I recently read two books by the same author about the same basic topic. One is a non-fiction account of the true story that happened. One is a novel based on some of the same experiences that the author went through. Reading both books is a great exercise for any writer because it captures the essence of the difference between non-fiction and fiction when it comes to writing from personal experience.
The first book that I read was Comfort: A Journey Through Grief
As I read the book, I learned that this author had also written The Knitting Circle: A Novel
It was interesting to read the novel after reading Comfort. There were many little details that you could see had been pulled directly from the life of the author and converted into fiction. All great fiction is rooted in some sort of personal experience because that’s where the emotion for it comes from. However fictional tales are told more neatly and cleanly than real life plays out. Many details from the author’s life are altered or added to the characters in the novel to make the characters ore accessible and interesting to the people who choose to read this book.
Reading the two books in this manner really gave me a lot of insight as a writer into the writing process. I can see the benefit of keeping a non-fiction journal of your life and then using the information as the bare bones starting point of a highly crafted novel. Of course we know this already as writers but it’s something that you really get to see in action if you read Comfort and then read The Knitting Circle. It’s not just that they are good books (though they are) but that they provide excellent examples of how to write about the same thing in different ways.
This information is useful even if you aren’t interested in writing a novel based on your life. Even as someone who writes only for the web you can use this information. You can see how your own personal blog post or social networking updates could be converted into more widely read articles online. Reading these two books with an eye towards that is a great exercise for any writer. It’s definitely been a great exercise for me!
As a professional blogger I have a number of steady clients who I have been blogging for over the course of several years. This year a couple of them have already sent me Christmas bonuses via PayPal. Totally unexpected and so sweet!
I am happy about this for three reasons:
- The money is nice of course. But this is actually a small reason compared to the other reasons this makes me happy.
- It makes me really feel like a part of the team. I work every week for these clients. I do all that I can to promote and build up their website and blog traffic. It’s nice to know that I am considered a regular “employee” deserving of a Christmas bonus even though I work remotely because it really makes me feel like I’m recognized as an important part of the company’s team.
- I think this is a hint that things are shifting in the world of freelance and independent contracting work. More and more people are doing this type of work. I think that there are more “freelancers” who are really functioning as work-at-home employees for specific businesses. The Christmas bonus is one sign that this is beginning to be recognized. Another sign was a recent announcement by oDesk that their freelancers can start getting group health benefits through them. This recognition of the difference between true freelance work and work-at-home independent contracting is important and I think it suggests bigger changes to come.
There is an episode of Sex and the City which I only vaguely remember where the girls talk about what they have in the “goodie drawers” beside their beds. They are talking about sex toys, of course, and I recall Samantha joking about how she has a whole goodie closet.
I bought a new bed frame for myself over the summer. It has a bookcase headboard and it has drawers underneath the mattresses. I, too, have a goodie drawer. It is the drawer closest to where I lay my head at night and the drawer which is easiest for me to reach in the morning. It isn’t sex toys that you’ll find in there, though … it’s journals.
I have been keeping a personal journal off and on since I was about ten. Writing in this journal is an important part of my regular routine. I used to hide the journal to make sure that no one would find it. These days I tuck it away so that it’s not tempting to the curious eyes of people who happen to be in my house but I don’t worry much because I don’t think that anyone I let in my house would actually violate my privacy by reading my journal. It’s one of those journals that wouldn’t be that interesting to others anyway; it’s filled with the banalities of life and my thoughts about nothing much. It’s something I do just for me.
This isn’t the only journal that I keep these days. I also try to keep a gratitude journal in which I regularly note the things that I am feeling most thankful for. I don’t do this daily (although I once did and think it’s good to do so) but I do it steadily enough. And I have a journal for affirmations and a journal for writing exercises. I certainly have plenty of private things that I could keep in my goodie drawer but it’s these things that end up being most important to me.
And of course then I have the bookcase headboard which is filled with the latest two dozen books that I’ve gotten out of the library and may read voraciously or may not read at all. I can see them there and be motivated to pick them up and do some reading though and that’s why those are left out in the open instead of tucked away into drawers.
What do you have in your goodie drawer? Where do you keep your private writing?
- Promote your blog. A really cool tag cloud that shows what you write about on your blog is going to entice people to read about it. Generate one and post it on your blog, link to it via Twitter, make it a Flickr photo or send it out as a comment or social networking message. The more readers you have the more inspired you’re going to be to write better on your blog.
