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Linda Adams wrote:Quote:Pro, definitely, primarily as a fiction writer, but I also want to write non-fiction. I was thinking of the blog entries as both training and samples for the freelance writing business I plan to start eventually. Since I have no qualifications at all (degree, etc.; joining this workshop is the only writing-related thing I’ve done within the past year), I was thinking I better provide potential clients with proof that someone like me can write after all.
Am I being unrealistic?
Probably the most important thing is to identify is what you truly want to write. Sometimes writers simply want to write full-time, so they decide to freelance when their dream is actually to write fiction (I fell into that with writing screenplays). If you want to write fiction, write fiction. You won’t learn how to do it better by doing non-fiction.
Is it unrealistic to think you can write both fiction and non-fiction? Fiction is definitely my first love, but I’m attached to non-fiction, too.
Ashe wrote:I’d say that On Writing is a book with good advice for any writer, but Stephen King’s advice isn’t for everyone. 1k of words a day isn’t a reasonable goal for most beginning writers.
Basically, the best thing for a beginning writer to do is start small. 500 or even 250 words a day for a few weeks, until you find yourself naturally surpassing that goal in your writing time, then up it another 250 or 500, whatever you think you can handle. Starting small not only gets you practicing with getting words down, it’ll be the beginning of your self-training to the discipline you need to get better, particularly if you arrange a set time every day for writing, which is another good thing to do.zette wrote:On the word count — starting high is an invitation to get disgusted by your inability to make the count all the time. You are not used to writing steadily, and you’ll do far better by setting a low goal and surpassing it than by setting a high one and not making it. That’s a sure way to make writing miserable and not want to go back to it.I, uh, now realize the problem’s bigger than the blogging. Sorry.
On a good day, I naturally surpass the 1,000 word quota. But I’ve been hit with writer’s block recently (unless I misused that term), for both fiction and non-fiction writing. The block started in the fiction writing, which got me frustrated, and it might have bled into the blogging. But I realize I’d been so focused on the blogging, because I currently have more “at stake” there than a story.
I’m currently hauling myself out of the fiction block, and so far it’s been going better than I thought. Though whether that means things will be looking up for non-fiction too might be another thing.
So…for low points like this, is it okay to lower the word count? Or force yourself to write your normal quota anyway?
Linda Adams wrote:A degree, by the way, is not necessarily a qualification. I’ve been published in over 50 magazines and have two stories coming out in anthologies, and I don’t have a degree. What’s going to sell your writing is your writing. That means you have to get manuscripts done and submitted.zette wrote:They will not be good as things to send other people to see, unfortunately, unless your blog suddenly becomes a super hit and you are drawing thousands of readers a post. It is simply poor business to tell a potential publisher to ‘check my blog’ for things. You will do far better by writing articles for various places and building up a listing for non-fiction work.On the other hand, it can get you into the steady pace of writing at all, which might help.
I’d actually started out writing articles to submit to newspapers and magazines, but all the “how to write query letters” advice I’d read said to mention “qualifications” – published work, degrees, any experience. All of which I didn’t have.
Needless to say, I’d gotten rejected (unless not receiving replies, even to follow-up letters I’d written weeks after to avoid looking like a nagger, isn’t rejection). Yeah, the articles not coming to them at the right place/time, along with being substandard, are other reasons, but I’d also gotten the impression that me not having anything else besides a pitch was a third strike against me. Hence the blog. Which, agh, has been a waste of time, more or less.
Besides writing articles, is there anything else you can do, at least to give you an edge? How did you get started?
Weird Jim wrote:Quote:That’s because I, uh, put my foot in my mouth too often to count.Wanna guess why in the eleven or twelve years I’ve been an FM member that I’ve rarely gone into chat? Foot in mouth disease is endemic with writers. I’ve often deleted posts, both here and in other places, but I’m not sure that’s desirable with a blog. Besides, I think there are people who love errors. 😳
😆 Nice to know it’s endemic after all.
