Wanna see how I prompted myself to write my own bio, which is admittedly wackadoo and whimsical (and hopefully demonstrates my writing chops by creating a wild rumpus of show-don’t-tell)?
I wrote my own bio by completing one of my own exercises (which means: I answered my own bio questions - the same ones I’ve asked my copywriting clients for the last four years – and crafted the results into a story).
And this-here-below is a map of where the answer to each question went.
A Map of Bio Q’s and A’s
So…by answering these questions, you too can create a wackadoo, wonderful bio.
This is just one exercise for generating content. This is the whimsical version. There’s also a straight version, and an aspirational version, and so on. (For best results, do all of ‘em and combine the content.)
This is the kind of thing that you’ll do (and create and edit and workshop) in Write Me, I’m Yours.
In the meantime, here’s an exercise you can do RIGHT NOW that will help you write your own bio. Right now. Do you detect an imperative?
(I command with love. Promise.)
Write Me, I’m Yours Exercise #1: Your (Wackadoo, Whimsical, Wonderful) Bio in Eleven Questions
1. Quick. Word association. What words describe you?
2. Who describes you (who is most important to you)?
3. In five songs, what is the soundtrack of your life?
Song 1. What’s your story?
Song 2. What’s your story?
Song 3. What’s your story?
Song 4. What’s your story?
Song 5. What’s your story?
4. Pretend your parents aren’t your parents. Which cultural icons, historical figures, rogues, rebels or reverends would you be the child of? Why?
5. Related: if that kid – aka your secret you – wrote your bio, how would it feel?
6. What’s the most unexpectedly wonderful compliment anyone has ever paid you?
7. In your work or creative process, what concepts are sacred? Which rules have you made, which ones do you follow?
8. Which rules do you break?
9. What is your grand, audacious goal? What do you wish people would know, believe, do?
10. What do you do best? What makes you the most money?
11. What do you want people to do at the end of this page?
Now cut ‘n paste your answers to those questions into your bio. Smooth it out with transitions, juxtaposition and explication. Explain what those answers mean for you, your work and your clients. (Honestly, I admit it, this is the hard part…which is why there’s an all-day group workshop in the course, so I can show you, live, with feedback and questions, how to do it.)
Then add all your contact deets and voila! a whimsical version of you. With mascara. Because one should never leave the house without lashes.
And one should never, ever leave the house with a boring bio. Says your website. The one that’s whispering to you. The one that’s already in you and just needs to be written.
Even before I saw Gone With the Wind, I knew about Gone With the Wind. In fact, I wrote an academic paper about the politics of romance novels and films positively littered with examples lifted directly from the film. And I hadn’t even seen it.
(I got a 90 and a note from the prof saying she didn’t usually give anything higher than an 89.)
And then this weekend I saw it. I saw all the things I’d commented on: the racism (it’s everywhere but most noticeably Scarlett slaps a black maid/former slave); the requiem for a noble, civilized south of leisure (if you were white and owned property and people); and the poisonous dynamic between Rhett and Scarlett.
She manipulates him and treats him with contempt. He marries her. He – maybe – rapes her. And she likes it.
?!
That they are one of our iconic cultural love stories mystifies me. And it worries me: what does the widespread sighing over the romantic Rhett Butler say about women? Does it say we identify with Scarlett O’Hara?
I identify with Scarlett O’Hara. Scarlett O’Hara is my evil twin. Dark hair, pale skin, bright green eyes, gorgeous clothes. Flirtatious. An eye for style and the effect of style and beauty on the world (and men!). Able to step up and protect those around her…and desperate to be protected. Passionate. Sometimes cavalier. Ambitious. Able to realize those ambitions…must to the astonishment and sometimes dismay of her friends, family, lovers, husbands.
