TALKING ABOUT HOW TO find your writer’s voice is a conversation that can get flimsy quickly. After all, one’s real writing voice may elude you for years as you try on the aspects of other writers you most admire. But knowing how to find your writer’s voice is a skill you can learn since it is rooted in reading and writing, two things you cannot live without if you plan to have a writing life. These days, however, writers must have another voice: One of self-promotion. Jeff Goins and I take on both voices here. Listen in as we talk about how to find your writer’s voice — and so much more.
Read along as you listen to this episode of QWERTY. You can subscribe to all future editions on iTunes, Spotify or Stitcher. (The following transcript has been edited from the original recording).
Marion: Jeff Goins is the bestselling author of five books, including The Art of Work and Real Artists Don’t Starve. Jeff is also the host of the podcast, The Portfolio Life, as well as a much sought after speaker and coach and ghost writer. We’ll get to all of that, but first, let’s say hello. Hi Jeff. How are you?
Jeff: Hi Marion, I’m great. Good to be here. Thanks for having me.
Marion: I’m delighted, we go back a long time and these days, I know you’re doing a lot of ghost writing. You’re podcasting, you’re supporting and encouraging and educating a group of people who have signed on to work with you. You have a wife, two kids, a life, and you call this…
Jeff: A life.
Marion: A life. This is your life, and you call this a “portfolio life.” A liberating phrase. I really, if ever I’ve heard one that is what many writers do, and what we can relate to. So what do you mean by this, this portfolio life?
Jeff: This was a term that I heard from a guy, who heard it from a guy, who heard it from a guy. Around the time that I met you, and I’m sure you recall this version of me, I’m not too different from that person. But at that time I was especially angsty about finding my way in the world, and I wanted to know what I was supposed to be doing. At the time I was running an online business, I was doing this online marketing thing, and I was also writing books and spreading ideas, and they felt all very different in disparate forms of being and making my way in the world. I had a writing mentor and you, where it was all about the craft, and all about getting it right, and saying what needed to be said.
Then there were, frankly speaking, all these opportunities to make money, and these things online that weren’t necessarily unethical. It was just a different way of thinking and working. I was trying to figure it all out because I was good at all of it. I was good at the marketing, I was good at the business, I was pretty good at the writing. I was talking to friend of mine and I said, “I’m just trying to figure out, am I the marketer? Am I the business guy? Or am I the writer?” And he says, “Why can’t you be all three of those?” I should have known, this guy his name is Keith, he is a poet who works as a high-level executive. He’s a marketer and he works in the medical industry, and he loves Japanese culture and hiking.
He’s got this marketer mind, he works in the medical field, writes poetry and loves Eastern philosophy and culture. He says, “Why don’t you just try to live a portfolio life? I got this term from so-and-so.” Then I went and talked to so-and-so, and on and on it went.
The term is actually, it was coined by a business philosopher, an Irish gentleman in the ’80s named Charles Handy. He wrote in a book called The Age of Unreason. He predicted that in the future we would all be living portfolio lives. It starts with the idea of a portfolio career that instead of having one 40 year career, you’ll have four or five 10 year careers. He said this is something that we need to embrace. In the ’80s, he was essentially predicting the gig economy. I think of a portfolio life as an embracing of a reality that is true for many of us today. I think for many a creative professional, the most fulfilling way to live and work.
Marion: Absolutely, and looked at through this lens. When we met, I was ready to acknowledge that I too had a portfolio life. It’s just when you started using the phrase, I went, “Oh yes.” I remember I sent you a copy of my book on how to write memoir, and we began exchanging services. You had several skills and I had several skills, but you gave me the skills to develop a multi-platform online life, and I coached you through some writing. What were we doing in that exchange? What lessons can you give to the writers listening in that you get from that? What were we actually exchanging there?
Jeff: What was I receiving?
Marion: Mm-hmm (affirmative). What were you receiving? I was giving you some writing coaching, and you were giving me these online skills, but it’s really, I think it’s a form of networking. I think that word just gets such a bad rep.
Jeff: Yeah. I like to say network is like a bad verb, but a great noun, and what I mean by that is you don’t network with something, “Let’s network.” You build a network. It’s an absurd bastardization of a good word. A network is a connection of people, right? Nodes, right, a network. I think what goes around comes around, and I think we were being generous to one another, and I believe, and what I think is so impressive about you, is there are very few people who get to a level of success or comfort in life, and decide, “I want to become a novice again.” Because that’s actually very humbling and very difficult for most people. I remember I was writing The Art of Work, and that’s where I introduced the idea of The Portfolio Life for the first time.