Weird Jim wrote:Quote:But I DO want to write genuinely good stuff, and…that’s where I come up short.I’m not sure what genuinely good stuff is, and I’m not sure that the writer is the best judge of what’s good and what’s bad. Even so, it’s a matter of progress. You toddle before you walk before you run. As long as the writing is readable and coherent so that people can understand it, it should be passable. Keep learning and you’ll get there. Your initial post was OK.
Linda Adams wrote:So true. I’ve seen some pieces posted for critique that were so bad they were unreadable.Genuinely good stuff for me is work I’m not merely satisfied with, but proud of. Yeah, you can’t entirely be objective there, especially if it’s your work, and then there’s taste to consider. But you want to write stories with the kind of characters and plots and writing, etc. you love, which…I can’t do as of now.
But good to know I passed the OK mark already.
zette wrote:But here is what I think. What you do has to depend on what you want out of writing on the whole. Do you want it to be a fun hobby? Then write whenever you feel like it.If you are considering anything approaching a professional career that includes writing, then you have to start approaching it in a professional way. First, how do you think the blog posts are going to help get you what you want as a writer? If you think discipline, they might not be your best approach. If you want to write stories then discipline yourself to write them and not something else.
Pro, definitely, primarily as a fiction writer, but I also want to write non-fiction. I was thinking of the blog entries as both training and samples for the freelance writing business I plan to start eventually. Since I have no qualifications at all (degree, etc.; joining this workshop is the only writing-related thing I’ve done within the past year), I was thinking I better provide potential clients with proof that someone like me can write after all.
Am I being unrealistic?
zette wrote:Whatever you want to write, try approaching it in smaller steps. Set a goal of writing 250 words a day, five days a week. Do that for two or three weeks and you will have the pattern of sitting down and writing in place and you will almost naturally start writing more. Build the number up to where you are comfortable. Change it to 3 days a week if that works better for you, but go with at least five (I would recommend seven) days to start with so you get used to just sitting down for a few minutes and writing.Yeah, I’ve been doing that, except I started with a higher word count. 1,000 words everyday, which I’ll move up to 2,000 when I’ve adjusted. I, uh, got that from On Writing – is this as good as they say? I got it because of all the rave reviews (which, say, 50 Shades of Grey also had), but I don’t have a real gauge since it’s one of the first craft books I’ve read.
J.A. Marlow wrote:There’s a reason the creative side of the brain is called your “Inner 2 year old.”
To take that analogy further, children do best in a structure. To know what to expect (even if rebelling against it). Those who write regularly attest that the more the write, the more their creative side comes up with ideas. More ideas equals more writing, and round and round it goes until you come to the point that you won’t be able to finish all the ideas you have in several lifetimes.
The point it to start that structure despite the tantrums and foot-stomping. You both will be happier as you settle into a regular writing schedule, even if it’s hard to initiate at first. There is no substitute for butt-in-chair and fingers-on-keyboard.
(I should mention that even burst writers are this way, so long as the burst come regularly.)
😆 Good to hear that. It really does get better? Now I’ll be even more motivated dragging that two year old to the keyboard later.
Ashe wrote:That’s okay. The thing is not to be too hard on yourself and remember, right at this point, you’re at the beginning of your writing life, so it’s okay to write bad stuff. Eventually, you’ll start writing really good stuff. For some perspective, and ymmv, I started writing in August of ’88 and didn’t really start producing anything even halfway decent until I found this site in its founding year (’97, irrc). It wasn’t until I was able to post stuff for critique and do critiques myself when I began to gain real skill, and, at least for me, giving critiques helped me more than receiving them.MrGrey wrote:turnipmeatloaf wrote:And finding out everything you’re written so far, even from years ago, is bad doesn’t do wonders (“what if you just suck, and will only amount to the Ed Wood of the writing world?” etc.).Would you rather look at everything you’ve written so far, even from years ago, and think it’s perfect? What would it mean if you did? You’d be ‘finished’. Nothing new to learn. Nothing else to expand upon. You’d essentially stagnate, refusing to learn any more because ‘you have it nailed’. Looking at your stuff from the past and saying ‘that was no good’ is great — it means you’re improving!
turnipmeatloaf wrote:Uh, I got a bit ranty there, didn’t I? Sorry. :blush:No problem, shows you have passion.