And lacking in a sound moral compass (she “hires” convict labour because she can no longer keep slaves, le sigh) and really, really manipulative. She marries her first husband to make her true love jealous. (This backfires very badly, as such plans are wont to do.) When she realizes her sister’s long-time suitor has come up in the world, she tells him her sister is engaged, and marries him herself. Then she puts herself in harm’s way so he’s forced to avenge her. During that honour attack – on a shanty town, ‘cuz you know how the poor and itinerant are wicked and need a village-burning now and then – he obligingly gets shot and dies, making her a wealthy widow. And, much earlier in the movie, when she’s at risk of forfeiting Tara, her family’s plantation, because she can’t pay the property tax, she decides to ask Rhett for the $300.00.
Scarlett O’Hara is my evil twin.
Rhett thinks Scarlett is a force of nature. He respects her feistiness, her fearlessness, her complete disregard for social convention and the conventions aimed at reining in feisty, fearless women. He sees her marching through the world, making men swoon, and gives props to her power. Other men (and women) are seduced by her apparent feminine helplessness and virtue and adore her for those false charms. But unlike other men, he sees her feminine failings – her bald ambition, fierceness, and ability to extract what she needs no matter what – and is impressed. Scarlett’s rogue, and Rhett likes that. He likes her. Everyone else likes her performance of herself.
So Rhett adores – and respects – Scarlett. He’s rich. She needs $300. She and her family, all of whom are depending on her, are near starvation. This former fine lady is working in the fields, planting and picking cotton. She’s got the dress on her back, and that’s it, and it is dirty and torn and worn.
And instead of telling him that, showing him her reality and her need, she takes down the green velvet drapes and makes it into an outlandish dress and hat. She tells Mammy that when she goes to visit Rhett, she needs to look like a queen.
And she does. She swans in and Rhett, who is “tired of seeing women in rags”, drinks her in with thirsty eyes. She tells him they’re doing well at Tara. She looks like they’re doing well. Everything’s just wonderful and she came into town because she wanted to see him, was thinking about him, worrying about him, missing him. She flirts, she fawns, she fibs. Caught up in her apparent tenderness, Rhett takes her hands in his…and discovers calluses and blisters. He discovers everything is not okay. He discovers that she’s here to flatter him out of the $300 – nothing to him, he loses nearly that daily at poker – that will save her farm and her family.
If she had asked him for the money, he would have given her the money. But because she attempted to deceive him, he won’t – and doesn’t – give her the money even though he wants to give her the money.
But Rhett won’t be Scarlett’s fool. He won’t be one more man she manipulates. He won’t be convinced or impressed by her virtuouso performance of a good Southern belle. He’s bored by belles. He respects a broad.
But Scarlett O’Hara is oblivious. She doesn’t realize that Rhett adores her exactly as she is and wants to love her madly. His most fervent desire was to adore and please her. He tells her this, years and years later, after their marriage has disintegrated and their daughter has died:
It seems we’ve been at cross purposes, doesn’t it? But it’s no use now. As long as there was Bonnie, there was a chance that we might be happy. I liked to think that Bonnie was you, a little girl again, before the war, and poverty had done things to you. She was so like you, and I could pet her, and spoil her, as I wanted to spoil you. – Rhett, to Scarlett, right before he leaves her.
So that’s the thing about Scarlett O’Hara. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t believe, that her man wants to give her everything she desires, everything he can. She doesn’t believe she can get what she wants in the world by simply asking for it, needing it, desiring it, deserving it. And so she resorts to flattery and subterfuge, the tools of a disenfranchised, disenchanted woman.
Scarlett O’Hara is my evil twin.
Once upon a time, I tried to convince men. My man. My loverloverman. And then I realized I didn’t have to, because the very act of convincing unconvinced him. So I stopped convincing him. I stopped scheming and plotting to get what I wanted…and now I have to be careful about telling him what I want, because he will give it to me. Because he wants to give it to me.
This is important to know about your partner and your business and the world. You don’t need to write papers about films you haven’t seen or seduce anyone into anything.
