L.E. Truscott's Blog, page 42

The Autobiography Decision: Who Do You Think You Are?

Recently a new discussion topic was posted on one of the writing and/or book related groups I am a member of on LinkedIn. The heading went something like this: “Let’s be honest. We all wish we could write our autobiography and people would read it.”

The person posting the topic explained he had been a trophy hunter and in a somewhat poetic reversal, he now cared for hundreds of animals after retiring young. Oh, and he had died three times (and been resuscitated three times presumably).

Now, I’m as self-involved as the next person (maybe a little less considering the emergence of the selfie generation) but I cannot stress emphatically enough how determined I am never to write an autobiography.

If after I am dead, someone else deems my life to have been interesting enough to deserve a biography, well, I’ll be dead and I won’t be able to do anything about it. But the thirty eight years that have brought me to this point have not encompassed anything that would justify the telling of my story.

And I’m not being modest. Born, schooled, parents divorced, car accident, high school, motorbike accident, university, hospitality job, office job, parents remarried, master’s, temp job that turned into career I never wanted, cat, next cat, more cats, house, next house, published my first book, won a trip to Europe, quit the career I never wanted, started a blog, another cat. And here I am. I suspect even that paragraph summarising my life may have sent a few people to sleep.

When I was doing my master’s degree, it seemed as though there were a handful of serious, more youthful writers who were vastly outnumbered by older writers, most seeming to be retired and writing their life stories. They were essentially rich hobbyists – rich because the master’s program I studied cost $21,000 (I’m still paying it off ten years later) and hobbyists because none of them ever had any intention of writing about anything other than themselves or of writing more than one book.

I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised but I always am when people who have had perfectly normal (boring) lives just like me think those perfectly normal (boring) lives are worthy of an entire book. I wouldn’t deny anyone their fifteen minutes of fame but a book, even a shorter one, is usually hours of commitment.

The truth about most fiction writers is that portions of their lives, heavily disguised and amended for interest, end up in their writing anyway. Even non-fiction writers sometimes weave their own story into the larger stories they are telling. So how do we, as writers, judge whether our stories are worth telling?

It certainly requires a large amount of honesty and humility. I think a reasonable benchmark would be finding a proper publisher. If you can interest a commissioning editor in your life’s story, then maybe you’re onto something. If you can’t, think about why.

We all seem to be living under a delusion these days that we’re special; it’s certainly a problem amongst youth who’ve been told every day by their parents that they’re something out of the ordinary. But the truth is that for every thousand Kim Kardashians, there will only be one Stephen Hawking. And I know which autobiography I would choose to read from those one thousand and one options.

Just as important as having a story worth telling is having the ability to tell it. As shows like X Factor, The Voice, America/Britain/Australia’s Got Talent, Idol, etc are constantly demonstrating, people who can’t sing often genuinely believe they can. There are just as many people who can’t write well that genuinely believe they have a gift.

So if you do have a life story worth telling, make sure you don’t destroy it with a poorly constructed effort. There’s no shame in working with a specialist biographer or even a ghost writer (while making sure they get the credit they deserve); just ask every footballer who’s ever retired.

And, of course, there’s the option that I wish a few more people would take: writing their autobiography and then leaving it in a draw for their children to find after they are dead. Life stories in the context of dead relatives can be fascinating but often only in that context. Insight into a deceased loved one who lived in a different time is often wonderful because we knew them personally. Without that connection? Just another perfectly painted but painfully pointless Kim Kardashian.

Book Review: Less Than Zero by Bret Easton Ellis

Maybe I’m just a sucker for punishment but I chose to read this because I had just finished The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger and hated it and when I was deciding what to read next, a newspaper review comment in the front of my copy of Less Than Zero caught my eye: “An updated Catcher in the Rye.”

I have to agree. It’s very much in the same vein as The Catcher in the Rye, so if you didn’t like the JD Salinger “classic” then don’t bother with this. It’s better written than The Catcher in the Rye with a much more obvious voice that sounds like a disillusioned teenager while still being readable but it suffers the same problems – nothing happens, the main character is dull and stupid and wanders around imbibing addictive substances and doing not much else and then wondering why his life feels empty.

