Angela Booth's Writing Blog

Digital-e: articles and courses for writers

If you haven't checked out the free articles for writers on our Digital-e site lately, please do so. You'll find lots of marketing, writing and creativity articles which will help you, whether you're a beginner or a pro.

If you're ready to invest in your writing career in 2005, take one of our courses, or sign up for writing coaching. Make 2005 your best writing year ever!

Do something different in 2005

Remember the old saying: "If you do what you always do, you'll get what you always get".

As you plan for 2005, ask yourself: "What can I do that's different?" Then, follow your intuition.

Look on your life as an experiment. Become curious. Do something different, and watch to see what happens.

Don't forget to document the experiment at all stages. The first things you try may not work, but they'll give you clues to your path to success.

Investigate your writing rules to develop writing breakthroughs

True or false? There are lots of rules for writers.

Yes, there are rules, but you've created 95 per cent of them yourself. Your rules are the borders you've set on your creativity. We act by the rules we've set for ourselves in all areas of life. We're outraged when someone tries to get us to see that many of our rules don't make sense.

Please note, I'm not encouraging you to break any laws. :-)

However, I am encouraging you to look at the invisible boundaries that you've set for yourself.

What boundaries? OK, think of something you'd like to do. For example: "I'd like to double my writing income this year."

Now make a list that's headed: "I can't, because…." All the reasons you come up with are your rules, the ones you live by.

Now you've got all your invisible rules in black and white, apply your creativity to them. Do they make sense? How can you circumvent them?

Tip # 11: How to thrive as a freelance writer --- Create a marketing plan

As 2004 totters to a close, it's time to create a marketing plan for your writing business. Please don't get your feathers ruffled when I refer to writing as a business. If you want to make money from your writing, it's definitely a business.

Your marketing plan tells you what to write and when to write it, and most importantly of all, it tells you how much money you'll be making.

Many writers, even copywriters, shy away from making a marketing plan. This is like setting out on a journey without a destination or a map.

Your marketing plan has three sections:

1. A plan of the work you intend to produce, and

2. Markets to which you'll sell that work; and

3. Scenarios of payments you'll receive.

Don't make a fuss about this. You can write your plan on the back of a used envelope, or on a paper napkin. Take ten or 20 minutes, and write.

Put your plan into your day planner. Make a note to review it once a week. Sunday night is good. A regular review keeps you on track.

Blogging and PR

Shel Israel has an excellent item on The Red Couch blog, "Will Blogging Kill PR?"

As a lot of PR goes these days, we can only hope.

He says:
" In the late 90s, there were too many editors and too many publications growing obese from too much advertising being placed on money that came from too few earned dollars. Too many PR people were pitching, pushing, emailing, calling, press releasing and gimmicking to reach editors who were born yesterday and did not know they were supposed to ask tough questions."

Unfortunately that mindset is still around. I've had violently frank discussions with PR cravens who let themselves be pushed around by clients. My attitude is, a news release is NOT an ad. If I write it, I write a news release as NEWS.

Shel says that blogging is word-of-mouth electronically reborn:
"But blogging now makes word-of-mouth scalable in new ways. It also filters out bullshit with great efficiency. It is also an efficient way to rank high with the most efficient way of scoring high on the most efficient placement of all--the Google Search results."

Amen to that. :-)

Looking for writing jobs?

If you're looking for freelance jobs, or for a fulltime job, here's an excellent new search engine: Indeed. One search. All jobs.

Not only does it search for jobs everywhere you'd expect, it also conducts niche searches, AND sends you results via email or RSS. (See the box on the right for RSS feeds.) I clicked the Bloglines button, and added the new feed instantly.

Brilliant. :-)

Merry Christmas!

Have a happy, holy, and safe, Christmas Day. Wishing you and yours happiness and joy.

"There's more, much more, to Christmas Than candlelight and cheer; It's the spirit of sweet friendship That brightens all year. It's thoughtfulness and kindness, It's hope reborn again, For peace, for understanding, And for goodwill to men!"