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(I’m keeping this at the fore of my mind when I write sales pages, which hithertofore have made me feel like Scarlett O’Hara’s evil twin. The antidote: no razmatazz or false scarcity. Just value, a letter to the person who needs my thing and for whom I made it, and a straightforward ask.)
X is the mark of a man signing a contract he hasn’t read because he can’t read. X is a surname you choose when you refuse to name Him ‘sir’. X is the choice – hard-won by your sisters – you’re free to make on a ballot. X is the choice of the select few who are eligible and allowed in…to watch that naughty skin-flick.
X is yes. X is no. X is decision. X is selection.
And the most loving, powerful and pleasurable thing you can do for yourself is to select who and what you’ll love. Select your responsibilities. Restrict your allegiances and your audience. Be an X-rated woman.
Being an X-rated woman doesn’t mean you’re striving to transform yourself into a pliable, plastic starlet or a cock-approved media-manufactured sex-bomb. (It doesn’t mean you’re not those things, either.) Being an X-rated woman doesn’t mean you’re accomplishing bedroom feats that would give a porn star pause. (No one has porn star sex unless the camera’s on, because that kind of sex is more about docking than gratification. Make love, not porn.) Being an X-rated woman doesn’t even mean you’re rocking the heels and flaunting your gams and your girls on a daily basis although I wish it did because I’m so tired of swimming in a sea of yoga pants and ponytails. Sportswear is not day-wear, people!
I digress.
Being an X-rated woman doesn’t have to mean any of those things. Being an X-rated woman means deliberately choosing who you will please. It means restricting your audience.
And that changes everything.
I mean, we know that intuitively, right? We know that trying to please everyone is a harbinger of disaster. Saying yes to every volunteer activity foisted on parents will swamp your family life and poach time from the actual objects of your parental affection. You know, your kids. Saying yes to every family obligation – organizing reunions, weddings, interventions, jail-house breaks, clandestine flights to countries without extradition treaties – will compromise the relationship with the person you’ve claimed as family. You know, your partner. Saying yes to every office responsibility, work task, request for collaboration, request will overturn your lifeboat. You know, your dream career.
And often you say yes because the request is inoffensive and you want to be inoffensive. You say yes because you want to please people who aren’t necessarily invested in pleasing you. You want to please everyone. You want to be excellent and known to be excellent and so you spread your excellence everywhere.
But excellence is an investment, not a jam. Excellence is the way you walk in the world. It’s the way you love in the world. It’s who you love in this world.
Imagine a feminist cosmos. Picture a self-help planet. Now envision a lustrous black hole where these two gorgeous galaxies collide. In that space swirls the disease to please and despite the best efforts of our warrior woman cosmonauts – advocates, mentors, mothers, coaches, columnists, your best girlfriend – it infects unwary women everywhere. We see it, we study it, we acknowledge it and we wish to cure it.
And because we wish to extinguish the rampant need to please everyone around us in order to escape critique, ward off judgement, be beyond reproach, be respectable (and perhaps earn accolades for our perfect performance of inoffensiveness?), we hurl the pendulum in the other direction: Don’t worry about anyone else. Don’t pander to the audience (they’re not watching, anyway). Don’t try to please anyone except yourself. Be suspicious of other creatures – especially female ones – who seem too other-identified. Counsel them on appropriate treatments for The Please Disease. Advocate. Evangelize. Eradicate. Stop people-pleasing. Please.
But.
In the name of avoiding namby-pamby pandering to an unforgiving audience, it’s not realistic to please only yourself. It’s not realistic, and it’s not desirable. The antidote to The Please Disease is not categorically refusing to please anyone.
Instead, declare who you will please and then really, trulymadlydeeply devote yourself to pleasing them.
Because that’s power. That’s excellence. To choose to love and love well is an act of profound self-love.
It’s the act of an X-rated woman, a woman who selects her path and her people and then walks it with them.
And they get somewhere.
So, good news: you can please yourself while in remaining in the business of pleasing others. I’m a people-pleaser from way back but I’ve discovered that the difference between aiming for maximum inoffensiveness versus empowerment is choosing who you will please. Self-love – and accomplishment and pleasure – rely on restricting your audience.