I was talking to a gentleman who was a writer who, he was in his 50s, and this was several years ago now, and he was out of work and he was a writer and an editor, and he had gotten all of his business from children’s publishers, referring business to him. Because of the financial crisis, what was changing in the publishing world, he just wasn’t really getting much business anymore. I started talking to him about it, and I was in my early 30’s at this point, I think. I was very keen to give lots of advice to older people that weren’t asking me for my advice. Yeah, yeah. But I said to him, I said, “Are you on LinkedIn? Are you going to conferences or meetups? Do you have a blog?” He was bemoaning to me, because he saw that I was a writer, and he’d been doing this for 25, 30 years.
Then he saw that I was having some success, and he was asking me, “What should I do?” And I said, “Well, have you considered going to local meetups?” He was like, “Ah, I’m not very good with people.” I was like, “Okay, cool. Do you have a blog?” “Well, I don’t really do that. I just write books for people.” I was like, “Okay, how about LinkedIn, or some sort of social network?” “Well, I don’t really get technology.” And I was like, “All right, good talking to ya.” I realized that represents how most of us are, which is that that’s very difficult to start over. He needed to, his career was saying, the days in which you’re good at one thing and that’s enough, are over.
The world was sort of requiring him to become what I call a portfolio person. He was turning it down. What were we doing? Well, I think most people, we live in an age where most people want to be the master, without ever willing to be the apprentice. We were apprenticing ourselves under one another’s tutelage in new craft forms. I find that very admirable of you especially, because you really did master the craft of writing in ways that I think are exceptional, and admirable, and that I continue to look up to.
To go really to a whole new field, and become an apprentice again and stick with it. This is what I think is so admirable about your journey, is you really did figure it out. You really did figure out the online platform commerce thing, and create a whole new business model for yourself, in this new age where you’re able to bring your skills to market in a way that you didn’t have to undermine any values, or non-negotiables for you, which I think is incredible.
Marion: Well, thank you. I always tell people that I simply did everything Jeff told me to do, but we’ll get to that in a minute. It’s true. What you didn’t mention in this, and I agree about this networking thing. It’s interesting when I was working at The New York Times, what I always dreamed of was working without a net. In other words, without that net under me of safety of The New York Times. What I needed immediately was a network, was people, community, and you and I share that.
What you didn’t mention in the lovely version you have of what we did for one another, was the challenges that you set out for me. I think you certainly mentioned that you offered them to the gentlemen who turned them down. When you invited me to come to speak to your then annual conference tribe writers, and you challenged me to announce that I was going to launch my online classes. I remember very well getting up to give my talk, and handing my iPad with its PayPal card reader stuck in the side to one of your staff members.
When I got back at the end of the day, she handed me back my iPad, and she had been taking registration for my classes. It still chokes me up to say this, but I remember staring at it and my brand new classes that had just been announced, and I announced them there at your conference, were almost full. People had just signed on. I remember saying to myself, staring at that online site, that “this is what a dream come true looks like.”
I think that’s exactly the collaboration that networking can beget, is that with your skills and my skills together, we both got to a new place. That’s what’s so interesting to me about what you do, about what I do. To do that, one of the words that we use a lot in the world that you and I live in, is platform and how we support. I look at it as a way to support, but amid the jargon of writing, there’s so much language. “Show, don’t tell;” “Murder your darlings,” and the word “platform” befuddles everybody.
I was reading a piece in Forbes earlier today that said, “Platform requires a focus on developing an unobstructed back and forth between authors, and their readers, with the authors, not the publishers controlling the flow.” This is something that you taught me, which is that this is the best time in the world for writers, on many levels because we control the content, and the delivery system to the authors. You believe that this is done with a group, you call it a tribe. I wanted to talk about platform, but I want to talk about first the people in your world to whom you deliver, and you have this relationship. Maybe the first thing to do is just to define what a tribe is, or what you think of as community, and the value of that tribe for a writer specifically.
