The Play is Whatever the People See
The episode of Mike Birbiglia's Working It Out podcast with Tig Notaro is a classic. Tig tells beautiful, funny stories about her family and about the time Allison Janney broke her ribs on a lesbian party bus. Classic. I listen to this episode each time it's rebroadcast. But on my most recent re-listen, something that Mike said sparked in my brain.
Mike's young daughter was preparing for the school play. She was rehearsing and practicing her lines at home. Before the big night, Mike told her, "The play is whatever the audience sees. If you miss a line, they don't know. If you don't do your blocking right, they actually don't know. Whatever comes out is the play and we'll all enjoy it."
For months now, I've been working on a new email newsletter. I've explored concept after concept, written draft after draft. One version focused on curiosity and making connections across disciplines. Another outlined a daisy-chain of content recommendations. A third was overly ambitious and promised to deliver an insight-driven idea, story, question, curiosity, conversation, and experiment each month. No, twice a month.
Each iteration fell flat. My test audience wasn't connecting with the concepts in the way I'd hoped. I kept refining, reimagining, redesigning.
I was stuck in a maddening cycle. I’m a communications consultant; I know how to launch an effective newsletter. Here’s how I would counsel a client:
Understand your target audience and what they want to read about.
Tell people exactly what they should expect and how it will help them solve a problem in their life or cultivate an aspirational identity.
Share valuable, relevant content that subscribers will find useful.
Validate what your audience is feeling and experiencing, tell them what they want to hear and one thing they need to hear.
Repeat your key messages frequently.
Include a single, clear call-to-action.
Sell, but don't act like you're selling.
Be consistent with your frequency of publishing and sending schedule.
Spend the most time on a compelling subject line to maximize open rates.
I know how to launch an effective newsletter. Those are the rules. I just … don’t wanna. Every time I think about email welcome sequences and A/B testing, I slump my shoulders and roll my eyes into oblivion.
And then I heard Mike Birbiglia's words again.
“The play is whatever the audience sees. Whatever comes out is the play and we’ll all enjoy it. ”
Hear me out. What if the newsletter is simply the newsletter? I sit down to write, share my ideas, and hit “publish”. People will connect with it, or they won’t. They’ll subscribe, or they won’t. Sure, I run the risk that people will find my ideas boring, pretentious, hack, or insane. But there’s also the possibility that a single idea deeply resonates with one person, blowing open a new landscape of perspectives and insights.
In the lyrics to my favorite musical "Sunday in the Park with George," Stephen Sondheim wrote, "Work is what you do for others, liebchen. Art is what you do for yourself." It takes a lot of chutzpah to call something art, but approaching this newsletter as work kept me trapped in a tangle of strategic objectives and best practices that drained my energy to create.
Seraut, George. A Sunday on La Grande Jatte. 1888, Art Institute Chicago, Chicago.
What if there are no paid subscribers and I never meet the minimum threshold to join the affiliate network? What if I publish inconsistently, or quit after four months, or pivot to an entirely new premise that hasn't occurred to me yet? Once again, I’ve made the mistake of focusing on the product, not the purpose. The newsletter is not a revenue stream; it’s a challenge to myself to make the shift from thinking to doing and a cold plunge into the vulnerability of sharing my writing.
The only difference between not doing it perfectly and doing it imperfectly is everything.
When you release yourself from rigid rules, you must also release your expectations about outcomes. Whether the newsletter finds an audience, raises my visibility, and brings in more freelance projects — or whether it flops spectacularly — I'm still me. Just like Mike's daughter in her school play, whatever comes out is the newsletter, and we'll discover it together. The difference between not doing something perfectly and doing it imperfectly is everything, actually.
The Wonder Work email newsletter launches soon. Sign up here. Watch me dare to try, publicly. You might try too.
Photo credits: Kyle Head via Unsplash