Only please the people who will be pleased. Only please the people who deserve it. Only please the people who need it. Only please the people who need you.
And so the list of people who get my X is short: my loverloverman. My children. My God. My muse. The woman curled up on a bathroom floor in Boise, Idaho. The one who believes she’s all alone but needs to believe she’s not. Because she’s not alone. I write for her.
I don’t write for my mother. She doesn’t need what I write and please trust and believe that although she’s highly pleased by my additions to the family tree she’s not pleased by what I write. That’s okay. I’m not trying to please her. (Anymore.) And as soon as I stopped trying to please her, we started enjoying each other because it meant our every interaction wasn’t tainted by the fraught seeking-withholding-dispensing of approval.
Well hallelujah and pass the popcorn. This X-rated film is gooooooood. I vote yes, yes, YES.
That’s what an X-rated woman does: in the name of self-love, in the name of pleasure, in the name of ecstasy and fulfillment, in the name of your pussy, your power, your spirit, your ancestors, your ascendancy (and hell, your dependants, too), you mark the spot.
Mark your pleasures and make your mark: for self-love. For agency. For efficacy. For excellence. For the greater good…but in a select theatre.
Restrict your audience and expand your effect. Be an X-rated woman.
xxx
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I wrote this piece (late) for Molly Mahar, who believes in the transformational power of truly adoring ourselves (and so do I!) and created a series on the A B C’s of self-love. Please go read the rest of the series – it’s gorgeous because it’s written by gorgeous women devoted to the art and practice of love and self-love.
We’re not, however, talkin’ about masturbation. Alas.
Maybe we should stop trying to boost our self esteem, boost our children’s self esteem, sis boost bah!
When I’m feeling bad about myself it’s usually because I know I’ve let myself or someone else down. I feel like a crappy person because I’m behaving like a crappy person. Cheering my crapology won’t encourage me out of it.
So the antidote to low self esteem isn’t affirmations or positive thinking. It’s mastery.
When we’re good at something, we feel good. When I’m learning, loving, succeeding, I feel like I’m filled with helium. Buoyant. I’m a hot air balloon and I’m rising, rising, rising.
All the indulgences and self-talk and secrets (bah! to The Secret) aimed at making us feel good (without doing good, without doing something to deserve our own esteem) are unsustainable because they’re not skill-building exercises. It’s not a coincidence that when I took my writing life in hand, and truly applied my hand to writing, everything changed. The woman I was three years ago wanted and would be astonished at everything I have now : a business. Big love. A little baby.
And I wrote my way here. The better I got at blogging, the better I got at everything, because I carried that confidence with me everywhere. Including into a relationship that changed me and changed him and changed us. For the better.
Forever.
So to feel good about yourself – consistently – teach yourself how to do something. Practice. Practice every day. Practice some more. Learn some more. Learn a craft. Learn your craft.
You’ll gain a skill and with that skill, pride and confidence; and your newfound pride and confidence will spread through all the rooms in your lifehouse. Like oxygen. Or helium.
Ignore her, when, after yet another of your unreasonable romantic disasters, she very reasonably suggests that maybe you should just be single for a while. You know, give yourself a break. (Give her a break.)
But you will not take a break. You will choose to keep dating, keep trying, keep seeking because seek and ye shall find. You will find him. You will choose him. Over and over again, when any reasonable woman would not. When any reasonable observer would – and does! And did! – say go, you’ll stay. Not passively, not because you don’t have any other choice, but because you choose it. You choose him. Even when you’re not sure you should, not sure you can, not sure you cannot. Uncertainty can and should be endured. Uncertainty is a function of innovation and a precursor to greatness and so what if you don’t know what will happen because you know what you want. You will make an unreasonable choice, because you know. You see it. It’s yours. And you will get there.
