For several years, I worked on a comic strip called Gay Balls of Fire (GBoF). I had a blast doing it, and it was project that allowed me to explore drawing comics for the first time.

But in 2005 I went back to college. Being both a full-time student and a part-time freelancer didn’t give me the freedom to work on GBoF as often, so the updates grew less and less frequent, until they stopped altogether in 2007.

Even when I stopped working on the comic, readers would still send me email. “When’s the next update?”, they’d ask. I’d always reply, “Soon.” Two years later, the next update is still waiting.

I promised to change all that this year. This year, I’ll work on GBoF, resdesign the web site, and upload a new strip each week.

The truth is, I did draw a new strip, but I couldn’t get the last panel right. I kept procrastinating, and five months later, I still haven’t drawn the last panel.

Obviously, it was time to face the facts.

If I really wanted to do it, it would already be done.

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I’m going to work on my fiction.

That sentence summarizes one of my major writing-related goals this year. The goals, if you want to get into details, are to publish (not just write) 3 short stories and participate in this year’s NaNoWriMo, or at least just spend a month or two writing the first draft of a novel.

Small goals to the seasoned fictionist - but the last time I wrote fiction was five years ago. “I need to devote long stretches of time to this,” I thought. “I’m out of practice, so I need to devote, say, around 2 months of my life just doing this.”

But if I were to spend a couple of months working on my fiction, where would I get my income? I’d have to find a way to make money passively while I write.

That’s it! I’m going to work on a passive income stream, then when that gets rolling I can really work on my fiction.

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“I think I’ve had it.”

I said this to myself six months ago, as I was trimming my RSS subscriptions. Why do many blogs echo each other’s content? What is the difference between “5 Ways to Use Twitter for Business” and “How to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business”? More importantly, why do these two articles seem to procreate and spawn 100 incestuous offspring entitled “7 Ways to Use Twitter to Promote Your Business” or some such incarnation?

Why would the world need yet another blog post on how to use Twitter for business? Chris Brogan already wrote his 50 ideas on how to do that. If you’re just going to repeat 5 of the 50 points he’s made, forget it. Just because a regurgitated “Twitter for business” post can exist, it doesn’t mean it should.

This might sound hypocritical coming from someone who has written her fair share of those articles, but I’ve had it with all those posts (and even entire blogs) that are just predictable, inbred mutations of other people’s work. I’ve had enough - not just of the inbred articles I read, but also the ones I create. If I don’t stop now, I might as well ask Cletus the Slack-Jawed Yokel to ghostwrite for me.

For the past several months, I’ve been making an effort to create something unique with each piece I write. Not unique in the sense that it has to be a sweeping masterpiece, but I should at least be able to answer “yes” to the question “Is there any point to this?”.

But nothing is completely unique, right?

You can be sure that almost anything you come up with has already been done. What you need to do, is spin it in a direction no one’s seen before.
-Nate Piekos [via Blambot]

Let’s look back at the US Presidential Race late last year. Setting your political inclinations aside, remember how everyone was talking about how inarticulate Sarah Palin was. The words coming out of her mouth seemed to be random phrases and keywords strung together. Every other blog and its owner’s Twitter account has some record of her grammatical gaffes.

Despite the monumental accounts of Palin’s nonsense, there was one article that left a deep impression on me. That article was “Diagramming Sarah” by Kitty Burns Florey.

That article is impressive to me for the following reasons:

1. The writer took an over-discussed idea (Sarah Palin’s verbal nonsense) and put an original spin on it (from the perspective of sentence diagramming).
2. Among the tens of articles and Tweets I’ve read about Sarah Palin’s gaffes, it is the only one I still remember.

While most people were blogging “Sarah Palin’s stupid, haha”, Kitty Burns Florey used her enthusiasm for sentence diagramming as a new way to approach the topic. If she intended to do this for the sake of uniqueness, I don’t know, but I’m willing to bet she just happens to look at most things from a grammar enthusiast’s perspective. Why? Because that’s who she is. On the surface, Sarah Palin has nothing to do with sentence diagramming, but through Kitty Burns Florey, a new connection was made.

Making New Connections

Here’s the funny paradox: blogging allows us a space for our unique voice, but we end up echoing each other’s ideas, style, and perspectives. We read lists of the 22 perfect blog title templates and guides on how to make web content more scannable. We read formulas of how we can make our own posts pop, shizzle, and wow.

In other words, we’re following someone else’s footsteps because we think we’ll lose our way if we walk on our own. But the “on your own” stuff is where the magic happens. You’ll have the freedom to walk into different worlds and spot the hidden connections that your peers don’t know about - they’re too busy talking loudly amongst themselves.

Write what you like, then imbue it with life and make it unique by blending in your own personal knowledge of life, friendship, relationships, sex, and work.
- Stephen King, “On Writing”

While there’s nothing wrong with knowing the established standards, taking all that advice too seriously will hamper your own innovations. If you write about internet marketing, don’t limit your reading material to what other internet marketers write. That’s where the inbreeding starts - in one’s inability to look beyond a specific subject. Read about plumbing, watch an interpretative dance, or build a model Death Star. You’ll be surprised at the connections you can make among seemingly unrelated activities or genres.

If you really want to write that “Twitter and business” thing, go ahead. Just make sure you’ll be a conduit for a new connection no one’s noticed before. A tall order, perhaps, but not impossible.

Maybe you can make sentence diagrams of business-related Tweets.

Image by Jan Flaska from sxc.hu