So last night, I went to the monthly meeting of Quills & Quibbles writers’ group at the Harrison County Public Library. Lee Cable, formerly of The Corydon Democrat, was our guest speaker.  A long time contributing feature writer who also covered local politics and other news, Cable has recently retired and is going to be publishing a book called Stop the Presses, about the newspaper industry.

As an internet writer, I found his perspective on the impact of the web on small town newspapers poignant and refreshing. One point he kept reiterating was the importance of storytelling in emotionally connecting readers to the news. He put a lot of emphasis on finding the bigger story beyond the bald facts, and that makes him a writer after my own heart.

In all honesty, some of the blame for the slashed budgets and staff at newspapers belongs with the “free information” ethos of the internet age. If any industry was caught more unprepared for the impact the internet was going to have than the music industry, the newspaper industry is definitely it.  Some of the responsibility also belongs with editorial mandates to stick slavishly to a journalistic style guide that didn’t provide enough local flavor and unique character to keep their material from becoming a commodity.

I thought it was a little ironic. In their attempt to imitate the editorial standards of larger national papers, small town weekly papers have possibly shot themselves in the foot. They’ve given away their most compelling attribute: a truly local, intimate, personal and yet still professional perspective on community news.

It was a fascinating and engaging conversation with a professional writer who is watching his entire medium attempt to strip itself down and rebuild itself like Steve Austin. A few members of Q&Q suggested that he should look into blogging. I hope he does.

I was doing some research for a content strategy project this week for the Belle of Louisville. Since I’ve become obsessed with steampunk stuff, working on a project that features the oldest still-operating steam-powered riverboat is PRETTY DARN COOL.

But I digress.

In doing the research, I read something really sad. Robert Fulton is widely believed to have invented the steamboat. He did not. A man named John Fitch did. Fitch not only came up with the design, he built four working steamboats. So why haven’t you heard of John Fitch? Because he couldn’t get any backers. He ended up falling into a deep depression till he died. A decade after he invented the steamboat, Fulton used his design and was able to get investors, launching the riverboat industry.

How weird is that? Go to Kickstarter sometime and see how quickly even totally goofy, unrealistic projects can get thousands of dollars of funding. And poor Fitch, with his four working prototypes of a technology that would revolutionize transportation? Nada. Zip. Zilch.

I think about this, and a couple of  things come to mind.

Being first means nothing. I see a lot of guys in my industry who are so obsessed with being on the bleeding edge of technology and entrepreneurship, it seems almost inevitable that they will run right past that edge and tumble off.  Remember Friendster? The Newton? Lots of times, being first means your invention/startup/idea/creative work is the one that everyone will laugh at, and someone else will learn from, improve, and profit.

Worry about contribution, not credit. Fitch fell into a depression and died. But the thing is, he still invented the steamboat. It still worked. He had an idea, he brought that idea into reality, and eventually that idea spawned an entire industry.  Maybe he was a horrible salesman. Maybe he lacked the right connections. Whatever it was, Fitch had the stuff to create the steamboat, but not convince people of their value.

If you create something amazing, but let yourself get sucked into depression because someone else put some spit and polish on it and got all the credit, well, wah. Life’s unfair. That’s implied. If you’re a person capable of creating amazing things, value that. Focus on that.

Because precious few people can.

It was a big night for fairy tales in the Grey Cottage.

I’m sure it will need further editing, but at least this time I feel like I told the story I meant to tell. There’s an underlying theme about the disillusionment that comes from growing up in a fallen world that’s an important element of the original fairy tale, The Snow Queen. It didn’t make it into the original draft.  I was able to cut a lot of fat in round 2, and work it in.

I could have taken the story to an even darker place. I had time to do a pretty extensive rewrite if I’d wanted.  But I realized that there was another agenda at play in that desire, and it didn’t serve this particular story very well.

Writing fiction is therapeutic, but if you try to make it actual therapy, you end up writing stuff that only makes sense to you. That was another important lesson learned in all this.

The fat-cutting also gave me room to work in more character development for Kit, the male main character who’s based on Kai from the original story.

