Why You Cannot Outsource Your Authenticity
When I first decided to begin writing for this blog I thought I had it all figured out of how I wanted it to work. I thought ”Hey, you know, I can write out a synopsis of what I want to say, perhaps a few hundred words, then hand that off to a cheap writer that can fill in the blanks for me. I will add in a few personal anecdotes and then…” Bam! Instant blog content!
I could apply my skill set of managing people, knowing what I want to say, knowing what works and how to achieve the results I want, by utilising outsourced writing services. It is the same principle at the video game company, by having others supply source code, by using artists to develop the 2D and 3D assets for a game, etc, I can create enormous projects far beyond any one person. I do the direction of the project. I contribute ideas. I watch all the details. I write a little source code. I produce a little concept art. I write out the design document. I manage the people and the finances, I make sure the project goes in the direction it should, achieve the goals I set out at the beginning, and get the results desired.
I am the glue that sticks all the parts together. Assuming that you can glue source, 3D art and audio together. Not even Keita Takahashi[1] ever thought of doing that. A gluer of glued parts. I guess my job description would be that I am some sort of glue-ist.
I started doing a lot of research in to ghost writing, in to virtual assistants that can do some of the heavy lifting, in to having other people flesh out my initial synopsis to 1,000 to 5,000 word posts.
Hey, experienced writers and editors are always telling me, and have been for many long years, in rambling, vitriolic essays, editorials and blog posts how much easier it is to teach someone the basics of a particular subject , say quantum symmetry, so that they can write eloquently and in-depth about it, than it is to teach doctorates and PhDs the basic skills of how to write.
After all, it takes years, nay, decades to learn how to write, and write well, so what do doctorates and PhDs with educational backgrounds in quantum mathematics or computer science know about it? Every article ever penned for every magazine, blog or website is written by a virtuoso wordsmith, nay, a literal reincarnated Hemmingway, donchaknow?
Those boffins just add up numbers and stuff. Being able to communicate with the written word in a trashy magazine you can find on any newsstand? That is real skill, right there.
A friend of mine, John DeChancie, who is an actual writer and avoids writing trash as much as he can, quipped (not sure if it is original) that "writing a novel is easy, you just write out the word "the" about two thousand times, as that is about the average number of times that particular word appears in a regular novel, and then just fill in all the other words between."
For that reason, I applied the same theory. Find people who can write reasonably well, and have them do it. Writers are pretty cheap, right? And it doesn’t matter if it is someone who charges $5/hr as opposed to a writer who charges $300/hr. It is just words after all? Right? All words are equal? You would not catch a musical maestro having the gall to charge tens of thousands of dollars to conduct a command performance when you could just as easily go get some kid; let us call him Bruce, from the local high school to do the exact same thing. After all, it is just musical notes, right? And there are less of them than there are words. Less research too. Should be even easier.
The thing is, the difference between hiring a writer for $5/hr and hiring a writer for $300/hr is night and day. Moreover, the reason you do not want someone hired for $5/hr is you end up with something like this:
Now in the interest of showing my readers what I mean, but running the risk of promoting the terrible web sites in question, I am not linking to some of the ones I have found on building self-discipline. Yeah, yeah, I know you cannot click the links but have to copy and paste them in to a separate browser window, this is to save me the embarrassment of actually linking to these pitiful representations of the English language that purport to be something educational.
www.managementparadise.com/forums/articles/10370-developing-self-discipline.html
www.ehow.com/
www.todays-women-and-health.com/self-discipline.html
www.socyberty.com/Advice/Self-discipline-and-Self-control.9530
www.articlealley.com/article_600375_15.html.
Unbelievably some of the articles on those websites are "free to republish." Trust me; I cringed just reading this tripe. I would die of shame if I ever had to have it anywhere near something I wanted to put my name on. I am off to clear my browser cache just to make sure I never actually glean any influence from that drivel.
In addition, someone was paid to turn out that claptrap. And no doubt, the web sites that host the "articles" (I use that term very loosely) are actually earning some sort of monetary recompense for the rest of eternity, or at least until Google is broken up and sold off in small pieces by the SEC for anti-competitive practices. These website operators are laughing all the way to the bank, and after reading that stupefying rubbish I can understand why as it makes me insane too.
If you cannot be bothered to paste links into a browser I will post a snippet of fair use text here, full copyright and acknowledgement is given to the original website Socyberty. A slice of the text is given here as a critique of how utterly crap it is. And I can ensure you that, as a card carrying member of the guild of product reviewers I am privy to the technical jargon to describe a product clearly and succinctly, much as lawyers use phrases such as “prima facia” that the average lay person wouldn’t understand, “utter crap” is a legitimate technical term used by reviewers.
There are many techniques of self-discipline and self-control, from spiritual texts to how to books to self-defined techniques of self-discipline and self-control. Here’s an article on the subject.
Self-discipline and self-control must be practiced in every area.
If you think you are out of discipline in any area, whether it is in speech or action, then you need to learn the techniques of self-discipline and self-control.