Jeff: A tribe is a relatively small group of people. I think this was the thing that surprised me most with Seth Godin’s book Tribes, is he says a tribe is this small group of people that you lead, and everybody has a tribe. Everybody has some group that they need to lead, but most of us aren’t doing that. I found my tribe by simply saying what needed to be said. The thing that I felt like I needed to hear as a writer, as a creative. I started saying it, and other people started nodding and raising their hand, and paying attention. I started to feel not so alone. That’s how I found this thing called my community.
Marion: It’s such a supportive thing to have. I remember the moment in my life when I was in my 20’s, when a friend of mine said to me, “What you need most now is to surround yourself with other people who write.” At the time I didn’t really understand that. I had left the New York Times to write a book, but what I didn’t have was friends who were writers, and that shared community, that shared sense of exchanging ideas and supporting one another, and being invested in each other’s success is invaluable. I think we’ve been talking now for about seven years. I was trying to figure it out today. As I said before, I literally have done everything you told me to do. I tell people when I send them to, “Just do what he tells you. It’s just really easy. Just do exactly what he tells you to do. It’ll be fine.”
I had an advantage when I came to you, having published four books with four big publishers. I knew how little they do to promote writer’s work, and so you didn’t have to tell me that. I think a lot of people struggle with the idea that once they write it, it’s still just in their computer or on the page, and they struggle so much with self promotion. Why do you think this is? Maybe it’s all creatives, but I only know it with writers.
Jeff: I heard somebody at a writer’s conference say, “I don’t like self promotion because I think it’s narcissistic. Look at me, me, me.” And I said to this person, because I was teaching a seminar on platform at the time. I said, “Well, let me ask you this question. What do you think is more narcissistic? The writer who pours her blood, sweat and tears into a great work, a blog, a book, whatever? Believes so much in it that she continues to work to promote it, and get people to pay attention to it. Continues to work to earn the trust and attention of other people, because she understands the value of such things, and doesn’t take it for granted. Or the writer who writes something and just expects people to read it because she wrote it?”
Marion: You said that, did ya?
Jeff: I did say that.
Marion: Good for you.
Jeff: I don’t know that I won her over that day, but I do think it’s a misunderstanding. I think people are lying. I think writers are lying when they say, “That’s selfish, that’s narcissistic, that’s whatever.” I think it just requires work, and it’s a different job, and writers don’t want to do a job other than writing. This is part of the job of being a writer. It’s not the art of being a writer in the same way. It was very easy to “work” with you, give you advice, and you just went and did it. You had been working as a writer, you understood that being a writer working at the New York Times meant doing all these things that weren’t writing. Now there was the writing, but there was also getting in the taxi cab, and driving to this thing, and knocking on the door and interrupting this person to get them to answer this one question.
When they didn’t do that, picking up the telephone and calling a hundred people, there’s all this stuff that you had to do. Talking to your boss and going and getting coffee for somebody maybe, all these things that aren’t sitting down writing, being struck by the muse. You had been apprenticed in that, but many a writer never actually has a job as a writer. They have this idea that they should just be writing all the time. I never had that thought. If I write an hour or two or three a day, Holy cow, that’s great. That’s amazing. The other six hours of the day are spent doing other things, that’s just part of the job.
I think that many writers are uncomfortable with self-promotion because it’s another kind of job, and I think it’s totally fine to just write and not promote it, and not share it, not do any of that stuff. Just don’t expect your book to sell, and don’t expect people to pay attention. That’s totally fine if you just want to do it for art’s sake.
Marion: Yeah, it’s true. I agree with you completely, and I’ve read all of your publications, and I think you do a great job of explaining how to do this. You say in one of them that we have to choose ourselves and build our own audience. It’s all about finding, writing for and connecting with your ideal readers. How does one identify that ideal reader best do you think?
Jeff: You’ve got certain hacks. I think things that are sort of, “Here’s how to get to from point A to point B as quickly as possible. Not a shortcut, but here’s the most efficient way to do things.” You’re a very efficient person, I admire that about you. You told me once, I still believe this is true, we see it happen every day. One of the fastest ways for a writer to get a book deal, is to write an article that gets national syndication, and popularity because all of a sudden you’ve proven an idea, and you see this happen to this day. Sometimes it happens on blogs, sometimes it happens on Buzzfeed. Sometimes it happens in the New York Times, but it still happens today.
Marion: Two of my four books came out of shorter pieces I wrote. Absolutely.