(Anonymous)

Giggle of the Day: The Ig Nobel awards 2004

The MEDICINE award went to:

>>>
Steven Stack of Wayne State University, Detroit, Michigan, USA and James Gundlach of Auburn University, Auburn, Alabama, USA, for their published report "The Effect of Country Music on Suicide."
>>>

Writing practice

Do you have a writing practice? I've found that all my writing is faster and easier, and I'm more creative, when I commit to a daily writing practice. Over the past month or so, I've let my practice slide.

So this next week, I'm committing myself to ten minutes writing practice three times a day.

What do I write for practice? I usually just get quiet, take a few deep breaths, and wait for an image to occur to me. Then I just start writing.

If I have something I want to explore, I write out the theme, or challenge, or topic, and write for ten minutes.

My writing practice sessions are not free writing, where your fingers don't leave the keyboard. I can stop for a moment, but no more than a moment.

If you've never tried writing simply as a practice, give it a go.

A planner for 2005

Here's an excellent, useful, and free planner from A Million Monkeys Typing.

The planner's sections include agendas, project outlines, brainstorm pages, and many more.

The file's in PDF, so you can print the sections you need. Or, you can tinker with the sections to customize them to your own requirements.

Tip # 10: How to thrive as a freelance writer --- aim for QUANTITY over quality

Whatever your current writing project, focus on quantity, rather than quality, of output.

When you generate lots of writing on a topic, your brain has time to make connections. After writing, and writing, and then writing some more --- you get inspired. That inspiration would never have hit you if you hadn't pressed on to write more.

Here's a quote from Ray Bradbury: "…quantity produces quality. Only if you do a lot will you ever be any good. If you do very little, you'll never have quality of idea or quality of output".

So write every day, and write a lot.

Tip # 9: How to thrive as a freelance writer --- learn to manage boredom

Writer's myth: You should never be bored with your writing. If you're bored it means your writing is perfumed garbage.

Nope. Wishful thinking. :-)

Here's what the great American novelist F. Scott Fitzgerald said: "Boredom is not an end product --- it is, comparatively, rather an early stage in life and in art. You've got to go by, or past, or through boredom, as though through a filter, before the clear product emerges."

Unfortunately, that's perfectly true. You've got to go through your boredom to get to the other side. So keep going, until you break through your boredom to renewed inspiration and creativity.

At the moment I'm intensely BORED with not one, but two, book projects. I'm bored, bored, bored. I don't want to reread them, look at them, or think about them.

But… I know that this is just a stage.

So, to humour my inner baby, I'm taking a week off from the projects and reading and playing computer games.

Then, bored or not, ready or not, it's back to work… even if the two projects are perfumed garbage. :-)

A writer's Christmas

Wilkie Collins had a typical writer's attitude to Christmas:

>>>
"an idea for a Christmas Story made a morning call in my brain the other day. The sort of book I propose would be a 5/- affair, running to about 130 pages - a sort of tragi-comedy in the form of a Story"
….
"This is indeed a great age for great authors. Dickens told a friend of mine, that he had made four thousand guineas by his last year's Christmas book - (The Battle of Life) - a five shilling publication,(!) which everybody abused, and which, nevertheless, everybody read. Eighteen thousand copies of his present Christmas book (The Haunted Man) were "subscribed for" by the booksellers, before publication."
>>>

When the big day arrives, enjoy --- and make notes. :-)

Dangerous blogging: forgetting that blogging is forever

Jeffrey Rosen's NYT article: "Your Blog or Mine?" points out the dangers of personal blogging.

Money quote:

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Without a reputation for trustworthiness, neither friendship nor journalism can be sustained over time.
>>>

The article focuses on personal blogging, but every blogger should realize that your blog is FOREVER. Even if you take down the blog, it will linger on in Internet databases forever. As a rule of thumb, never blog anything you don't want your best friends and worst enemies to read on the front page of a newspaper.

In 2020, do you want a blog posting you made in 2004 to be read out to you at a job interview? Could happen.

The blogger's style book

Interesting post on The Blog Herald, "Choosing your English: the choice for new bloggers".

For me, the money quote is:

>>>
The most important consideration in planning a blog is being comfortable with how and what you write. For 99% of blogs this will be your natural written English.
>>>

Your blog should be fun. If it's your blog, you get to make the rules. If you're blogging for hire, use your boss's style book.

Of course, many small companies, and a surprising number of larger ones, don't have a style book, so you can offer to create one for them. :-)