Life's #1 Rule: Becoming The Expert Non-Expert

Life is filled with rules, and marketing your material is evidently no exception.

Writers and consultants I've read and heard suggest a myriad of rules to follow: Build a platform. Get a website. Blog. Expose yourself...

I think that means make your name and work known. At least, I hope it does.

A recurring suggestion states that the writer should become an expert in an area that makes him––and henceforth, his book––salable. 

The advice feels sound. Based on the evidence the advisers provide, it is sound. The problem for us marketing neophytes, however, is determining what that area could possibly be for us. 

I presented that issue to my wife one day as we emptied a trunkload of books into the garage. She said, “You have two bachelors degrees, went to graduate school, taught for 35 years, and have a library full of fiction, nonfiction, and reference books. You must be an expert on something!”

Sadly, no. 

That’s not false humility. I speak from experience. Every time in social and professional gatherings, whenever discussions veer into my favorite topics, someone knows more than I do. The problem, I have learned, is that despite my ego, it is quite obvious that there’s no subject where I know all there is to know.

Today I had a revelation: "Hey! That' s my area of expertise! I am the expert non-expert. In fact, that is my greatest asset."

I have absorbed life's greatest lesson: The more I learn, the more I know I need to learn. No time for resting on laurels. No time for medal/trophy polishing. No time to boast. Time to just shut up and learn.

A degree in history earned forty years ago? Times have changed. There's a little catching up to do.

A degree in English? Good chance I missed a few books written before 1976. There's an even better chance of having missed a few since.

Journalism? The practice and laws governing the practice have altered a tad. What was once only print and broadcast has morphed and now includes cyber pages, blogs, and Joe-Bob Wampeter forwarding fuzzy and creative “news” to anybody with an email account, a smartphone, and an IQ over 27.

Teaching experience? Every year at the front desk, one notices that techniques and students change. Science discovers more about how the brain works. Materials and delivery systems change. Technology improves. Subjects, programs, and entire professions disappear. As trends and appreciations transform, students teach as much as instructors do. 

Spiritual knowledge? Every truth leads to more questions. Every question leads to more answers and more truth, BUT more questions. The cycle continues ad infinitum. 

Here's the issue: Many of us find uncertainty and constant change frustrating.

If we are honest with ourselves, however, uncertainty and change are, in fact, liberating. Realizing how incomplete our learning is frees us to learn more. 

And that is the main problem we have accepting the title of expert. To accept the mantle of expert only confines us to what we already know, a position surely to be outpaced by events and discoveries. Only by realizing our inexpertise in EVERY area can we learn what we need to know.

Becoming an all-knowing expert is impossible. We cannot learn all there is to know about any subject.

What we can become––and be as long as we breathe––are authoritative learners, people knowledgeable on certain subjects, aware of our deficiencies, and willing to learn more about everything of which we were once so sure.

So how does one market being the authoritative learner, the non-expert? 

Learn all you can. Then, like all the world's "authorities," follow Life's #1 Rule: Fake it and fake it big.

With a few decades of practice, I'm kind of an expert on that.

Rules Revisited: Beware the Brussels Sprouts

I don't mean to beat a dead horse here...or a horse statue...or even a wooden hobby horse.

Violence is wrong. 

Watching a three-day Green Acres/Petticoat Junction/Beverly Hillbillies marathon is wrong.

Cooking Brussels sprouts for anything other than insect fumigation is wrong.

Giving books for Christmas is good. Receiving books for Christmas is even better.

Yesterday, while I griped and grumbled about the notion of putting Brussels sprouts on the same menu as cherry pie and stuffed baked potatoes, the family placated my indignation by passing out gifts. (They're so smart.)

I loved all the presents, but one was especially appropriate to The Write Wind. 

A book. 

But not just any book. 

The 20th Century in Poetry, edited by Michael Hulse and Simon Rae. (Nothing like having an author in the family who feeds your literature addiction.) That in itself is a good thing. 

But what elevated the book immediately in my estimation was a "throw-away" sentence found in the introduction that reinforced the rantings of the Crabby Curmudgeon here a few weeks ago. 

CC said at the end of his tirade: "Learn the rules. Rigorously and repeatedly use them until they’re second nature. Then wreck ‘em! Stomp the heck out ‘em and develop your own. It’s fun."

In response, some readers/viewers saw that paragraph as the blasphemous raving of an old man, while others exhaled in welcome relief that finally the grammar Nazi of their adolescence had joined the real world. 

In actuality, it was the blasphemous raving of an old man, but be that as it may, Hulse and Rae's introduction confirmed CC's assessment of creative writing, at least in the realm of poetry. 

And CC was ecstatic about the affirmation. To the point of nearly letting the Brussels sprouts circle the table without comment.

Nearly. But he's old and can be forgiven.

"Back to the book," you say. 

Sorry. To make a short story long...

According to Hulse and Rae, as well as countless literary critics, the 20th Century was a battlefield of critical theory that pitted poets against readers against academics. The likes of Kipling against Yeats against Frost against Eliot against Ginsberg against Plath... Each spokesman claimed the correct theory, while viewing the collective hordes railing against them as heretics and charlatans.

Throughout the century, there were more theories of composition and analysis than there were alternatives to serving brussels sprouts for Christmas dinner. No wonder Hulse and Rae wrote: "The one rule in poetry is that there are no rules."

See why CC was so happy?

While that observation may seem permissive and lazy, the words are, in fact, liberating for poets and readers alike, especially when adopted by writers and audiences of the 21st Century. 

How?

Without the strictures of confining and arbitrary rules, the poet is free to say what he/she wants in the way that he/she wants to say it, creating a style most effective for the poem's purpose. 

The reader, freed from Pharisaical conventions of what makes good poetry, can step out of the putrid Puritanical temples of tradition and enter ever-expanding fields of fresh verse where poems are scrubbed clean of rancid rhythm and rhyme, purged of muddying metaphors, and shaped into masterpieces so deceptive in their simplicity that their beauty overwhelms the most intricate flowers.

On this day after the Christmas holiday, I am devouring this book of verse with the enthusiasm that my family ate the Brussels sprouts yesterday. 

I think I'm getting the better meal/deal. 

With fresh material to read and inspiration for new things to write, it's going to be a great new year. May yours be the same.