Y – You

04/29/2014 2 Comments

YI seem to be missing one last critical component of writing – You! The reader! Without an audience, a book is not a very interesting thing, and a writer is not going to be a paid author for long. So on the one hand, the goal is to get published – but on the other hand, the goal is to get read.

I think that’s a lot of the appeal to self-publishing. Yes, money, a career, all that. But really, if the goal is to be read – if the goal is to get the book to You – then by any means necessary!

It’s the reader who must meet your words with their understanding, it is the reader who tries to figure you out. Who tries – and wants to try! – to know what you scrawled out on the page, what you typed hastily into a computer. It is the reader who makes this worth it.

I missed the opportunity to write about Audience, when I wrote about Author instead, for this A to Z Challenge. So instead, I’ll let you read a post better than I would have written anyway, from the Writing Catalog. I say that in part because I like Gene’O’s writing, but also in part because I don’t think enough about the audience when I write. In a lot of ways, I write for an audience of one: myself.

And maybe that’s why I have a hard time starting to write. Because while I could write, if my main audience is myself, well, I already have the story here in my head. I know what happens. Would anyone else care what I write? Would anyone else like it?

So that means for me the most important question right now goes back to audience. And actually, I think that it may also answer a question I asked before: why write a blog? The answer may well be that you write a blog to have an audience. To experience that, to want that. To interact with them and find out what they like and don’t like. To get praise, or constructive criticism, or to get shared – all to give you that little bit of confidence you need, to know that you might just have an audience outside of yourself (or maybe your family, hopefully they’d read it too…), and that it might be worth it to drag those ideas out of your head and let them see the light of day.

Thus, concluding my posts on the essentials of writing, I dedicate this post to you: my reader, my audience. That’s right, you. Right there. I’m thinking about you when I write this. And I am thanking you for being there. Whether you’re there just as a blogger, wandering by from the Challenge – great! I know I don’t read nearly as many blog posts as I should. I am a bad audience member. Or whether you’re a follower – thank you so much! You remind me time and again that maybe I really can be a writer.

And this seems like an excellent time for self-promotion. If you like my writing here, like being my audience here, check out my geeky blog I write with my wife: Comparative Geeks. It overall has much more content and posts than here. However, since my audience has grown quite a bit during the challenge, I’m going to have to keep going strong here too, I think!

Thank You!

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N – Newspapers

04/16/2014 10 Comments

NI think it’s safe to say it’s been a tough few decades for newspapers. I talked about how Journalism jobs seem to be becoming more specialized and in some ways this makes sense, as the news in general gets smaller and tighter as an industry. But what has led to the steady decline in newspaper business? The obvious answer is our old friend the Internet. But I see a few specific elements that are causing more trouble for newspapers because of the Internet than other industries are seeing – say, books versus e-books.

The obvious one is that the Internet provided a new means of accessing the news, forcing them to react and start to try and provide the news in multiple channels. And, to provide it at an Internet-appropriate speed: so, basically instantly. Not the easiest thing, and for getting your facts straight, for doing good editing, a deadline and publication schedule and time is kind of a useful thing. That changes significantly with the Internet.

And then there’s the fact that search engines arose – increasingly giving people the feeling that they can find things on their own, and don’t need anyone else to do that sort of work for them. All of a sudden, is there as much value in the person doing that work, digging up the stories, reporting on them? When all of a sudden, everyone feels like they can do this.

And then you get people creating the content, too! Bloggers and the like, doing the work for free, on their own time. Saying whatever they want, with no editorial standard. Eroding our expectation of there BEING an editorial standard.

But no, the number one problem facing newspapers, in my opinion, is the fact that people expect things online to be free. Oh, and we don’t really like ads. Why buy a newspaper when the same paper gives the news online for free? So then some of them add pay-walls, and we’re up in arms. Paying for something that costs money to create, and which we used to pay for anyway… I will also say that regularly, the most ad-filled, cluttered websites I have seen are news sites. This has gotten better with time, or else I stopped going to their sites: I’m not sure which it is.

I’ve given a few of my thoughts, and I think these things are hitting newspapers harder than a lot of other types of writing. There’s free fiction online, after all, but I still see the value in paying for a good book. However, the news? If I can’t get it one place for free, I’ll just look elsewhere until I can get it for free. Right? That’s what they’re up against. At least in my opinion – what do you think is their greatest challenge?

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J – Journalism

04/11/2014 Leave a comment

JI was planning from a pretty young age on pursuing writing as I grew up. Every year through elementary school, I went to what our district called the Writer’s Conference, where you basically just went as a kid and presented something you wrote. In third and fourth grade, I was running a lending library of my books during recess. No one was really checking them out that I remember, but my goal was in creating them more than anything. Around that same time, I also was one of the founding members of my school’s Newspaper, eventually ending up as one of the last two original founders by sixth grade, and doing a news report on the local public broadcasting.

