Real Words

Once again, life has happened and I have found it difficult to update this blog as regularly as I would like to. My goal here has generally been that I’d like to have daily posts on the topic of my writing life and what it means to be a writer. However, I seem to be stuck in this cycle where I fall behind and then I feel bad about falling behind which makes me disinclined to write more so I put off doing a new post even longer.

I’m a little bit embarassed about this. I would never let it happen on a blog that I do for my clients. I haven’t let it happen much on my other blog, Diary of a Smart Chick, which is a collection of thoughts about (and links to) the topics of my current writing projects. And yet it consistently happens here.

So, I want to make a commitment to writing for this blog on a regular basis. I won’t say daily because that might be too much but I want to get at least 3 posts up per week here. I have some exciting things planned for this blog in terms of some guest visitors, reviews and giveaways so I really don’t want to let things slide.

Here it is then – my commitment to this blog for my readers as well as for myself. I want to be present here on this blog so that it can become the kin of active conversational community that I know it has the potential to become. And I want to commit to it because this part of my writing life is important to me even though I let other things crowd in on it all of the time.

I would love to hear your thoughts about how to best make a commitment to your own blog when you write full-time for others professionally. Please share!

I am someone who believes in the power of keeping a journal. I got my first diary when I was about ten years old and have kept one fairly steadily since that time. Although I’ve gone through bouts of not writing for awhile, I always return to keeping a journal because I believe that it benefits me immensely as both a writer and an individual.

Some of the top benefits that I’ve experienced as a result of keeping a journal:

• The many benefits of a daily routine. I believe that having daily rituals helps us to get up and get going in the morning. My morning routine starts my day off right and helps me feel like I’m on track with things. Journaling is one part of that routine for me.
• The power of self-reflection. I think that all people, particularly writers, need time to reflect on life and on themselves every single day. It’s hard to do that when we have so many obligations and distractions, Journaling returns us to ourselves day in and day out.
• Unjudged writing practice. I am trying to get in the habit of not judging any of my writing but rather just letting it happen. This isn’t always easy but I’m able to do it with my journal. As a writer, I think this daily period of unjudged writing time is important.
• A collection of my thoughts. It’s been important for me to have this collection of my thoughts. There are memories that I forget but can then access again in my journals. There are patterns of behavior that I only see when I re-read my journals. There are characters and projects that I thought of in passing that I revive when reminded of them by my journals.

I’m not the only one who believes that a journal offers many benefits. Take a look at some thoughts other people have posted on the benefits of journaling:

• 7 Benefits of Journaling. Thoughts on how journaling helps you to identify, preserve and explore your ideas.
• And another 7 benefits of journaling – this one as it specifically applies to writers.
• The Benefits of Journaling as outlined by two women who created their own powerful journal for others to use.
• Uses and benefits of journaling – this is an academic article on the topic.
• Health Benefits of Journaling (including the benefit of stress management)
• And the ultimate post on the topic – 100 benefits of journaling.

Surely we can all get something out of journaling. Do you journal? Does it help your writing? What has been the great benefit?

I have always loved memoirs. I like personal stories that share insight into the different ways that people live. Memoirs work better for me than biographies or autobiographies because they are more poetic and usually more personal. I don’t care about the facts and stats of someone’s life; I care about their thoughts and passions. Memoirs give me insight into those things. Great memoirs that really resonate with me also give me new insight into myself.

One memoir writer that I just recently discovered is Sue William Silverman. Her first memoir, Because I Remember Terror, Father, I Remember You, is the story of her years growing up in a childhood where she experienced sexual abuse. Her second memoir, Love Sick, is about her struggle with sex addiction which resulted from this abuse. I haven’t read her first book yet but recently finished Love Sick and definitely recommend it to anyone interested in the topics of abuse, addiction and relationships.

But what does this have to do with writing? Well, Silverman’s most recent book is all about the art of writing a memoir. The book is called Fearless Confessions and it looks like it’s a great book for people who are interested in learning to write their own memoirs but who aren’t quite sure how to go about it (or who simply need a bit of inspiration for that). I haven’t actually read the book yet but I’m awaiting my copy of it in the mail and will return here with a full review once I’ve read it.

The reason that I wanted to bring it up now, though, is because Silverman is currently in the midst of a blog tour. Fearless Confessions is being reviewed, discussed and given away on different blogs all throughout the month. I love following blog tours and I think that this memoir looks really good so I wanted to share that information with others. The details for that tour are here. If you check it out, do come back and let me know what you think!

Yesterday I had the opportunity to attend an SBA class on the topic of blogging for businesses. The class was geared towards people who own a small business (or who want to) and who were seeking information on how to use a blog to benefit that business. I attended the class as someone who blogs for businesses professionally.