Clay has been away at college on the US East Coast and has returned home to LA for the Christmas holiday. His parents are divorced, his mother is vacuous, his father is shallow, his sisters are brain dead bimbos and his friends are just as directionless as he is. Clay sees a psychistrist who doesn’t seem interested in sorting out his lack of direction but wants them to collaborate on a screenplay (because, of course, everyone who lives in LA must want to be in the movie business). His on again, off again girlfriend, Blair, wants to know if they are on but Clay doesn’t love her and can’t think of a way to tell her until close to the end of the book.

The more books I read about drug culture and the more I see real life accounts in the news, the less sympathy I have for people who think they can escape their problems through narcotics. The story of everyone who has ever tried should be a cautionary tale but stupid people won’t take their word for it. They have to go through it themselves. For centuries, people have been trying to lose themselves in drugs and failing spectacularly and nobody ever seems to learn from these mistakes. Fine, whatever, but don’t expect me to care about your “troubles” because they’re no worse than anyone else’s. Whether you’re a fictional character or a real person, I’m just over it.

Despite my withering review of this book, it still shows the talent of Bret Easton Ellis as a writer and I might read some of his other work in the future – the story might be lacking but the execution has saved it from a one star review.

2 stars

*First published on Goodreads 6 July 2015

Project October: Week Four

Abandonment or Accomplishment

By this point you will know whether you are heading towards success or failure. My final result, in many ways, feels closer to abandonment because I wrote so few words in weeks three and four.

But it should all be kept in perspective. Even though I didn’t achieve my minimum target of 14,000 words, I still wrote over 10,000 words. This pushed me past the 50,000 word mark (closer to 60,000 words, in fact) and over the half way point of the novel I am writing. Even these kinds of small achievements are worth celebrating.

I’m sure by now you will realise that the end of Project October is just the beginning all over again. The next step is to schedule another Project October and when that one finishes, to schedule another until all your Project Octobers add up to a completed first draft. Be sure to take a break in between, though. Back-to-back Project Octobers have been known to end marriages or require psychiatry sessions.

Once you have a completed first draft, the Project October intensive format is less useful, I believe, because refining is very different to just getting massive amounts of text down on the page. Entire days can be spent deciding on individual words, sentences or paragraphs and this requires a lot of thinking time. During this process, your word count is more likely to go down than up as you cut, cut, cut. I suppose this could be called Project November.

I’m not at the Project November stage with my current novel but when I am, I will try to distil the important points into an intensive month long program so you can do Project November, too.

My week four target: Between 3,500 and 7,000 words

My week four total: 1,041 words

My Project October target: Between 14,000 and 28,000 words

My Project October total: 10,542 words

Let me know how your Project October efforts went. Book reviews and normal blog posts resume next week.

Project October: Week Three

Roadblock

It’s almost inevitable that any attempt at intensive writing will hit a roadblock at some point. Mine happened on day 15. I had written three pages of the latest chapter on day 14 and on day 15 I realised it wasn’t working. It was hard work writing it and even harder work reading it the next day because it was a huge info dump.

The novel I am working on is a literary crime story and I am trying very hard not to make it a procedural. But what I had written was going step by step through the police discovering and then cataloguing a crime scene.

Worse than being an info dump, it stymied me on being able to move forward. What a lot of people call writer’s block, I think of as my mind’s way of telling me that what I’ve written isn’t good enough to support the chapters that will come after it. Sometimes it means that the story is heading in the wrong direction. Sometimes it means that I’m telling the story from the wrong person’s perspective. It happens to me a lot.

It took me until week four to do what I am going to tell you to do if and when you hit a roadblock (do as I say, not as I do and benefit from the wisdom of my experience). Start again. Don’t delete anything because you might be able to use some of the elements; just go back to the beginning of the chapter or the scene that isn’t working and try again from scratch in a slightly different way. If you can, copy and paste in the parts of your original attempt that weren’t bad and just keep going.