That’s good to hear, thanks.
I guess it’s just that it’s discouraging seeing all your work throughout the years and not having anything you can be proud of, that reassures you that while you need lots of work you ARE capable, once in a while, even rarely, of producing something worth reading. Even a line.
MrGrey wrote:turnipmeatloaf wrote:You want to be good, but it’s hard drilling discipline into your very non-disciplined self.It will be with that mentality!
Part of improving upon yourself is giving yourself credit when you do. Calling yourself very non-disciplined will only make a good excuse for when you don’t feel like writing. See yourself as someone who is learning discipline — not perfect, but still putting the effort in. 
Thanks for the tip.
Weird Jim wrote:turnipmeatloaf wrote:Uh, I got a bit ranty there, didn’t I? Sorry. :blush:And the problem with that is….? Readers want you, and possibly your rants as long as they’re not overly introspective.
(Who is this person? What does she think? Who does she think she is? = I’m going to read what she’s written to find out.)
What do many people read? Is it gossip? Sometimes angry gossip.
Ten drafts and you’ve probably killed it dead. Fifteen and it could be murder. You should try reading the Daily Mail. Writing is often awful. It’s one of the top online newspapers.
That’s because I, uh, put my foot in my mouth too often to count.
Oh, I sometimes read the Daily Mail and enjoy it in a so-bad-it’s-good way. :blush: But I DO want to write genuinely good stuff, and…that’s where I come up short.
Linda Adams wrote:Quote:But what if the lots-of-drafts routine has always been like that for you? I very rarely have anything that comes out decent-but-needs-polishing in the first draft, and that’s even for topics I’m enthusiastic about (and I had surprisingly decent first drafts for topics I was indifferent about). Most of the time my first drafts of anything belong to the trash bin – for content and prose. If I’m lucky, they start becoming readable when I start polishing. Little by little, from draft to draft.There’s two different issues here. The first is that since you’re relatively new to writing, you might be line editing instead doing actual revision (a lot of writers do this). Line editing is when you go through the manuscript line by line and change sentences to make them shorter, take out an adverb, that kind of stuff. Revision is when you make major changes. For example, you do a post where you make five points on your subject and then you realize that one of the points doesn’t work. So you have to revise it and either strengthen that point or come up with a new one.
Yeah, that’s exactly what I’m doing. Never knew they were two different things.
Linda Adams wrote:The second issue is the amount of revision. If you’re going to be a freelancer where your primary source of income in writing, ten drafts is probably too many. It means you spend longer fixing a piece when you need to get a new one done for more money to come in. A blog post is going to get you some promotion, but unless you’re someone like Mike Hyatt or Chris Brogan, you’re not getting paid for it. So you want to make sure it’s not cutting into your (potential) paying writing time with many drafts.Oh, I have no delusions I can be someone big in the blogosphere. Just have a blog I can point potential clients to, to show them that this noob can write even without qualifications. Hence me making it harder for myself 😆 , making sure “everything is perfect”, because I don’t have anything else to make up for my lack of qualifications. But yeah, too much is too much.
Linda Adams wrote:Quote:Now here is where I come out with the idiocies. I’m pressured to make publishable-quality blog posts because I was thinking of using my blog as a portfolio for my freelance writing. I have no qualifications whatsoever – no degree, no work on school papers since elementary school, nada. Joining this workshop is the only writing-related thing I’ve done within the past year that I can remember, besides the quiet practicing.Not necessarily. Look at any organizations that you belong to. There may be opportunities sitting in there that are open to you because you are a member. An article for a newsletter or the organization’s magazine. Membership there does carry a bit of extra weight and knowledge. I got about 10 articles published in The Toastmaster that way. Freelancers with only knowledge of the magazine and not the organization often came up with generic articles, but as I member, I knew topics that would interest the audience. A blog is not likely to serve as clips unless you’re getting a lot of comments and drawing attention.
