Up (Amazon)

Sterling Terrell