Dana Sitar's Blog, page 6

How to Find Your Focus and Write Your Memoir

by Roberta Temes, Ph.D., Author of How to Write a Memoir in 30 Days: Step-by-Step Instructions for Creating and Publishing Your Personal Story

You can write your memoir even if you were not kidnapped, not set on fire, and not brought up by wolves in the forest. Good writing and honest raw emotion trump sensationalism.

You can tell your story from a variety of angles:

Point in Time

Most memoirs are about a particular point in time or about an ongoing relationship or a recurring theme in your...

Are You Chaining Your Elephant?

Image: John Payne

I bet you don’t know how elephants are trained. I didn’t, until I read the method in a book recently and was floored. Here’s how it works:

A baby elephant is placed on a chain that is staked to the ground. The chain is substantial, and although baby elephants are not small by any means, they’re also not quite mammoth enough to pull a big chain from the ground.

So, every time the baby elephant tries to roam, or wander, or (more proactively) break the hell free from its res...

Become a Better Writer by Writing Daily

Have you heard the story of how Sylvester Stallone wrote the entire script for Rocky in three days? Or, similar tales of workaholic writers scrawling entire books from cover to cover with only the hint of a slight breather?

As aspiring writers, those stories don’t serve us.

Unless you are some sort of hermit, recluse, or shut-in you probably have a busy life filled withwork, friends, family, and cable T.V. dramas. Not everyone can escape to Paris, Walden Pond, or the Overlook Hotel for mo...

Ditch The Niche: Why Your Blog Doesn’t Need A Specific Topic To Be Successful

When people ask me for advice about blogging, the main question I get asked is:

Do I need to pick a specific topic to blog about?

Blogging experts often advise new bloggers to find a niche to build an audience and grow their blog.

I beg to disagree.

I haven’t always felt this way. From my anonymous lifestyle blog in college to my book review blog that I ran from 2009 until early 2012, I’ve always found a niche; a community of bloggers who wrote on similar topics. I wrote content that fit in...

How NOT to Die of Boredom on a Dull Freelancing Gig

Illustration by Ramiro Roman, Jr.

“…being bored is like being slowly boiled alive. It seems tolerable at first, but every day it gets more and more painful.” – Sonia Simone, Copyblogger

When I first read these words in 2011, I wrapped them around me, comforted in the fact that there was someone out there – someone I respected and admired – who felt the same way I do. Boredom is the worst. It isn’t simply a minor annoyance. It’s downright painful.

An acquaintance once told me that “only bo...

How I Turned My Writing Hobby into a Career

by Gideon Thomas

I’ve always been interested in, collected, and had a serious attitude to music. I’ve supported bands and artists since I was young, gone to gigs, compiled lists, and written small pieces about music in different contexts throughout my life for local papers, music magazines, what have you.

After some traveling in 2002, I became more interested and more serious in what I was doing, and I worked in a record store for a couple of years. Then, in 2004, I undertook an MA at She...

How My Pay-What-You-Want Promo Made Me Feel Awesome About Selling My Self-Published Book

Get Xandra’s book at the price readers chose!

I’ve been self-publishing for years. Daily, in fact. That’s what my blog feels like, anyway – a little piece of the internet I can call my own, where I can write down useful things. It is my daily accomplishment, a reminder to myself to live up to what I observe.

So when I sat down to write my ebook, most things came naturally: the concept, the design, the chapters, the words.

But there was one crucial difference between publishing blog posts and pub...

3 Ways to Be a Better Freelancer By Sucking At Your Day Job

Image from Stock Xchng

One week before the most important day of my life, my wedding in 2012, I was out of a job.

It seems surreal that less than two years later I’d find myself building a freelancing business and connected to a host of influential writing and blogging mentors.

At the time, I just didn’t think I had it in me.

Back then, I had been tinkering with a business blog and website. I wanted to try my hand at freelancing. It was a side hustle that I hadn’t done in years. I found myself st...

A Simple Mind Tweak to Write Faster, Better, and More Efficiently

by Lynn Silva

Have you ever found yourself preoccupied with something that is causing stress or pain in your personal life and wished you could just shut it down temporarily so you can write?

Especially when writing for your own blog or personal projects, your mind flicks back and forth between a life situation, how you’re going to market, what keywords to use, when to tweet, if you’re making any major mistakes, etc. – anythingbut writing.

When you write for someone else, the incentive to...

Making the Time to Write

It’s 5:30 a.m., it’s my birthday, and I’m writing.

I didn’t just write that to brag. “Hey look at me, I’m over here slaving away at my craft, yay for me!” Ok, maybe a little bit, mostly I want to talk about making time to write.

I work a full-time job, but writing is something I’ve always wanted to do. I always thought someday I’d be a writer. It’s fun to plan for a hypothetical “someday”. There happen to be seven days in a week – someday just isn’t one of them.

How I Make Time to Write

I l...