Jeff: I think it’s brilliant. When I’m working with an author on a ghost writing project, I say, “Write an article first so that you can succinctly, clearly, and hopefully powerfully say this thing.” Similarly, if you want to build a tribe, if you want to see if there’s an audience out there that resonates with what you have to say, I recommend that you write a manifesto. A manifesto is a short, shareable document that clearly articulate your worldview. The Declaration of Independence is a manifesto. A communist manifesto is a manifesto. Any number of political, religious, Martin Luther’s 95 Theses, anything like that, that very clearly draws a line in the sand and says, “This is what I’m for, who’s with me? Who’s against me?” Is a manifesto. If you want to start a movement, you want to find a community of people that resonate with you, write a manifesto.
It could be an article, could be an e-book, it just needs to be something that can easily spread. That is the best way for you to see if anybody out there is interested in what you have to say. How I did that was, I wrote an article that I then turned into an e-book, 1000 word e-book, not very long. It was basically an article, and I wrote an article called Writers Don’t Write to Get Published, and that was a reminder to myself because for so long I was striving to get attention when really I just needed to fall in love with the craft of writing, and get good at writing before I expected anybody to pay attention. I wrote that article and I turned it into a manifesto. Then people started paying attention.
Marion: Let’s talk about that, those early years. I’ve heard you live and online, and I’ve read many times where you’ve written that if you’re not being yourself, you’ll eventually burn out. As a young writer, name me a half a dozen writers you were, before you firmly found your own voice. Who do you think you were imitating, or who do you think you were trying out as, before you became Jeff?
Jeff: I think that’s a wonderful question. Who was I before I became me? Which is everyone.
Marion: Did you have an Ernest Hemingway period? Did you have a Fitzgerald period? Come on, fess up.
Jeff: I don’t, yeah, right, right. No, I don’t think I was ever good enough to have a Fitzgerald period. He’s incredible. I definitely, with the blog I started, I tried to be Steven Pressfield. I tried to be Seth Godin. I tried to be Michael Hyatt. These were bloggers and writers whom I admired. I definitely dabbled in Hemingway, I love Anne Lamont. I probably borrowed some of her sort of memoir mannerisms in her writing. I tried a bunch of different things. Those are definitely all authors that I remember trying to be like at various times, and I still do it. I realize, I don’t think I can not do it, but what I find now is it’s sort of like a rubber band.
I’ll read a new author, and I’ll really like the way they did something, or just read somebody and go, “Wow, I wish I could do that.” And the next time I’m writing, I find myself trying to do that. I first resist it because that feels unoriginal, and then I forget that how I got to where I am today is basically just by copying everybody that I know, and then organizing it in my own little way. I like the historian Will Durant’s saying that nothing is new except arrangement. This is a whole steal, like an artist idea.
Marion: It’s a lovely quote.
Jeff: If we go back to the whole concept of The Portfolio Life, I like the idea that our job as creative individuals is not to come up with something “original.” That’s not entirely possible, right? We’re all using the same source material, ideas. Joseph Campbell’s motto — there’s one story — and yet nobody’s exactly said it the way that you’re going to say it, the way that I’m going to say it. I am the organizer of the ideas. I’m the arranger, the composer, the one who’s taking the notes and arranging them in a slightly different order. These days, I think of my job as the arranger of all the different influences that are living in me. Then how do I bring those out depending on what I want to say, and who the audience is?
Marion: Yeah, I used the word annotation. All the things I’ve ever read, tasted, felt, smelled, all the movies I’ve been to, all the plays I’ve read, all the plays I’ve seen, they’re all in there. Then it’s how and when you draw that gesture, from Carson McCullers play Member of the Wedding. How and when you draw that turn of phrase that Emily Dickinson does, like nobody else does. It’s not plagiarism, it’s annotation. You must read, of course, we’ve talked about this for years. The other thing I think you have to have is discipline, and the discipline we’ve talked a lot about discipline. It’s a huge part of finding one’s voice, is having the discipline to keep trying. I think one of the things that I marvel at with you, is you have these, at least two voices that I know of, many voices we all do, but our writing voice of course is that expression of our very own selves.
Marion: But you make a very good point, and you made this to me that we need to master a copywriting voice as well. That’s the one where you’re writing to sell. I think that you are, more than anyone I know, the proponent of shamelessly having that too because you’ve got to sell it. You’re selling voice, I know you have a marketing background, but do you see them as separate? I don’t want to put words in your mouth, but I see them as separate voices. What about you?