You may be wondering (as a couple of other people there did) why I was bothering to take a basic business blogging class when I do this for a living. The answer is a simple one – I want to learn who my clients are. I work with people who own a business but who don’t necessarily know how to launch, promote and utilize a blog. I interact with them online but that interaction is limited. Most of them just give their blog to me and then let me run with it. I thought it would be great to meet some people who are in the same position as my clients in order to get a better viewpoint on what they might need from someone like me.

Here’s what I learned from this class:

• The primary thing that blog clients need is information. I forget that not everyone knows how to set up a blog or what a Twitter account is. I think that my clients could benefit from learning what the different options are for blogging / social media. I have been thinking for awhile about adding blog consulting to the list of services that I provide – essentially teaching business owners the basics of blogging and guiding them through content creation. I think that this would be a big benefit to certain clients.
• I know more about blogging than I sometimes think that I know. I often feel inferior to major bloggers who blog daily about blogging and social media. (I’m thinking of people like Darren Rowse.) I blog about a variety of different topics and don’t focus specifically on what’s going on with web writing and social media. What I learned from my participation in the class is that I actually do know a lot compared to the average person and that I can benefit others by sharing what I know.
• I don’t know as much as I need to know about blogging and social media. I was pleasantly surprised to learn about some new sites and tools that I’m not using yet. I learned why it might be better to use bit.ly for URL shortening than the programs I’ve been using (primarily because it offers web analytics information that I didn’t know about before). I also learned about xeesm.com where I can create a contact and links sheet to share with others through a single URL. More importantly, this class reminded me that there are a lot of aspects of blogging that I’m familiar with but that I’m not implementing on my personal blogs (despite that I do them for clients). I want to get back on track with developing and promoting my own blogs. To do that, I need to create a small business plan for my blogs. This goes along with what I recently mentioned which is that my number one writing goal right now is to get organized.

The class was informative and helpful for me as a blogger. I got to meet some great people and had some ideas spurred that I think are going to be really inspirational this week for my own blogging goals. Great stuff. And kudos to the teacher of the class – Carlos R. Hernandez. Check out his blog / site on social media and Web 2.0 topics.

Question for other bloggers and web writers – do you attend classes and networking events around blogging? What has been your experience with that so far?

I’ve mentioned here a few times that I’m working on establishing and accomplishing a series of new writing goals. Those included:

• Cataloguing my work
• Getting published in more print magazines
• Finishing a personal book
• Doing more collaborative projects

I’ve added a few more goals to that list:

• Submitting work to anthologies
• Setting and achieving some clear goals for my 3 personal blogs
• Creating and executing a plan for more active promotion of my Hubs

Taking a look at my list, I’ve figured out that there is one specific writing goal that needs to come before everything else: getting organized!

I tend to be basically good at getting naturally organized. My freelance finances are in order. I’ve got my client’s files in good shape. None of that is a problem. However, I need more organization as it relates to these specific goals because there are areas where I’ve let things go. So, my specific goals for getting organized include:

• Doing my planning on paper. Several of these goals require creating action plans. I like to do those in my head but I’m actually going to do them on paper.
• Collecting all of my creative writing. I have poems, stories, essays and books that are written and half-written. They are in journals, on scraps of paper, on various computer files and who knows where else. Before I can reasonably submit work to anthologies and magazines, I need to be able to see what I have. This means learning about good methods of organizing this stuff and then going through the process of organizing it. That’s the big goal as far as this goes.
• Deleting all unnecessary files. I back things up all of the time and I have multiple copies of several things that I didn’t need to save in the first place. I want to get to where I only have what I really need again.

So, I’m still working on the bigger goals but I’m focusing right now on the small organizational goals that I believe will put me in a better place for meeting the big goals in the end.

It’s funny how things work out sometimes. I got a last-minute invitation to go camping and decided to work my schedule out in order to make that happen. I finished up all of the month’s work early and let everyone know that I would be gone. Then some things happened and the person that I was supposed to go camping with couldn’t go after all. I was bummed out about it for a little while but then I just let it go.

I think that I normally would’ve just returned to my standard routine but I’d already gotten it in my head that I needed this break from the Internet world. So, I decided to keep the computer off even though I was here at home. I didn’t contact my clients to let them know I was around. I didn’t sign back on to my social networking sites. I just pretended that I was still camping.

I managed to get a bunch of projects done around the house that I’d been working on for awhile. More importantly, I feel like the break helped me to get more solidly on track with some of my writing goals. With pen and paper in hand, I mapped out a daily and monthly work schedule that is more in line with my goals for work right now.

