one of the first rules of improv comedy is to always take the baton--in other words, to say yes to what your teammates hand you. Stephen Colbert explains the concept more elegantly here, but the basic idea is that if someone asks you on stage why you have a gorilla in your bedroom, you do anything except deny it. denying it kills the story and kills the fun. instead, you go one further. "one gorilla?" you say. "where did the other three go?"
this concept applies equally well to parenting, at least as far as playing with your children goes. I've probably been asked several hundred times the following question by a child carrying a pretend doctor's kit:
"Mommy, are you sick?"
(no, I am not sick. and if I am, I'm only sick of playing this game.)
this is the moment when I often have to reach into my deep reserves because saying no comes much more naturally to me. but of course, if you want the play to continue you'd better cough your guts out and ask for the most intimidating needle the bag can provide.
so often for me, saying yes is about getting out of my comfort zone (where I really could live for the absolute rest of my life). whether socially or professionally, it's about pushing boundaries that would normally keep me safe safe safe. and, you know. it's hard.
for example, I've been gaining a lot of new information lately that pertains to the world of writing and publishing. my initial feeling is no, no no! I am not ever going to tweet five times a day! attract a following of thousands. and many other suggestions that, while helpful, are also completely not my thing.
but I'm trying to remind myself that saying no doesn't buy me much. so, really, it's probably time to, you know.. *cough* *cough*
I love the sentiment behind this, it's what I was getting at before with my overly-long-winded essay on Larssen's brilliance.
ReplyDeleteI'll ruminate on the validity of the 5-tweets-a-day plan. I tend to think of social networking as being more of an ego-boosting fad than a long lasting tool for marketing and information exchange, but that's probably my own closed mindedness at work. I wonder why I am so pro-blogging and so anti-tweeting.
I have been following a few authors in my genre who have been successful. The woman who uses social media best actually has a full-time job doing something else. Perhaps for that reason, she limits herself to about a tweet/day (or in her case a longer fb that also posts to twitter and routes people to her fb page after they've read the first 140 characters). What she does well is keep the tweet in line with her authorial persona and her book writing style. They do not feel incongruous and while she does share details of her life and family in a way that helps fans to feel as though they know her, she does not bore everyone with a close look at the grains on her cereal. In contrast, I recently began following an up-and-coming (although experienced) author whose books I adore and have been disappointed to have to hear all about the very boring details of her daily life written in a style totally unlike her urban fantasy/romance genre. The second woman also does not appear to have as much going on as the first woman besides writing her books. While this makes the books very enjoyable b/c she really works on them, it makes following her less so. I probably like her book-writing a bit more than the first woman's, but I buy the first woman's books because I like *her* and I am impressed with everything she pulls off. I feel as though you would be especially good at the first strategy because you are very busy and also a thoughtful observer of the world. Oh and, once you are a bestseller you can get a media person who handles the posting for you. xoj (who is mentally building her authorial persona instead of authoring her dissertation)
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