Let’s say you’re out of control in spending money. Let’s say spending money is like an addiction. Then you have to make use of self-disciplinary techniques like budgeting. Setting up a budget. Deciding what percentages of your income can you afford to spend on what.
This is the same in every area. If you think you talk too much. Then learn to discipline your speech. What can you do besides speaking? Try listening more to others.
What type of speech? Do you think you need to discipline your type of speech, the type of subjects that you speak about?
What is the area that needs to be disciplined? Speech? Thought? Action?
Then come up with practical solutions. Balance.
Students need to learn self-discipline just to learn. To budget their time so that they can learn.
Public figures need to learn self-discipline and self-control in being effective public figures.
Money managers need to learn budgetting, which is a form of self-control and self-discipline.
Most people know when they are out of control and undisciplined. It’s something that people just know.
Then you have to think of the ways to discipline yourself and to control yourself.
There are many methods of self-discipline and self-control you can make use of. You can come up with methods of self-discipline and self-control that work for you. You can also study the great spiritual philosphers and spiritual texts that offer many techniques of self-discipline. There are also many how to books on the subject.
Read and study and learn the techniques of self-discipline and self-control that work best for you when you think you need this discipline and control.
Ugh! Brain hurts just reading that. It is only my self-discipline and self-control that is preventing me from shooting myself in the face after having read that unreserved pile of steaming…
I think this is what a web-writing hack would use when throwing around terms like “key word rich” and “search engine optimization.” I feel as though I am reading the condensed version of a chapter from a Brian Tracy book with all of the useful information clearly stripped out and re-written for a Janet and John audience.
See Spot.
See Spot’s Self-Control.
See Spot’s Lack of Self-Control.
See Spot Shag Janet’s Leg Because of Spot’s Lack of Self-Control.
Spot Still Lacks Self-Control.
Spot Needs Self-Control.
Spot Stop Shagging Janet.
Now Spot Has Self-Control.
I guess it could be abominably worse. I could end up with the writing you can find on Engadget or Geekologie, where the writers actually think they can do comedy as well as report short newsy items about technology in 200 words or less, with relevant picture attached. It is no wonder the founder, Peter Rojas, of that particular blogging network quit writing his own blog recently, he has probably realised he has done too much damage to the written word by hiring those writers to put pen to paper, metaphorically speaking, ever again.
So you hire a writer and if the writer is any good — read "expensive" — they go off for a goodly amount of time and actually do this thing called "research" where they will absorb information about the particular subject. They will talk to learned men with doctorates and PhDs about the esoterica of the subject, usually while telling them they just add up numbers (which there is, I am informed, an infinite amount of) where as writing actual words is much harder (which I am also informed by learned English Majors that I have conversed with whilst ordering a double-double with animal fries and a strawberry shake (much to the chagrin of the people in line behind me) that there are only a finite amount of actual words) (and we’re possibly running out of those and now we are having to borrow words from other languages, like gomi or schadenfreude, or making up some nonsense words like goodly and esoterica). And any decent writer would have never created a run on sentence like that with all those brackets either. Or started a sentence with “and.” Ever!
After many expensive hours and several hundreds of dollars, your writer will come back and give you their finished prose. And generally, it should be good and worth publishing. But, if your writer comes back in less thirty minutes and cost you three bucks, you end up with one of the articles I cited above, I will let you decide how to identify the cheap one.
You’ve got a cheap article, now you either have to baby sit your economy writer through the whole ordeal of doing the writing work, telling them what a "period" and a "comma" are for and how to use words bigger than three syllables that only appear outside of "English As A Second Language Level 1.”
Or, you have to completely re-write the entire article they gave you, because it suspiciously reads like something that came directly from Steve Pavlina’s Dexterity Software website, only it was condensed to just 500 words and talks about Erin who, when you question the writer, whose name is "Jeremy" and he lives in the middle of Bangalore, swears blind that "Erin" is a popular girl’s name in his town and he is talking about his sister. Or his Mother. Or maybe his penniless, dead-beat Uncle.
This actually happened!
A few years back my company’s website was being administered by an outside contractor who also did a lot of the writing and the frequently asked questions (FAQ) was an identical clone of the FAQ from Dexterity software, right down to the names of certain games. This is not something you want to find out with a cease and desist letter in your e-mail inbox on a Monday morning thank-you-very-much.
So yeah, nothing about this blog writing thing, if you want to be truly authentic, and get across your deep, deep ideas and thoughts about a particular subject you have contemplated for a long time and, hopefully, have unique insights into, can be cobbled together by using cut-price writers. If you do, you end up with the examples I gave.
Whatever you decide to do in life, be authentic about it.
P.S. The sentences in this articles are supposed to be that godawful long! :-p What do you expect? I don’t know anything about words unless they are enclosed in curly brackets. I am a software developer and I only deal with binary numbers, of which there are a very finite number.
[1] Original designer and programmer who came up with Katamari Damarcy.