The reason for just keeping on going is that once you stop, once you lose the momentum, it can be very hard to find it again. If you spend too much time (any more than a day) thinking about how to fix the chapter or scene that isn’t working, then you’ll suddenly find a week has passed and you’ll never be able to catch up on your weekly target (witness my total and utter failure below). So instead of trying to fix it, just keep writing, even if you are writing the same chapter over and over again. It’s all writing. It all contributes to the daily, weekly and monthly writing target. And you’ll know when the roadblock has been overcome because you’ll be able to move on to writing the next chapter and then the next and then the one after that.

My week three target: Between 3,500 and 7,000 words

My week three total: 0 words

Project October: Week Two

Continuing

As a general rule, week two should be your most productive. Your momentum is going along nicely, you’ve passed the week one struggle of getting into the routine and you’re starting to feel like you’re accomplishing exactly what you intended to accomplish.

However, it can also start to feel like all you are doing is writing and sometimes a little bit of boredom can set in. While it’s important to stay focused, you might need to mix in a few writing-related activities with the actual writing. According to the log I was keeping, my writing-related activities for week two included:

*Re-watching a couple of episodes of the BBC version of Pride and Prejudice – a terrific example of pacing, something that is crucial in what I was writing at the time.

*Watching the first episode of Bosch. I kind of wish the producers had left it in the time period in which it was written. Adaptations are always challenging. But the main thing that bothered me? No moustache.

*Watching the second episode of Bosch. Enough has stayed the same to remain true to the books but enough has been added to make me unsure. Also the plotting is patchy. But Titus Welliver is growing on me.

*Going out with the intention of buying birthday presents for several family members but coming home with three books for myself (they were on sale)!

*Reading a few chapters of Tokyo by Mo Hayder – nearly finished (book review will appear in November).

The key with these writing-related activities is always to think about how it links back to Project October. For me, it was the pacing in Pride and Prejudice (there is always a temptation in a crime novel to make things happen fast but that’s not the type of crime novel I’m writing), the adaptation aspect of Bosch (since I am essentially adapting the first part of my novel to write the second part) and buying and reading books in preparation for when Project October ends (the blog schedule waits for no one). If you can’t relate your activities back to what it is you’re trying to write, then it’s only a distraction and best put aside until after Project October finishes. After all, it’s only a few weeks away now.

One more tip to keep the words coming. A lot of writers (me included) find it helpful to end a writing session mid-scene. This means that when you return to your writing the next day, you can immediately plunge back into it. Personally, whenever I have to come up with the opening words for a new chapter at the very start of the day’s writing session, I find it can take up half of my allotted time. So if I finish a chapter, I try to write the first paragraph of the next chapter before calling it a day. That way, even if I end up changing the first paragraph (as I almost always do), I have the previous day’s draft as a prompt to springboard me into that session and prevent dithering.

My week two target: Between 3,500 and 7,000 words

My week two total: 5,710 words

Project October: Week One

Beginning

So the kids are in bed, the cats are fed, the wife/hubby is watching The Bachelor/a game of football (or whatever variation on this theme is relevant to you) and you finally have a couple of hours to yourself to begin Project October. I always try to set aside two hours at a minimum when I know I won’t have interruptions. For me, this generally ends up being after 9.00pm at night. For you, it might be from 5.00am to 7.00am. Maybe you’re a stay-at-home parent with a toddler who naps between 1.00pm and 3.00pm before you have to do the school run. There are no hard and fast rules about when to write, except for this: write whenever you can, as long as you write every day over the next month.

It’s good if you already have a rough idea of what will be happening in the chapters you want to write because planning contributes nothing to your daily word count. In the novel I am working on, the book is in three parts and each part explores the same two week period from the perspective of a different character. Part one is complete and I’m working on part two, which means I know what happens and when the characters interact. It’s just the stuff that happens when they are apart that I have to fill in. It’s much less difficult than trying to come up with the entire story on the spot.

If you don’t have the luxury of a structure that helps out like this, then part of your preparation prior to beginning Project October should be comprehensive notes on what is going to happen, what you are going to write about. You can always deviate from them as your writing progresses but prompts like this can be important in preventing umming and ahhing and indecisiveness and a big fat zero in the tally of your daily word count.

Just in case you think it’s always full steam ahead in week one, there were two days in which I wrote nothing. But I wrote enough on the other days to exceed my minimum weekly target by 291 words. Just made it. But made it nonetheless. This is why it’s super important not to stop just because you reach your minimum or even your maximum. Write for as long as the words keep coming. Because no matter how well you think you’re doing, there will always be something that will do its best to get in your way.