One of the biggest challenges with this story was making Kit a compelling character. If you’re at all familiar with The Snow Queen, it’s probably easy to guess why. Kai spends most of the story in a trance state, cold and unfeeling. Just before that, he becomes cruel and jaded to his best friend, Gerda. It’s difficult to sell the reader on investing in a character who is essentially unconscious for more than 2/3 of the story, and kind of a jerk right before that.

Also, in my version, Kit is basically the straight man and voice of reason compared to Greta. His personality is much more subdued. All my beta readers of draft 1 said Greta jumped off the page, but it was hard to connect with Kit. It would’ve been easy to let him become a featureless, unmemorable “Disney prince,” only important as a plot device and love interest for the quirky, heroic female main character.

But that wasn’t the story I wanted to tell. While the obvious conflict in the story is about the Snow Queen and her dastardly plans, there’s a deeper relational conflict that’s just as important, at least to me.

Kit and Greta both start the story believing that one of them is deeply flawed and basically a burden to the other. A big part of their journey is discovering the truth: that they’re both flawed, and they’re both strong. To get by in life, they’ll need to rescue each other as the need arises. Making Kit more than the role-reversal “damsel-in-distress” required making him as well-developed a character as Greta, with his own flaws, problems and motivations.

I’m really glad I had time in the second draft to give those to him.

We had Pepsi Next to drink, which should be called Pepsi Compromise.  ”You want to avoid sugar because it’s bad for your teeth and blood sugar and artificial sweeteners because they’ll rot your brain? Try Pepsi Next. It’s got both! Just in smaller doses!”

I’ve been thinking about food an awful lot lately. My strawberry patch survived the hail, and some of them are starting to pink up. They’re not all perfectly strawberry-shaped like the ones in the supermarket. Past experience tells me they’ll taste better than those, assuming I can keep the ants and The Girl away from them.

Speaking of The Girl, I went to a Mother’s Day presentation at her school this morning. Her class recited “Love You Forever.” She was one of the only speakers who didn’t look at her note card even once. We made a foam picture frame together, and she served me a muffin and apple juice. We also got our picture taken in front of the school (we’ll get the picture later to put in the frame we made.) As the lady was taking our picture, she noticed my Marilyn Monroe t-shirt.

“Do you like Marilyn?” she asked.

“Yes,” I said. And I do–I just watched Niagara a few weeks ago.

“Have you been watching Smash?”

“No. I probably should.”

I always feel awkward on the rare occasions I get to go to the kids’ school things. Even in parenthood, there are still cliques at school. I’m not as polished and pulled together as the “business moms,” in their hose and heels. I wonder if they’re stressed that they’re away from the office, or relieved.

I lack the confident familiarity that the PTO moms have, in their polo shirts and khaki shorts. They all know each other, and they all know all the kids. And I’m probably a little too mainstream for the “weird moms.” My hair and clothes are occasionally a little punk, but I lack obvious piercings and tattoos.

I am a mom without a country.

But I do have a couple of pretty amazing kids.

The Boy has informed us that he’s now got a bona fide Girlfriend, who attends his school. They’re both going on a choir field trip to Holiday World soon. It must be love–he’s started showering without prompting again. He wanted to take her to the Drive In, but since (A) he doesn’t own a car or a license, and (B) ARE YOU FREAKING KIDDING ME? That’s going to be a “No.” I have not pointed out to him that since he just lost his phone again, and school is winding to a close, he may have some trouble maintaining that relationship over the summer. I’m just going to enjoy the non-moodiness while it lasts.

I also colored my hair red. I was getting bored with the brown, even with the occasional purple streaks. Blond is too much maintenance. Black is the only color that looks just completely wrong on me; believe it or not, platinum blond and purple didn’t look as strange with my complexion as that flat black did.

I started reading Catching Fire this week, as well as Grave Peril. I’m enjoying the Harry Dresden series so far, although it was a bit odd when Harry himself @ replied to me on Twitter. I’ve tweeted as a battery, a bra and a bottle of bourbon in a professional capacity; I guess a fictional character isn’t that odd.