Choose celibacy. Sleep around. Take the Habit. Break the habit. Choose sex work to fund $200,000 of cosmetic surgeries to look like a woman – be a woman – even though you were born a boy. Sell your sofa for a meeting with Russell Simmons. Give up everything and everyone to move to San Fernando, Toronto, Vancouver. Don’t give anything up. Don’t go. Stay instead of leaving. Insight isn’t only found in Italy, India and Indonesia and you can eat, pray and love your way out of a nervous breakdown at home in between – during! - soccer games and suburban play-dates and grown-up dates and driving to daycare. Drive a vintage 1976 Cadillac with tinted windows, dual exhaust, an abundance of backseat ashtrays and an absolute dearth of cupholders. Drive that instead of a minivan (Exclaim: But The Caddy is practical! It’s so big that it fits three carseats just fine!). Don’t drive anything at all because cars are killing the earth. Finally, finally, finally hear the doctor and listen to her when she tells you you’re killing yourself and must change your diet. Do not change your diet, change anything, change yourself, just to be what the world thinks a woman ought to be. Or…be everything the world and the male gaze desires a woman to be, unrepentantly. And still he’ll leave you, or you’ll leave him, for another woman.
Desire is a tyrant. You will always find a way to get what you want, do what you want, do who you want, be who you are.
Come out. Stay in even though you promised to go out and have no excuse not to go out except that you really need to write for your blog which has four readers who are counting on you delivering insight and revelation and wisdom. So you need to get wise. And write. (You can write your way to wisdom even if it’s not always wise to write in the second person.) You’ll need to take classes, attend workshops, and practice, practice, practice. Publish. Blog. Blog every night for two hours after the kids go to bed, after you’ve worked all day, after you’ve done the dishes and done the laundry, after you’ve done everything. Blog even though you’re a word-snob and frown at using the word blog as a verb. Blog or write or paint or sing or think or make or plot or market or create or create your market because you need to do it, not because it makes sense or seems reasonable to other people.
And that’s the truth: you need to do it, whether it’s reasonable or not, and in the beginning, before you’ve got any extravagant results to display, it’s not reasonable. Desire isn’t reasonable, and neither is your vision. And no one can see it except you.
Vision is an invisible, slumbering, snoring giant: it waits. But not quietly. With each breath, it rattles you.
And so you will blow off your friends, blow strangers, blow up banks, just to blow up.
Or maybe you won’t do any of that. That trope is trite. Instead, maybe you’ll take your medication so you won’t go Van Gogh and cut off your ear, maybe you’ll refuse to starve, maybe you’ll keep your day job, make a living, live, live to create. Because keeping yourself in the basic comforts will keep you going.
So keep your job but e-mail yourself ideas all day. Use that healthy paycheque to pay for night classes and courses and courses of action. Use that paid time off to drive to Whistler for a workshop with another writer who will tell you you’re hot shit and the real deal and should be getting your ass published as widely as possible. Stay up all night painting and in the morning go to work, exhausted. Your co-workers will think you’re hung over. You are hung over. Live life like you’re hung over even if you never drink. Never drink. Drink coffee. Keep drinking coffee for all nine months even though the good-mommy storm-troopers tsk-tsk at caffeine-intake while you’re pregnant. Get pregnant. Decide you’re not going to get pregnant. Make your peace with never getting pregnant again. Make your peace with getting unexpectedly pregnant. Conclude, carefully and fulsomely and passionately, that mothering is or is not for you and that choice is up to you because no one else will do it for you. Any of it, before or after, yes or no. Because this mothering business is an unreasonable affair. And you don’t have to be a mother to mother.
In the course of your well-lived life, you will make choices that will appear to outside observers – mothers, fathers, friends, family, lovers, haters, anyone who is not you – to be unreasonable. Those choices, your choices, your unreasonable choices, are only unreasonable to other people. They make sense to you, because you see it. You feel it. Desire, vision. It’s yours. And you will get there.
So make unreasonable choices. Because life is an unreasonable affair.
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