- Generate story ideas. You can use a tag cloud to get ideas about what you want to write about next. Just enter any URL or chunk of text into the tag cloud generator and see what comes up. Use the words there to get ideas for your next story line.
- Various creative writing exercises. Writing exercises are really good for you to do to keep your writing fresh. There are any number of writing exercises that you can do involving your tag clouds. For example, choose a paragraph from your favorite book and enter it into the tag cloud. Take the top five words that come up largest on the screen. Write five paragraphs of a story with each paragraph beginning with one of those words. Come up with your own creative writing exercises! (I’d love to hear more suggestions in the comments here!)
- Make poetry. You can use tag cloud generators to create visually interesting poems. Do this daily and you’ll find that your writing benefits from doing so because you get a new look at old words.
- Create inspirational word collages. Generate several tag clouds. Print them out. Cut out the words that appeal to you most. Make your own new word collages. Post these word collages all around the area in which you do your writing. Having them there should inspire you to keep on working at your creativity.
- Generate series of articles easily. People who do their writing for the web (or even for magazines) know that it’s very profitable to take one article and re-write it in a fresh way to create a series of related articles. This is done much more easily when using tag clouds. You enter the text of your article into a tag cloud generator. This shows you which keywords are used most in the article. Take the top five or ten keywords and rewrite the article with your focus on each of those words. For example, let’s say that you wrote an article on Celtic history. Your tag cloud shows that you wrote a lot about myths and about jewelry. Write one article about the history of Celtic myths and one article about the history of Celtic jewelry.
- Use tag clouds as an editing tool. When you are done writing a piece of work, enter the text into a tag cloud generator. See which words come up most frequently. Are these words in line with the thesis of your paper? If not then you’ll want to take the information that you have in the tag cloud and edit the work accordingly to make sure that you’re hitting all of your key points in your article.
I just wanted to send out a quick reminder to all of my writer friends that writing is a gift to be shared with others. It is actually one of the best gifts that you can give to someone else this holiday season. You can write love letters, heartfelt Christmas cards, songs, poems, and stories for the people in your life. You can combine your writing with photographs to make memory books that will touch their hearts.
So often we think of writing as our work. However writing is also our life. It’s what we have to share with others. Those others shouldn’t just be the readers that we have come to love. We should also share our writing with those we love who may or may not be our regular readers. Even if your hubby doesn’t read your blog or your mom doesn’t quite “get” your books, these people will appreciate the writing that is written just as a gift for them.
Check out my recent hub 15 Ideas for Using your Writing as a Gift to get some ideas for word-based Christmas gifts that you can give this year.
I just spent some time back at home in Tucson with my family. While I was there, I went to the local independent bookstore (Antigone’s) with my dad and my sister to check out a book reading that was being done by an author named Richard Polsky. I admit that I had never heard of this author before my dad suggested that we go to this book reading. However, based on the reading alone, I am now a fan of his.
Richard Polsky is an author who has spent the last several decades working as an art dealer. His first book was called I Bought Andy Warhol and is all about the art world. He wanted a good piece of art as an investment but it took him twelve years to pick what he wanted. He tells the tale of looking for this piece of artwork and uses that tale as a framework for describing what the art buying / art dealing world is all about.
The book that he was specifically promoting at this particular book event was his new book, I Sold Andy Warhol (too soon). It’s essentially about the fact that he eventually sold his piece and made a pretty penny but that he would’ve made millions more if he’d held off for another couple of years on that sale. In more depth, this book is about what makes art valuable in the art world today. Interesting topics.
What really interested me, however, was not the books or their topics so much as the approach Polsky took to his book reading / book signing event. If you’ve attended many of these things then you know that they typically involve a brief introduction to the author followed by him (or her) reading a passage from the book and then doing a brief Q&A. Polsky threw that plan of attack out the window. Instead, he decided to give us just the briefest overview of what’s in the books and then to tell us what is not in the books.
He described the things that had been taken out of his books by his editors or his legal time or by himself at the last minute due to external circumstances. This was interesting because it gave us listeners a lot more insight into his writing process. It gave us greater insight into the topic that he chose to write about because we learned what can and can’t be talked about in this art world. It showed off a more personal side of the writer than what you normally learn from a standard book reading. And, undoubtedly, it was a great marketing approach because as Polsky said, “you can just read the book to find out what’s in the book” and his approach surely made more people there want to buy the books themselves.
This whole thing not only got me interested in Polsky but also got me interested in the book signing event in general. I am curious now to learn more about how different authors have taken creative approaches to their book reading events. I am interested in coming up with my own creative ideas for book signings that are out of the norm and therefore more interesting to potential readers. Are you aware of any authors that have taken a creative approach to their book signings? If so I’d love to know more about them!!