Jeff: I think of them as different tones. The way I speak to my kids is not exactly the same way that I would speak to my wife, or an adult friend. I don’t necessarily talk down to my kids, but I talk to them differently, different level of affection, different vocabulary. I think the same is true of compelling copy. You will see this, especially online, you’ll see somebody who’s maybe a quite good writer, and then they clearly had some outside copywriter, write sales copy for something that they’re selling. I actually don’t think that works very well. If what you’re selling is writing or some version of your message, because the copy itself is part of the product, but it is going to require a different tone of voice then say, long form would require it.
It’s just there’s a different goal here, there’s a different job. I’m not trying to necessarily entertain you, or whisk you away to a different scene or a different world, or a different state of mind. I’m trying to very quickly and efficiently persuade you to buy something. I think probably how that worked for me is, I started out as a copywriter working as a marketing director for a nonprofit, and that’s how I got into blogging. Blogging lends itself well to copywriting. It’s a shorter form version of writing for most people.
The attention span of the average internet user is lower, than say somebody who’s reading a newspaper or a magazine article. You’re forced to write quick, punchy quippy kind of things. I cut my teeth on that with copywriting than blogging. Then I got into writing books, and longer form articles, and I began to appreciate good writing.
I think that’s made me a better copywriter, because I’ve sort of blended these two styles together in what I hope is a heartfelt, sincere, authentic manner. I don’t think of them as different voices because it’s always me, right? I don’t have different voices, but I have a cold right now, so my voice sounds a little bit different. This is my cold voice. When my kids know I’m excited, whether that excitement is anger, or something else, they can tell in the tone of my voice.
I do think that we as writers, need to be a little less precious with the tone of voice required for the task at hand. In the same way that the great writers did this quite well. They could write a satire piece, they could write a love poem, they could write a very serious play or novel. I love that. The classic authors and poets and playwrights were well versed to writing lots of different kinds of work. Whereas these days, we get so segmented by genre. I think it’s a little bit silly. A portfolio person should be multifaceted.
Marion: Absolutely. I think so. In a couple of weeks I’m going to have on Joanna Penn, and if there’s ever a person who’s got a multifaceted, writes horror, writes fantasy, writes fiction, writes how to books for writers. It’s Joanna, but as we wrap this up, and I would be remiss if I didn’t ask you about where we’re going to hear that voice of yours next. What are you working on now? What are you doing, and what can we look forward to?
Jeff: As you mentioned, I’m a ghost writer now. This is a newer venture. I’ve got I think close to a dozen books that I have worked on, or am working on that will be coming out in the next year or two, or maybe three depending on publication. I coauthored a book with a friend of mine named Grant Baldwin called The Successful Speaker, which was a fun little book on the art and science of public speaking.
I’m working on a super fun book that I think you would think is interesting, where I’m working with a classically trained internet marketer who is all about sales, and direct response copy writing. He took everything that he, at age 50 he got Parkinson’s ,and he took everything that he learned about persuasion and he applied it to himself, because he realized, “I can persuade anybody to do anything, basically. Why can I not persuade myself to live a better life?”
Marion: Oh my.
Jeff: Yeah, and it’s powerful. Getting Parkinson’s was this inciting incident in his life, where he realized, “I don’t have,” aside from Parkinson’s, it was a wake up call but, “I don’t have the kind of life that I want. If I believe in the power of persuasion, why can’t I persuade myself?” That’s what the book is about.
Marion: Well, he’s in the right hands. Thank you my friend, as ever it’s been a joy to speak with you, and as ever, I now have more work to go do and just to go do what you told me to do. I will, I promise. Be well.
Jeff:Thank you. It’s my pleasure.
Marion: The writer is Jeff Goins. Get his book, Real Artists Don’t Starve wherever books are sold. Listen to his podcast, The Portfolio Life, wherever you get your podcasts, and visit him online at goinswriter dot com. I’m Marion Roach Smith and you’ve been listening to Qwerty. Subscribe wherever podcasts are available. Qwerty is produced by Overit Studios in Albany, New York. Reached them at over it studios dot com. Our producer is Adam Claremont, our assistant is Lorna Bailey. Want more on the art and work of writing? Visit Marionroach dot com and take a class with me. Thanks for listening. Don’t forget to subscribe to Qwerty, and listen to it wherever you go.