Sometimes my life seems so ordinary, I worry that I’m boring you reader friends. But it’s these moments of calm small town life with minimal drama that I enjoy most, and need to remember when things get crazy. Other times, I look at some of the unbelievably odd stuff that happens to me, and think “no one is ever going to believe this.”

So I guess it’s good that I post both. I hope you’re all having wonderfully odd and ordinary experiences, too.

I have a friend who is almost a good storyteller. He has a wealth of interesting, eclectic life experiences and knowledge to draw from.  He can tell a story in a funny and entertaining way.

He can tell a good story. But he’s not a good storyteller.

Why? Because he doesn’t listen to the audience. Whether it’s one person or a room full of people, after he gets rolling he’s barely aware there are any other people in the room, much less how they’re reacting to his tale.

For my friend, telling stories is about impressing others with how clever he is. He’s so entertained by himself, he doesn’t even notice that whomever he’s talking to has mentally checked out about five minutes ago.

Storytelling is intrinsically interactive. It always has been. Whether you’re telling ghost stories around a campfire, sharing funny family stories around a kitchen table, or pitching a creative idea around a conference table, the story is an exchange. You give them the story in bits and pieces. In between those words, sentences, pauses and inflection, they’re responding back to you. They laugh, or don’t.  They nod, or frown. They’re either following along, or dying to interrupt with a better story.

It’s easy to stop paying attention to the audience. I’ve been guilty of it myself. Especially if people are really responding well in the beginning. The temptation is to become distracted by the fantasy that you’re the star of the show, adored by the faceless crowd. That’s when you lose your audience. The story was something you were weaving together; your words and their responses. When you stop being fully invested in the story you’re telling so you can enjoy your private mental story about you being the center of attention, the audience realizes it instinctively. They see no reason to stay involved, either.  After all, if you’re not fully present for your story, why should they be?

If you’ve ever done any acting or standup, you know that you live or die by your ability to read the crowd. You have to listen to their response. You have to be ready to improvise and pull them back with you for the rest of the story. You might have to adapt the story a little. A story is an interactive experience when the listeners see and hear themselves in it. If they don’t–you’ve lost them.

If you can’t listen to your audience, you risk being the self-important chatterbox that  everyone wishes would just shut up.

Why is it that the tics of personality that others share with you irritate you so much more than the ones they have that you don’t?

My workplace and personal relationships are a mixed bag of enneagram and Myers Briggs types. Whenever I get completely exasperated with someone, it’s almost always a Four or INFP acting out of the unhealthy side of their type.

I give everyone else a pass. The other Fours, I always feel like “Seriously? You could try harder to not do that. If I can get it together better than that, so could you.”

The problem with that logic is that (A) I don’t always get it together better than that, and (B) I have the advantage of having studied my own type. I’m acutely aware of its common quirks and misperceptions.  Most unhealthy behaviors that spring from personality type are unconscious, or at least mostly unconscious. Bringing that stuff up into awareness makes a difference.

One of my favorite little koans about the enneagram comes from Clarence Thomas, “You never get enough of what you don’t really want.”  Fours both love and hate themselves for being different, outside the mainstream, “special” (in both the positive and pejorative senses).

Fours often end up in creative jobs, because seeing things from a different perspective is one of the benefits of the type. But if you have to design or write or create something for “the masses,” it’s sometimes hard to make the best decisions, because sometimes the best decision is to do something recognizable and accessible. Fours hate, hate, HATE doing anything we don’t think is original. I’ve seen more than one Four since I started working in advertising who can’t understand why his or her awesome, mindblowingly unusual concepts never get picked. They keep creating unrelatable, abstruse stuff and forgetting that their job is to figure out creative ways to sell soap, not to figure out ways to show off how special they are.

I also see a lot of Threes in marketing and advertising. Threes are all about image and perception, so Threes and Fours working together in an agency can be a great collaboration. The Fours are emotionally invested in acting as if they could care less what others think of them and their work (despite being incredibly sensitive to criticism). The Threes are acutely aware of and invested in what other people think of them, and how the work reflects on their personal image. The Four will have to get over feeling like the Three is a shallow fake, and the Three will have to get over feeling like the Four is an oversensitive basket case. If they can learn to work together, they can often make a productive team. Threes can spot something that’s going to be popular a mile off, so they make a good reality check for creatives. The downside of a Three is that he or she will not hesitate to throw someone else under the nearest bus to protect his or her image. If you make an unhealthy Three look bad or lose face, they can completely freak out.