My week one target: Between 3,500 and 7,000 words

My week one total: 3,791 words

Project October: Preparation

So I’m taking a little break in order to increase my novel writing output, which means a reduction in my blog writing output but I’ve put together a few tips so that over the next four weeks, you might be able to successfully achieve some writing results from your own Project October.

Preparation

First things first. Just because I’ve identified October as my most productive writing month in recent years doesn’t mean that it has to be yours. In fact, because I write and schedule my blog posts a few months in advance, this Project October was actually undertaken in late July and early August. I’ll be doing another Project October in the actual month of October.

When starting Project October, I highly recommend that you choose a novel to work on that you are at least a third of the way through writing. The completely blank page can be an awfully large challenge and I often find the best way to prompt the next writing session is to read through the previous day’s writing – hard to do when there isn’t any previous writing.

Choose a daily writing target with a minimum and a maximum. I always like to set myself the writing target of a thousand words each day but I also recognise that some days I am just not going to get there. So I chose 500 as a minimum and 1,000 as a maximum. The great thing about having a range like this is that when you’re having a good day, 1,000 words isn’t difficult to reach and sometimes even exceed. And when you’re having a bad day, 500 words can usually be achieved, even if the writing itself isn’t what you might call “a keeper”.

And finally, I can’t stress this point enough. If you are going to commit to an intensive novel writing month, there is really no point trying to do it if your other commitments are going to impact negatively on your ability to achieve the targets you have set. I knew going into the end of July and the start of August that several family birthdays, several social events and the birth of my twin nieces would occur but I thought I would manage it by writing nothing on some days and twice as much on other days. I’m sure you don’t need me to tell you how that worked out (but I will in future Project October posts).

I will post every Friday for the next four weeks with further tips on making it through Project October.

The Challenge of Change

Anyone doubting the usefulness of LinkedIn might be surprised to learn that since my last contract ended in February 2015, I have had seven unsolicited job offers, mostly from people I don’t know. So why then do I remain unemployed?

I remain unemployed by choice because all of the unsolicited job offers have been for bid management positions. I decided last year that I no longer wanted to work as a bid manager (or bid writer or bid coordinator or tender specialist or whatever other name you want to give it) and I no longer wanted to work in the relocation industry.

After a sabbatical during which I travelled to Europe, I was briefly drawn back into the field as a favour to a friend and former colleague. But when I finished that favour (the aforementioned last contract), I was determined not to be drawn back in again. Because I essentially found myself in exactly the same place as a year before. What place was that? Leaving a position and an industry without knowing where my employment future was or how long it was going to take me to get there. I only knew that a year had gone by and I was no closer to knowing or getting there.

What I do know – or rather who I do know – is someone who has successfully gone through both a career and industry change. Barry* spent ten years with an organisation that went through a significant round of redundancies last year but had been considering making a career change for up to eighteen months before finding out he would be forced to leave. I sat down to talk to Barry recently to see if there were any hints he could give me.

Understanding the Difficulty of Change

It took Barry five months from being made redundant to find, apply and interview for, then begin his new job.

“I didn’t fully understand how long it would take to get a new job. I very quickly found out that a lot of the kinds of roles I was interested in didn’t even get advertised in the places you might expect, such as Seek and LinkedIn. It was all word of mouth so if you didn’t have the contacts, you’d never even know. I worked very hard at developing and expanding my network. There were a lot of meetings for coffee and a quick chat that never went further than that. I would call recruiters and call them again, then again once more, just to make sure my name was in the forefront of their minds and that they would be on the lookout for my CV amongst the hundreds they were receiving.

“I watched some terrific podcasts on the Manager Tools website. One that has especially stayed with me used a matrix to demonstrate the different levels of difficulty in change. Obviously, not making any change is easiest. Changing jobs but remaining within an industry you are already familiar with or changing industry but staying in the same role is less easy. Changing both your job and your industry at the same time is hardest of all.

“Regardless of the level of change you want to make, you have to be proactive and do everything possible to set yourself apart from the crowd when job hunting.”

