Dave Caolo

I’m totally in love with rule number one from Elmore Leonard:

“Using adverbs is a mortal sin.”

Read the rest here.

While doing some leisure reading online, I noticed that a blogger on the Fusion Ad Network explained a recent absence by saying that he had just finished up high school.

Hi. Yeah. I’m almost 40.

When I started blogging for TUAW, I thought, “Wow, I’m getting paid to write!” Calling myself a “writer” at that point would have been like a hummingbird calling itself a space shuttle. I mean, they both can fly, but one produces 1,315 tons of thrust and can withstand temperatures of 1,650ºC.

The other entertains retirees from their kitchen windows.

I’ve been able to delude myself into believing that I deserve that title over the years. It started the 1st time someone called something I had written a “piece.” Much like a Lay-Z-Boy is a chair while an Eames Molded Plastic Rocker is a piece, the term elevated my 350-word re-working of a common and rather pedestrian opinion to something actually worth your time and attention. As the head swells, so does the pen and I wielded mine like a Louisville Slugger.

However, the act of typing doesn’t turn one into a writer any more than sleeping in a garage turns one into a car. It’s something you either have or you don’t. Like Rubella.

In “On Writing,” Stephen King notes that most decent writers can become good writers, but they won’t become great. So I’m at my desk, behind the keyboard, writing pieces.

Shooting for “good.”

When I was at Berklee, we had a joke.

Q: How many Berklee students does it take to change a lightbulb?
A: 10. One to change it, 9 to say, “You’re doing it wrong.”

Joshua Blankenship is right when he says, “…will everyone just STOP thinking they have the market cornered on how I’m supposed to use the web? You don’t.”

Whether your goal is to make per-click dollars or produce ad-free, killer content, you’re right. Define what you want to do, how you’re going to do it and then do the best job possible. That’s the only real rule.

From Copyblogger

“So many bloggers quit writing because their topic ceases to inspire them. They think the only way to keep going is to start a new blog on a new topic and reach for new inspiration … Most beginning bloggers have it backwards. They think the topic is supposed to inspire them, when really, they are supposed to inspire the topic.

You have to write from the inside out.”

Amen, brother. Writing about Apple every day can seem repetitive, if I let it. The post I wrote about Keynote ’09 was so much fun because I first said to myself, “You’re allowed to be funny. You needn’t focus on the same points that every other product review points out. You’re writing for fun, so have fun.”

It works.