Somewhere in the midst of all of this, and I think also reading about and learning about the lives of famous authors, I really thought that Journalism was going to be that thing I did to make money while working on novels. Because it’s what other writers had done. It made sense. You could write. You were a writer. A natural fit. Right?

Right?

Flash forward and I didn’t do much with Journalism in high school, so maybe that’s its own bad sign for it. Who knows. Then by college, I wasn’t really in with the folks doing the paper and all either, actually eventually writing a letter to the editor about their poor editing skills and fact-checking. However, none of this stopped me from looking at writing jobs when I graduated, and finding them all smiling back at me saying, “English Majors or Journalism Majors only.”

So wait. My 40+ page, heavily edited and pared down (it was originally 60+ pages), highly researched History Honors Thesis and associated degree didn’t make me a writer? I had to have those specific degrees?

I guess, like my Fine Arts post the other day, it all comes back to a question of what makes you a writer? Your specific degree? Being trained as a writer? Being a published author? And yes, I need to stop planning so much and do more writing to really call myself a writer. But I do blog quite a bit.

And that’s the closing thought on Journalism I want to go with: increasingly, I feel, the Journalism that we are turning to in our Internet-heavy world is blogging. The Journalists are turning to the blogging format and style. blog news sites are huge – just think of The Huffington Post. While its star is rising, where are the newspapers and other news sources going? Restricting, restructuring, playing with pay-walls and commenting.

So I guess, maybe I’m doing something right.

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H – Hook

04/09/2014 6 Comments

HFor many of the letters of the A to Z challenge, I had ideas pouring out for what to write about, and I started organizing things to not overlap too much, discuss different topics, to be short, personal and opinionated, and of course writing-related. For a few letters, I was left hunting a bit for words. Just so with H, where I found the essential writing term “Hook.” I had forgotten this term, but it is of course one I know and employ, or even over-employ, in my writing. I know when I first did NaNoWriMo, every chapter started with a hook sentence, In Media Res, and the action caught up with it.

However, that got me thinking of the other sorts of ways the idea of the Hook comes up in our world today. What began its life as a writing technique has become something of a way of life in our information-heavy world.

For instance, in blogging, or other sorts of writing online. They say that for search engines, you really want to have your keywords in the earliest parts of your post. That effectively, the search engines are optimized to consider your hook. Also, in RSS feeds, you generally only see the first bit of the post, and this is the Hook that gets people to click-through and read more of your post. Thus, in blogging, the Hook is an essential tool to get read – without a good Hook, the post is likely dead in the water.

By this standard, I’m pretty sure this post fails!

Thinking about the Hook in terms of blogging got me thinking about it in terms of the rest of the Internet in general. And in particular, some of the ways in which the Internet approaches these things like a Journalist. That is to say, we think about webpages in terms of what is “above the fold” (like with a newspaper) – the content that you can generally see without scrolling down, as this is the most-seen content. And really, the first paragraph being the Hook is a heavily used Journalism approach to writing.

And what about Social Media? Twitter in many ways functions as a giant Hook machine – at least, any tweet with a link or picture or anything else you need to click. It has to be interesting enough that someone clicks! It has to Hook them, and it has to do it in under 140 characters. Less, really, with a link in there too!

So be thinking about what you write and put online. Yes, the first paragraph might be the first that you write. But it also has a pivotal role in whether you get read. So go back and look it over before you publish!

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Taylor Grace, you continue to rock – The Sunday Re-Blog

04/06/2014 3 Comments

I have to admit, part of why I am sharing this post is because the author, Gene’O, said it was his most-shared post. Just adding to that expansion…

A couple of lines of thought here. One is about watching, and stressing over, the blog stats. The other is about Canon and Canonization. I care about both things, making this a great post to think over.

Gene'O's avatarMy Former Blog

I just need to post again. Nothing else will do, and my friend Taylor Grace has the perfect thing for me to blog about. A post about what numbers do to the mind. Especially a writer’s mind. Here’s the lede:

I have to admit, I’ve done it. I stared at the blog stats until I knew the numbers by heart, then I would check and recheck. The blog became a live entity I needed to keep happy…and, well, I wasn’t miserable but it was close.

Here’ s the rest. Taylor’s post includes lots of good links – nearly all of her posts do. One of the reasons I love her blog so much is because she turns me on to things I would never see otherwise.

I’ve been right there – looking at those numbers, checking and rechecking, and it wasn’t that long ago. You can measure it in…

View original post 1,180 more words

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