Further Tertiary Study

Barry studied a double Bachelor’s degree in Engineering and Business Administration straight out of high school and hasn’t done any further tertiary studies since.

“As part of the redundancy package, I was given access to a career coach who advised me to do an MBA or at least a Graduate Certificate in Finance. I’d been thinking about doing an MBA for some time but I knew the costs. $45,000 for an MBA, $15,000 just to do the Graduate Certificate. But I was being made redundant and I didn’t want to commit to such a large cost.

“On the one hand, not having an MBA was used by many of the recruitment companies as a barrier to the kinds of jobs I knew I would be able to do and wanted to apply for. And in retrospect, if I had started the MBA when I was thinking about doing it, I would have been finished by now.

“On the other hand, with the position I eventually ended up accepting, having the MBA would not have made a difference. And having looked into a number of courses, I doubt I would actually have learned much that I don’t already know from my undergraduate studies and my subsequent on-the-job experience. It would have simply been a very expensive piece of paper.

“MBAs are known as marriage killers but contact with other MBA students can be extremely valuable. And if I don’t have one within the next five to ten years it might become an issue for where I want to end up.”

Further Non-Tertiary Study

Although Barry started out his career with an engineering focus, over the course of his ten year employment he was promoted into roles with a concentration on project and people management.

“With any potential new role, I had to decide which direction I wanted to head in. I decided on project management. There are two types of project management methodologies and I was already trained in one. I took a course in the other to ensure there were no gaps in my knowledge but again, in the end, it was my overall background and not my recent training that got me considered for the role I ultimately accepted.

“My lack of a formal project management qualification was a barrier just like the lack of an MBA was – certification is the price of entry, especially in the face of transactional recruiting where there is a firm checklist that doesn’t allow for variations. My advice where at all possible is always to deal with capability-based recruiters who can look at your skill set and understand its transferability, especially if you are trying to change careers and not just industries.”

Long-Term Goals, Short-Term Steps

Although Barry was looking to make a change, his career had already changed a lot in his previous workplace.

“What I was doing when I was made redundant (project and people management) was completely different to what I was doing when I first started there (engineering). So I had already started the process. In looking to make a further change, I had to decide what my end goal was. I used a ten year time frame.

“My end goal was not engineering and not project management. But ten years is a long time away. I needed to take a small first step. I’m no longer in the engineering industry but my new role is still in project management. I’ll take more small steps. Eventually I’ll get where I’m going.”

Barry’s Final Words

“I started to get a bit down about my employment situation at about the four month mark but less than a month later I had the job that I wanted.”

*Name changed for privacy reasons

By The Way

For anyone who is wondering what exactly a writer on sabbatical does with her time, the answer, of course, is she writes! Since February I’ve published 83 posts on my blog and I have written and scheduled another 39 to appear over the course of the next three months. You can check out what is essentially my writing portfolio here:

https://singlewhitefemalewriter.wordpress.com

*First published on LinkedIn 6 July 2015

Book Review: The Catcher in the Rye by JD Salinger

What a disappointment! This is the latest in a long line of “classic” books that when I finally get around to reading them, they aren’t worth even a fraction of the praise that has for so long been doled out and certainly weren’t worth the time spent reading them.

Told in the first person by Holden Caulfield, this is the story of – to be frank – nothing very interesting and nothing much happening. The main character is sixteen and the book’s one achievement is capturing something very much resembling the true voice of a self-involved, alcoholic, chauvinistic teenager who doesn’t like anybody but can’t bear to be alone. Unfortunately, that character is not someone you want to spend time with. He’s whiney, unwitty and boring.

He’s been kicked out of his prestigious boarding school after failing everything except English (and if this is one of those semi-autobiographical novels, then Holden should have failed English as well based on this effort). Instead of going home, he checks into a hotel in New York. He constantly goes to bars and tries his luck at ordering drinks. Some bartenders won’t serve him because of his age, others do. He tries unsuccessfully chatting up various women (no wonder, he’s about as appealing as a schnauzer licking his balls and then trying to lick your face), then gets tricked into paying a prostitute for services not rendered, he has breakfast with some nuns, he goes on a date with an old girlfriend who he treats appallingly, he goes to see a movie (even though he’s spent a good portion of the book up until now telling the reader how much he hates the movies), he meets up with an old acquaintance who clearly can’t stand him, he gets ridiculously drunk, he sneaks into his family’s apartment to “chew the fat” with his kid sister, he sneaks back out to go visit an old teacher, then runs away when he thinks the teacher is trying to molest him, he sleeps at a train station, then meets up with his kid sister again and takes her to a playground. That’s pretty much it. The missing subtitle from this novel could have been “A Narcissist’s Guide to New York”.