I had a dream last night about writing. Normally I don’t remember my dreams. If I do, they’re usually about something that has actually happened in my real life. This time, though, the dream was all about me writing something. It started out with me writing the lyrics to country music songs. This came from the fact that I just took a road trip with a friend and was marveling at the radio because of all of the mundane topics that get turned into songs on the country station. I was telling him that I needed to start working on writing country music lyrics because I think it would be a really interesting writing challenge. So my dream was mostly about that. However, at the end of it, I had some grand realization about how writing things down turns bad things into positive experiences. That’s what I woke up thinking about this morning.
Here are some of the ways that I think being a writer makes it easier to tolerate negative situations:
- Annoying situations become fodder for stories. I recently went on a trip to Yosemite during which everything that could possibly go wrong did. The trail we wanted to hike on was closed, it started to rain during the hike we did do, it hailed on us, we climbed straight up a mountain to get a great view and saw nothing but fog, we had to trek slowly through the rain because we got stuck behind a group of tourists on mules, the second half of the trip was canceled because there was snow in the mountains and we couldn’t pass through … It could have been a terrible trip. However, as a writer, you’re always thinking about these things in terms of the story they provide. Whether written or just told to others, these things become not so bad because you find the humor in them as you think about the story.
- Writing provides understanding and eventually resolution and peace. Bad things happen all of the time. People who write get the chance to work through those things on the page. Whether you journal or write creatively, you spend a lot of your time writing about whatever it is that you’re thinking about. You may be going through a tough time but you are able to understand the situation (and your own feelings) better because you write through it.
- Writing can create connections with other people. In the worst of times, what we often need most is to know that others understand and support us. Although writing can be a solitary endeavor in many ways it is also something that has the potential to create connections with other people. You can share your writing in blog posts, social networks, writing groups and by offering lectures or seminars to your readers. All of these things allow you to build connections with others who know some of your deepest truths because you share them in writing. This makes the bad times bearable.
One of the things that I’ve thought about doing off and on is hiring a social media person. This would be someone who would have the job of doing the social media promotion for all of my work as well as for all of the posts that I do for my clients. It’s a tempting thing to consider doing but in the end I’ve decided that the cons outweigh the pros so I’m not going to do it.
Benefits of Hiring a Social Media Person
There are a lot of good reasons for me to hire a social media person. Doing so could benefit my own blogs as well as increase the traffic that I’m getting for my clients. The core benefits of having someone else do this instead of myself would be:
- That individual would be sole focused on social media promotion. Social media promotion is only one of the tasks that I perform as a blogger. Things I do as a blogger include defining the content, writing the content, adding images and videos to the posts, scheduling the posts, doing internal and external linking and then promoting the posts through various methods. When time gets tight, it’s hard to focus completely on social media. Hiring someone to do that would guarantee that the time and focus was on that regularly.
- It would mean I wouldn’t have to do social media stuff. The truth is that I don’t like doing a lot of social media promotion. There are things that I like using Facebook and Twitter for. I am starting to get into LinkedIn for various uses. However I don’t particularly enjoy the promotion of my own posts on these sites. Hiring someone to do it would mean I wouldn’t have to.
- I’d get an outside opinion on my social media strategy. Working alone means that I end up doing everything on my own and can get really stuck in my own way of doing things. This isn’t as bad with my clients’ blogs because I get their feedback on the social media strategy that I plan out for them. However it can be bad for my own blogs. It would be nice to have that second person giving me suggestions and feedback on how I approach my blog promotion.
- Confusion of costs. I would have to pay this person. I’m not sure if I’d want to do that hourly or per post. I’m not sure how I’d keep track of the work that they did for me. I’m not sure that I can reasonably afford this service at all.
- Would reduce my communication with readers. I do communicate with some of my blog readers through blog comments but most of the ones who contact me do so through Twitter. I wouldn’t be communicating with them as much if someone else was doing my social media stuff. That would be a disappointment to me as well as something I assume would be taken negatively by my readers.
- It would make the work less “mine”. I think that there are good reasons to hire a social media person, especially for the more routine work of promoting my clients blogs, but in the end I think that doing so would take away from the way that I’m able to insert my own personality into my blog promotion. I don’t really think that this would benefit anyone at this point in time even though I think there are some benefits to this arrangement. It could be something I’ll want to do in some form in the future but it’s not right at this point in time.
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