Twos can make amazing account reps, or they can make awful account reps.  It really depends on how healthy the Two is. Twos want to take care of people. They want to make everyone happy (so everyone will love them). Unlike Ones, they’re great at compromise. Often, too good at compromise; it’s incredibly difficult for a Two (or a Nine) to draw a line in the sand with a client or a creative, or any human being, and say “this is the point where we part ways.” No one will work harder to make sure the client is happy than a Two. Like the Hotel California, this could be heaven or this could be hell.

Ones are classic traffic managers and project coordinators.  Ones not only want to deal with all the details of organizing things and keeping them on track, they are deeply passionate about quality. Ones love them some checklists. They care intensely about things being done right.  If your agency has trouble keeping projects on time and in scope, a healthy One can immediately see how to get you back on track. The only caveat is that no type is more prone to perfectionism than One. A One who isn’t healthy can sometimes actually stop progress, because they don’t believe in “good enough” and they make the creatives and developers crazy demanding perfection.

Oddly enough, Nines are often in leadership positions in agencies and development companies, almost accidentally. Their biggest strength is in being likable and getting everyone else to get along and work together.  They don’t tend to naturally have a lot of ambition, so it’s often a little ironic when they find themselves in a manager’s role.  Nines almost never panic. When  healthy, they’re steady, although rarely speedy, workers who just keep plowing forward undaunted once they get a good head of steam going. On the unhealthy end, they can be passive aggressive nightmares.  If you’ve ever had a boss who was sweet and likable, but made you completely nuts because of his or her inability to confront people, he or she was probably a Nine.

I don’t see a lot of Eights in an agency or web dev environment, but the couple I’ve met have actually been really valuable. Eights don’t tolerate B.S., and ad agencies and web devs are sometimes breeding grounds for it.  If you need a “bad cop” (and in an agency where clients don’t always pay their bills and employees don’t always perform to expectations, you do) then having an Eight around can be a great asset. He or she just needs to be aware of his or her “bull in the china shop” effect and give the creatives and programmers enough space that they don’t feel like Big Brother is constantly watching and waiting to pounce.

Sevens are more common in a web dev because they love gadgets and new things, but I’ve seen them in ad agencies as well. Sevens are great brainstormers. They’re great starters. They have an infectious enthusiasm and passion when things are new. They are not good finishers, so they’re often best in business development. A healthy Seven can get the client as fired up and excited about a project or campaign as they are.  If you have a Seven in a creative role, it can work but they usually need to be paired with someone who’s better with details and hanging with things till the end, like a One, Three or a healthy Four.

Sixes are often  chameleons, and don’t necessarily fall neatly into a stereotypical job, unless maybe it’s accounting. Depending on whether you’ve got a phobic or counterphobic Six, they’ll either be the person with the uncanny ability to see exactly how everything is going to fall to pieces, or the person who jumps into the most terrifyingly intimidating task without checking the pool depth first.  Sixes are usually very loyal–they tend to stay with a company for decades, which is why you don’t find them a lot in a volatile agency or startup (unless they’re counterphobic, and keep joining startups as a response to their fear of an employer going under).  They can also be kind of paranoid when unhealthy, and prone to “I stabbed you in the back, but it’s your fault because I knew you were about to do it to me” behavior.

Fives are often skilled programmers or analysts. On the positive side, they’re often both intuitive and logical. They can add great insight and are typically really skilled at whatever they’ve decided to master–if you can get them to part with their knowledge.  On the unhealthy end, they can tend to hoard information like a dragon hoards gold. Fives are a classic mad scientist/wizard. Rarely extraverted, getting them to collaborate can be a task, but if you need someone to FOCUS, a Five is your guy or girl.

Anyway, this is all very broad and stereotypical, but I have observed that certain personality types really do seem to be drawn to particular roles, if not specific job titles. It’s always helpful to know where your natural strengths are, and what you might want to keep an eye out for in terms of weaknesses.