I, uh, don’t belong to any organizations. Better start looking…
Udo wrote:Slightly off tangent.I can’t speak for anyone else, but I cannot write when I am depressed. I have to wait the spell out. It’s not a matter of lack of mood, which typically is missing, it is that I can’t. If I try to force something, I spend most of the time staring at a blank page and then get even more depressed at the lack of progress. That is also when I am most likely to trash out anything I have been working on, certain that nothing I put down is worth reading. (I couldn’t even begin to count the number of stories that have been abandoned and posts/comments not made during these spells.)
Oh. Yeesh. That does suck.
How do these spells of yours end?
Ashe wrote:turnipmeatloaf wrote:That I’m also rusty from long periods of not writing doesn’t make it better. I’ve gone through years not writing unless I’m in the mood, meaning hardly ever, since I thought that’s how writers work, because “writers don’t produce trash”, which I regularly do. So I’d been thinking it’s a combination of rustiness and lack of discipline. And yes, as much as I hate to admit it, skill.Writers get better by writing constantly, and it does take discipline. Writing at least a little bit daily is the best way to instill such discipline and gain the skill necessary to be able to cut your drafts down to two or three before posting.
No writer who is serious about writing gets anywhere by writing when only “in the mood.”
Oh, and all writers produce trash, particularly when just starting out and sometimes even after years of writing and gaining the discipline to do it every day and the skill necessary to make it good. They just produce less trash, and there are some writers who insist their first drafts are still trash.
Yeah, it’s only recently I realized that (well, read that somewhere and and got my epiphany). Hence the practicing and the blogging, which has been hard. You want to be good, but it’s hard drilling discipline into your very non-disciplined self. And finding out everything you’re written so far, even from years ago, is bad doesn’t do wonders (“what if you just suck, and will only amount to the Ed Wood of the writing world?” etc.). Uh, I got a bit ranty there, didn’t I? Sorry. :blush:
Linda Adams wrote:Quote:My situation: I’m trying to write blog entries (averaging >1,000 words) twice a week, posting after at least three drafts, and I’m having trouble with something that should be so easy.Blogs are actually not easy to write. At least not ones that get people to comment. In fact, they may be harder than other forms of writing. I’ve been blogging for a good five years, changing things up, and it’s still hit or miss.
Oh.
I’d gotten the idea that blogs were easy to write because all the blogging advice I’d read online said you have to post everyday, or at least as much as you can, to gather readers. You can start slowing down once you have “enough” content, which is more or less months after you started. My logic went: if a lot of bloggers can keep up with that pace, I’d be pathetic if I can’t. And I can’t, ergo…
Linda Adams wrote:Quote:Yes, problem is I’m not disciplined enough. Overall it’s whether I’m in the mood or not that dictates if I get work done. I’ve tried to get around this by, as said, writing through the bad days anyway (I’ve equated it with “vocalization” or “warm-ups” – maybe I need to write, say 1,000 words, to free the writing muscles, that kind of thing), but with less-than-stellar output. Which I don’t end up posting, if I finish at all. I’ve come to realize that the first draft (or first two, depending on my present mood) can be terrible, but it’s something else when it has barely improved in the fifth, or even tenth, draft.It might not be the case. It might be that your muse is telling you you’ve got the wrong topics. I took Kristien Lamb’s class on blogging and tried to find my platform. It was tough even keeping up with regular posting. I had trouble coming up with ideas, and it was just plain work. It wasn’t until I read a blog post on ProBlogger that asked the question, “Are you having fun?” and I realized I wasn’t. I was spending so my time selling myself that I wasn’t having any fun doing the writing. So after that, my first criteria was to write posts that I really did enjoy.