Holden thinks everybody around him is a phony, which is ironic because he seems to be the biggest phony in the book. He doesn’t know his own true self but he thinks he’s better than everyone without any genuine evidence to support that belief. He clearly has mental health issues in addition to his numerous personality disorders but the author isn’t able to articulate them any better than having Holden constantly describe himself as depressed.

The whole time I was reading this book, I kept thinking it sounded much like the kind of bad novel a teenage boy might write before compiling a manifesto and then going on a killing spree. If you want to read an example of what I think the writer intended to do but done right, I would recommend Stephen Chbosky’s The Perks of Being a Wallflower, which isn’t a perfect book either but is about a hundred times better and more well written than this.

Should You Have a Blog, Too?

Maybe my immediate answer to this question should be no (after all, I don’t want too much competition for the reading time of the audience out there) but there has been an explosion in blog numbers in the past few years and I’m hardly one to lecture others – after all, I’m relatively late to the party. I’ve only had my blog for about nine months.

But my more considered response is to think about why you are contemplating starting a blog and to make sure you understand what is involved. Here’s some pros, cons and tips that might be able to help you decide.

Pros

Meeting Deadlines

One of my suggestions is to post to a consistent schedule. If you do this, you will have deadlines that need to be met. It’s a terrific skill to be able to meet deadlines, in both writing lives and working lives (assuming you aren’t lucky enough for your writing life to be your working life). Having a blog gives you a chance to practise this skill without the sometimes terrible consequences that might befall you in a professional context if you fail.

Consistent Effort

Having a blog inevitably means a requirement to develop a lot of content. I can easily say that this year, the first of my blog, has been the most productive writing year of my life. And the variety of my content has refreshed my enjoyment of writing. Apart from the quantity being high, the quality is up there as well because I’ve been writing about so many different things and not getting fed up trying to write the same thing a million different ways.

Your Writing Is Out There

I spent a lot of time when I was younger locked in my bedroom writing. Which was fine. It was all part of my writing journey. But I got to my late twenties and realised I was a decade behind where I should have been because I wasn’t putting my writing out there to be read.

If you want to be diarist, then I highly recommend the hidden bedroom writing model. If you want it to be something more one day (like a paying job), then being accessible and developing a reputation as a good writer is an important part of the process. I’ve had readers from as far away as Ireland, Chile, Canada and many other places that I never would have been able to reach had it not been for my blog.

Your Writing Is In One Location

My online footprint really began in 2012 when I published my first novel, Enemies Closer. I started posting book reviews on Goodreads. I started my Twitter account. I did interviews. And in 2014 I began writing articles on employment and posting them on LinkedIn. Slowly, I started to realise that I had a lot of content in a lot of very diverse places, sometimes under slightly different names (on Goodreads I’m listed as L.E. Truscott, the name I published my first novel under). Anyone who wanted to read me would have to have gone to some trouble to find me in all those locations.

Now that I have my blog, all my different types of writing are easily accessible and anyone googling my name will see my blog come up in the first page of results. Much easier for my readers.

Also easier for my potential employers. Now when anyone asks to see samples of my writing, I can direct them to my blog.

Marketing Tool

When I published my first novel, one of the real difficulties was getting the message out there. Now that I have a blog, I can use it as one of the many channels to do just that.

Cons

Time Away From Other Writing

I openly admit it. I have spent so much time writing for my blog that my current novel in progress has been put on the backburner. The only thing that really makes this a con is if you regret the time and consider it wasted. I don’t. I’m trying to think of the time away from my novel as a much needed break. But if I was a glass half empty kind of person, I might look at the past few months and wonder how much further along in writing my novel I could have been.