I also re-instituted my morning writing routine. I used to haev a solid routine that included some inspirational and educational reading, a little bit of blogging and journaling and some non-writing stuff like yoga. I’d gotten off track with that and was able to resume it in the past week. The lack of computer distractions helped me just sit still and be with myself. All in all, this vacation was good for my writing self even though it wasn’t what I’d planned on.

I mentioned last week that I’d established some new writing goals for myself. Here’s an update on how I’m feeling about those so far:

• Creating a catalog of my work. I located all of the different disks and files that I’ve stored everything on over the years. That’s the first step in going through everything. That’s all I’ve done with it so far but at least I took a tiny action!
• One dozen magazine publications. I recently had someone request the right to republish one of my articles in a magazine. I want to get my hands on a hard copy of that magazine so I’ve emailed about that. I need to make a more solid plan about this goal though.
• Finish a personal book. I’ve committed to a specific book project that will take 9 months to complete. Since it’s in such early stages, I really don’t want to discuss the details but I’m on my way with this goal.
• Collaborative writing projects. I haven’t made any progress on this goal yet but writing about it today is making me feel more motivated to get some ideas out there for people to possibly pounce on.

Tell me about your writing goals. What tiny step have you taken recently to realize them?

I used to be really committed to taking a tech-free day every week. This was a day that didn’t allow for TV, computers or cell phone conversations. I was working A LOT of hours back then so it was an absolute necessity to take those days. But when I started working less, I kind of dropped the ball on this.

I’m thinking about instituting these tech-free days in my life again. I think it’s really important for me to unplug sometimes. The computer is the big problem. I spend pretty much all day on my computer. If I’m not working or reading or researching online then I’m watching Internet TV or playing Internet games.

I feel like if I turned this stuff off for an entire day every week, I’d get to do more of the things that I say that I want to do. I’d go wander around the city more. I’d do the creative projects that are always only half done around here. I’d sit still with myself.

I’m having a tough time re-committing to this though. I’m not sure what my hesitation is. I suppose that I should probably just take the leap.

Does anyone else do this?

I love quotations. I love finding those phrases that someone else said which I wish that I would have said myself. I take comfort in the words of other people when I can’t quite say what it is that I want to say. And I enjoy sharing quotes with others who feel this way about writing.

The problem is that I’ve never really been very organized about keeping my quotes written down so that I could return to them. I’ve tried to keep quote journals off and on but I always stop writing in them sooner rather than later. I’ve tried to keep an ongoing Word document filled with my favorite quotes (which is great because I can then search easily through them to find things I’m looking for) but I always stop this too. I’ve also done some wackier things in my lifetime like writing my favorite quotes in Sharpie all over one of my bathrooms and emailing quotes to myself so I’d have them in my inbox.

None of these things really worked. These days, I do a combination of things. I write down quotes that I really like and make collages around them which I keep in a notebook. I blog quotes and post them on my social networking sites so at least they’re online somewhere that I can access them. But it’s still pretty disorganized.

Do you have a good method of organizing your favorite quotes?

I have a funny relationship with the idea of calling myself a writer. For years, I refused to call myself a writer because I didn’t feel like a “real writer”. I wasn’t writing important novels or whatever I thought writers did so I didn’t want to dare to breathe the word as though it could apply to myself.

Then eventually I became very comfortable with calling myself a writer. After all, I get paid to write. And I would write even if I didn’t get paid to do it. Isn’t that the essence of what a writer is? I stopped feeling self-conscious about being a writer and just was one.

However, there was one part of calling myself a writer that I never really got comfortable with. That was the part where other people would react to me when I said, “I’m a writer”. They would always ask, “what do you write?” which is actually a really complicated question – or rather a question with a complicated answer. They would then ask how they could start writing as though that’s something that I can explain over coffee.

There are some writers who love these conversations. They feel proud of the fact that they do something that people are so interested in. I am not one of those writers. The way I feel about it is that I write because I like writing, not because I enjoy talking about my writing.

It got to the point where I would say, “I’m a writer” with such an ugly tone in my voice that people would be deterred from asking me more about it. This was sad, though, because I really do like what I do and didn’t want it to keep coming off as though I didn’t. But I still never got comfortable with the “writer” conversation.

So now I usually say something along the lines of, “I’m a blogger for a variety of different businesses”. This is the truth. Of course, it’s also true that I’m a writer who has done (and still does) a lot of different writing besides blogging. But blogging for businesses is really what I do for a living.

This response generates a lot fewer questions from people. And the questions that they ask are a lot easier to answer because mostly they want to know what it means to blog for businesses. I do sometimes get people asking me to give a five-minute explanation of how they, too, can blog for businesses. But it’s not as common and I’m not as uncomfortable with it.

So, for now, that’s the label that works for me. What about you? Do you enjoy telling people that you’re a writer?