Quote:Second problem is I need a lot of drafts, at least ten, to get anything into good shape – this I realized after being horrified at the quality of every blog post I’ve written so far – and even then, the articles “in good shape” from having had fifteen drafts are only good maybe a few weeks or so after I’ve finished them. Nowadays I wonder what made me think how I could have thought they were decent.If your muse is telling you you’ve got the wrong topics, this may be why you can’t get the posts to work even after ten drafts.
So … what do.
First, I’d suggest cutting the post word count down to 500 words. It’s a lot shorter and will take less time to write. This is especially important if you want to freelance, because you cannot spend all your time writing huge posts that cut into your freelancing time.
If you’re trying to keep up with the 3 times a week, then cut back to once or twice a week while you figure out what’s going to work for you. Every time I realized something wasn’t working, I cut back on the posts because I didn’t want to waste the time writing things that weren’t working.
Cut the revision time to two drafts. Draft one is the post. Draft two is cleaning up the typos and making sure everything is clear.
But what if the lots-of-drafts routine has always been like that for you? I very rarely have anything that comes out decent-but-needs-polishing in the first draft, and that’s even for topics I’m enthusiastic about (and I had surprisingly decent first drafts for topics I was indifferent about). Most of the time my first drafts of anything belong to the trash bin – for content and prose. If I’m lucky, they start becoming readable when I start polishing. Little by little, from draft to draft.
That I’m also rusty from long periods of not writing doesn’t make it better. I’ve gone through years not writing unless I’m in the mood, meaning hardly ever, since I thought that’s how writers work, because “writers don’t produce trash”, which I regularly do. So I’d been thinking it’s a combination of rustiness and lack of discipline. And yes, as much as I hate to admit it, skill.
500 words? Sounds great, thanks. (Now I feel stupid for not being able to think of something that makes so much sense. :lol:)
Linda Adams wrote:One of the things I had to do was stop fussing over trying to make the posts publishable quality. A blog is meant to be more personal, and I was losing my voice by trying to fix it (which also robbed the fun from it). If a post isn’t working, don’t post it.Don’t think of them as articles. Think of them as journal entries you’re sharing with other people. Use them to communicate your voice, and the things you enjoy.
Also, try to plan the posts out for an entire month. If you know what your topics are, you can think on them for a bit, change them up if need be — before you have to write anything. I’ve been using themes for the month, which is a great way to have a direction of ideas to come up with. This site has monthly blog planners: http://www.productiveflourishing.com/free-planners/
😆 Now here is where I come out with the idiocies. I’m pressured to make publishable-quality blog posts because I was thinking of using my blog as a portfolio for my freelance writing. I have no qualifications whatsoever – no degree, no work on school papers since elementary school, nada. Joining this workshop is the only writing-related thing I’ve done within the past year that I can remember, besides the quiet practicing.
Thanks for setting me straight. And for the free planners, too.
Myrddin wrote:Not in the mood? Mood’s a thing for cattle and loveplay, not [strike]fighting[/strike] writing!:blink:
Humor aside, when facing deadlines, I just put butt in chair and twist my own ear while typing with the other hand.
My problem with my fiction is, I don’t have external deadlines. So, when the mood (or drive/motivation, which my usual issue ) isn’t conducive to writing, nothing really helps. Just butt in chair until it becomes a habit. In my case, proper drive will overcome mood. And if I type out crap, I see it as practice.
Since you seem much more disciplined, you are fighting bad habits like me.
I tried the twisting my own ear until I get work done. Problem is my inner writer is such a brat it’s been fighting with me all the way.
I guess another problem is I get easily discouraged – I’ve come a long way from “everything I write has to be good, even the first draft”, but only until “first draft, and maybe even the second, sucking is okay, but this better shape up nice after a while”.
Disciplined? Moi? Uh, I prefer “guilt-ridden”.