Unending New Content Required

You have to keep developing and posting new content otherwise it looks like you are neglecting your blog. And sometimes we all experience the problem of running out of ideas. As I’m only nine months in, I haven’t reached that point yet but it’s highly likely I will.

To try to prevent this, I keep an ideas board on which I write one-sentence proposals to myself on concepts for new blog posts. Often these ideas will come to me just as I’ve turned the light off and am trying to sleep but I get up every time to write them down. Here are some that are on the ideas board at the moment:

*Taking inspiration from the things around you every day – I thought of this as I looked at the stuff stuck to my refrigerator and wondered what the police would be able to tell from it if I was the victim or the perpetrator of a crime and they were searching my house for clues.

*The importance of being good at more than one kind of writing – I have an idea for a new novel and I am considering writing it as a series of prose chapters, diary entries, emails, newspaper articles, online chats, transcripts and anything else that seems interesting.

*Just because you have an idea doesn’t mean you have time to develop it – I have so many ideas for novels that never get acted upon for logistical reasons.

*Character development strategies, perhaps psychoanalysis – some of the blog posts I have written were developed as updated versions of the weekly pieces I had to write when I was studying my Master’s degree and this is one of them still to be developed.

*The relationship between reading and writing – another former Master’s topic.

*Are you conscious of the reader as you write? Another former Master’s topic.

*Where have all the idealists gone? Something I wondered as I watched a news report on refugees and thought about again as I discussed with someone how people leave jobs with toxic cultures. While I understand the inclination to run, I also wondered how anything will ever change if nobody stays to take a stand.

*Confessions of a reformed perfectionist – I just liked this as a title but as a reformed perfectionist (it’s a constant everyday struggle, a bit like alcoholism), I thought there might be a blog post in this.

*The trick to coming up with good book titles and article headlines – this is a genuine skill and an important part of marketing anything you write.

Keep an eye out in the future to see if any of these make it past the ideas board stage.

Tips

Pick the Brain of an Experienced Blogger

I knew nothing about blogging when I first started. I didn’t even know which platform to use. So I talked to someone I knew who had her own blog and asked a lot of questions.

Pick a Title

You can just use your own name or you can come up with something that is going to stick in people’s minds, but remember that you are not just creating a blog, you’re creating a brand.

Of course, you need to make sure that you don’t pick a title that’s already in use, so do a bit of research first. The platform you choose will help you a little in this regard as it won’t let you have a web address that is already in use but there are multiple platforms.

Just make sure it’s personal and relevant.

Pick a Topic

My blog is obviously a writing blog (and by extension a reading blog as well). I post examples of my writing, book reviews, tips on the craft, and discussion points on the areas that tend to trip up writers, that sort of thing.

But I know from the weekly emails I get from Bloglovin’ and WordPress that the most popular blogs tend to be about fashion, food and fitness. Mommy bloggers seem to get a lot of attention as well. You can write about anything.

Once you’ve picked a topic, you don’t have to stick to it religiously. You can set up a category called “Off Topic” and post on things slightly left (or right) of your normal post subjects. Readers don’t mind a bit of variety.

Decide How Often You Want to Post…

There are no rules about how often you should post. It has to be your decision. Think about how much time you want to devote to writing blog posts and how much time you want to devote to other activities. There’s no point deciding to post daily if you don’t have the time to develop that much content.

…Then Stick to It

Once you’ve made a decision on how often you want to post, make sure you stick to the schedule. Your readers will look out for a post once they get to know your posting schedule and if you miss one, then you’re missing an opportunity to have guaranteed readers for your writing.

Write Posts Well in Advance

I don’t want to feel like I’m spending all my time writing for my blog so I set aside a few weeks and try to write as many blog posts as I can. Then I schedule them to be released on Mondays, Wednesday and Fridays every week. Even though this blog was posted on 25 September, I wrote it all the way back on 9 July and I am probably at the moment developing content that won’t appear until December or January.

Which means I am giving myself plenty of down time before I need to think about developing new blog content. In the interim, I can work on my other writing, socialise, renovate the house, whatever else I want to do in order to have a more well-rounded life. It also means when the time eventually comes, I will be fresh and ready to write.