EDITORIAL

Three Ways To Skin A Cat

Here’s a stimulating exercise: Take one story and write versions of it

This week I asked myself: What significant lesson have I learned from watching others on Medium that I’ve started to apply and seen results?

The immediate answer is process.

I’ll explain.

Process is something that I learned from following the works of two Medium editors Andrew Rodwin of Brain Labs and Dr John Frederick Rose of Backwaters Publication. Both have strong backgrounds in research where it’s not just about attention to detail, but being well-versed with structures, organization and systems. No, I won’t label them geeks or nerds, they’re simply brilliant thinkers.

Writing isn’t just about placement of emotions when channeling vulnerability. It’s not just about syntax, diction, and being good with colorful words. It’s about format and chronology. And more.

Writing for Brain Labs allows me to collaborate with Andrew who guides and points out specifics — aspects I overlooked or underexplored. Articles on Brain Labs are about the mechanism of ideas and approaches. You take a topic and you break it down, discuss the mechanics of things. For example, think: the internet and the Internet of Things (IoT). At least that’s the sort of story I submit to Andrew which challenges me to take an alternative route against memoir-writing.

My creative writing lecturer used to say, “to expound is always easy. What isn’t, is being tight in one’s articulation, to explain how something works without ending up with a how-to dry biscuit of a piece. Try being technical once in a while in feature writing.”

John came up with the idea of Backwaters Publication with the intention of not just writing poetry, but to share how our daily operations — aspects we take easily for granted — are shown to be remarkable systems of knowledge and behavior. And yes, do that through the language and flair of poetry, sil vous plait.

For instance, the way you make coffee and start your day has a sequence accompanied by a rhythm, a micro act that is part of a macro pattern. What happens when one aspect of that value chain is removed? For example, you wake up with no access to hot water to make your mandatory pot of coffee. You’re thrown out of rhythm. Do you sink or swim? Author Scott-Ryan Abt comes to mind with his recent piece What Do You Want At 3AM?

A classic case is when you’re late for an appointment and how things sometimes fall apart from there. That’s a story we read very often. It becomes a unique and inspiring story when you mindset the situation to be an advantage rather than a disadvantage. What happens then? That too becomes a story.

Every day we are surrounded by systems. People who are successful develop a disciplined aptitude for order, routine and structure placed in their lives. There is a chronology of events that are anticipated and planned. It’s as simple as always starting your day with making your bed, as opposed to leaving a disorderly room, and coming back to it after an exhausting day. Many people write about routines being boring and that breaking away from it is the story. An opportunity for a story is when the non-anticipated and unplanned occurs. Perhaps it is, but not always, and never too often (on the subject of aptitude for order and discipline, Chris Thompson is the sounding board for you).

But how do we break the ceiling for refreshing angles to a story we’ve heard all too often before?

Humans need structure. That is a fact. Just observe when the traffic light is out of order at a busy intersection. Tempers flare up, accidents occur, no one gets any wiser. What’s the reason for the chaos when the lights go out? Semiotics — the study of symbolic communication.

I’ve learned a fair bit from following Andrew and John in the last one year. They inspire me to challenge myself, to keep things fresh, and to not be afraid to try something of a different beat. I decided to explore semiotics.

I’ll be more specific.

I took one angle, a symbolic communicative subject-matter, and decided to write many different ways centered on and around it.

The angle was Facebook. Simple. One word, a social media platform. Even if you don’t have an account, it has become common knowledge of what it is.

To add context, for quite some time I’ve been planning to exit Facebook and delete my account. I keep forgetting to take action. I thought a personal gain out of this exercise is I’d be doing myself a favor and kick my own ass into action. Conjecture to actuality.

I finally did.

I wrote about it in I Now Pronounce You Meta-Dead.

The 4-minute read is written in a dialogue format between two people, indirectly describing the process of deleting a Facebook account.

Using humor, the story was designed to be two-tiered. One tier was in the conversation, revealing a human connection between two levels of authority. Another tier was between man and machine; a connection between user and Facebook, against the hassles of digital technology.

Writing this piece, I wanted to explore and interplay two systems, both I’m exposed to on a daily basis.

Facebook, and all its communal, town hall, and business tentacles, has become such an insidious web of systems that trap people into addiction and data hostage manipulation. The only way out is to untangle myself from the nefarious knots themselves, to escape the system. It was an exciting prospect to play with at the time. I got a kick reminding readers of the sticky exit procedure designed to make you return to digital Hell.

Compounding on the idea of dialogue and humor, I decided to write about Facebook from a different human struggle. This became The United States of Reunion.

The quasi-dialogue and personal essay stabs at a high school reunion, facilitated by the presence of Facebook. I didn’t want to demonize the social media platform, but to highlight how people are the demons, manipulating it to their greatest advantage for personal gain. Facebook is just their arena.

The dark premise is we all have our ulterior motive to be on social media. Many of us are voyeurs, stalking others, yet much of the content on social media is about folks criticizing others for doing the same thing. I wanted to make fun of this situation.

Once again, the final outcome of the story is, to reach safe shores is to escape from the labyrinth. People will lure you in, to stay, the machine is set to destroy you, much to the glee of human onlookers. It’s a no holds barred battle to find the exit to secure your sanity.

In this piece, I wanted to expose the process of how people utilize and manipulate social media in ways that would have been impossible in the pre-Facebook era. It begs the question, are we designed to become beasts or is the beast within us activated via social media?

It’s always interesting to reflect what we were, what’s happened, and what we’ve become. It’s a novelty to think of an alternative life if the internet never happened. Where are we today? Would we have Medium?

But this all started with one piece I wrote in December, A Slave To The Machine. The piece challenges you to think about losing your phone. What happens next?

The essay became the turning point for me after reading comments saying how it’s anxiety-inducing to think about giving up one’s channel of connection to the rest of the world.

True enough, the internet and social media collapse fences and pull countries and people close to each other. That’s a marvelous “flattening” of the world, to borrow the term from the man who wrote about it — Thomas Friedman in The World Is Flat.

We are able to make friends 10,000 kilometers apart, giving birth to opportunities unthinkable fifty years ago. Imagine Tinder being made impossible to those who depend on it. Yet, riding on that idea, it made me question further, is it the world that you want to be a part of, chaos and all? If not, what other options do we have?

If our friends and family are on Facebook, what happens when we sever our ties by deleting our account? Will it mean we have to create a different channel of communication? That typically ends up being the Family WhatsApp group chat.

Hence, escaping a platform, does it mean we are free to escape the entire matrix?

Well, I may have deleted Facebook and Messenger, but I’m here connecting to readers on Medium, another social media platform. The joke is quite on me, really.

Damn if you do, damn if you don’t. One thing’s for sure, it’s given me several story ideas to amuse myself and my readers. Meanwhile, try chucking your phone aside for a day or a week, and see how the running of your life (and mind) flourish, or fall apart.

I’m certain there’s a story there you can write in three versions. Go forth and skin your cats.

If you have any questions regarding writing and publication, feel free to email me at [email protected] *Unless specified, do note that your questions will be shared. Cheers.

From the series: