Angela Booth's Writing Blog

Should YOU blog?

Here's the editorial from this month's Creative Small Biz. If you're not a member, join our free monthly ezine here.

  

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Blogging, which is essentially instant publishing by anyone, anywhere, is gaining momentum on the Web. Creatives, as you might imagine, are taking to the new medium in droves.

 

Should YOU blog? I get several email messages every week asking me about the pros and cons of blogging, and I hope that this month's excerpt from our Pro Write workshop "Blog Your Writing" will help you to make a decision.

 

"How much time do you spending blogging each day?" is the most popular question. It takes me around 15 minutes to write and post an item of 100 to 200 words. Therefore, depending on how many items I post on a particular day, it might take around half an hour to an hour.

 

Your blog is what you choose to make it. You don’t need to spend hours on it every day. Many bloggers only post a couple of times a week.

 

Hope you enjoy the excerpt. :-)

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What you feel comes out in your writing

Your feeling comes out in your writing. If you're bored witless by your topic, it shows. You need to be enthusiastic about what you're writing about. If you can’t manage that, you must at the very least be interested.

 

This means that even if you've been hired to write about pumps for large sewerage systems (par for the course for business writers), you've got to be able to develop interest in the topic.

 

Here's how:

• think of the people who will be reading your work, and using the information. When I was writing about the pumps, I thought about the people who used them, who worked hard, and did valuable work, and who needed clear information.
  
• Think about something else in which you are interested. You may be enthused about health and fitness, but you need to write about LCD monitors for a computer magazine. Spend a few minutes thinking about health and fitness, and build your enthusiasm. You've find that you'll be able to retain that enthusiasm, and will be able to write about monitors happily.
  
• When all else fails, think about the money you'll get for writing. :-)

Get enthusiastic. It makes all the difference.

 

Your writing attitude to write well: "don't care"

The best attitude to cultivate for writing is: "don't care", that is, complete and utter nonchalance.

 

If I'm writing for a client and I desperately want to write well, I take that as an alarm, a warning. I know that whatever I write with this attitude will be garbage.

 

Therefore, I've trained myself. It's reverse psychology. I convince myself that I don't care what I write, I'm happy to write junk. In fact, I DEMAND that I write junk.

 

With this attitude, it takes ten to 15 minutes for me to become engrossed in what I'm writing. As soon as I start to have fun, I know I'm writing well.

 

How do you get to that "don't care" state? Tell yourself that you can destroy your writing if you're not happy with it. It's true. You can. Then tell yourself just to have fun, and to enjoy your creativity.

 

Waterman Phileas reigns supreme

My Waterman Phileas slipped out of my hand and speared into the carpet on my office floor yesterday afternoon. Oh, the horror. When I picked it up, the nib's prongs had lifted out of alignment by at least a couple of millimetres.

 

My favourite turquoise pen with a medium nib… I stared at it for a while, then pressed the prongs back into shape on a piece of paper.

 

Guess what? It writes. Of course it doesn’t write the perfect way it wrote before, but it still writes. Magic.

 

On my next order to Pendemonium, I'll be ordering another of these little treasures. :-)

 

Copywriting: two tips to help you get clients

Tip One: Don't follow the crowd

This means, try to find markets that no one else is servicing. Target manufacturers and other non-glamorous companies.

 

Don't worry if you know nothing about a particular industry. If you're a writer, you can research and write about anything as long as you're prepared to do some extra work, and aren’t scared of asking questions.

 

 

Tip Two: Nothing happens until you get in touch

We'll all got something to learn from the UCE (Unsolicited Commercial Email) pests. It's this: if you approach enough people, you get results. So keep sending out your proposals and letters of introduction. :-)

 

Apropos of which, please remember:

 

Please, please, please DO NOT send out your naked resume to people you think might give you creative work. If you do, I will be extremely disappointed in you. Send a letter introducing yourself, preferably containing a proposal. Here's an article that may help.

 

The important thing to remember is that when you approach people, put yourself in their shoes. Ask yourself what they need, that you could supply, then make them an offer they can’t refuse. :-)

 

Write organically: trust Self Two

What does that mean--- " write organically"?

 

It means to trust your writing. Let your writing write.

 

There's an excellent book: The Inner Game of Work: Focus, Learning, Pleasure, and Mobility in the Workplace by Tim Gallwey, in which he talks about Self One and Self Two. Gallwey points out that we have two selves, Self One and Self Two. Self One is the bossy, didactic voice in our head. This voice is not our real self, it's a false self which parrots every hurtful, destructive thing we've ever heard. It's no wonder that we're frightened of failure, frightened of success, and just plain frightened of everything, especially writing, if we take Self One seriously.

 

Remember: Self One is just  a voice in our head.

 

Gallwey suggests that we trust our real self, Self Two. Our real self, Self Two, is much more powerful than Self One. Self Two is everything we are. If we trust ourselves, and allow Self Two to do the work, it gets done.

 

The problem is that Self Two is mute. It's not verbal. It communicates with feelings, images and I guess — intuition. The easiest way to discover whether Self One or Self Two is currently in charge of our inner self  is to ask: am I loving what I'm doing? Am I feeling joy as I write? If the background feeling to what you're doing is joy, then Self Two is in charge. Self Two is you, happily absorbed, completely engrossed with what you're writing.

 

Letting yourself write organically means putting Self Two in charge. Trust that as long as you're enjoying your writing, you're letting Self Two take the lead. Ignore any loud Self One mind-chatter. Remember that Self One is NOT you, and it sure as heck can’t write. :-)

 

Jumpstart your writing with THE BLOCK

This cute little book of 672 pages, shaped like a child's building block, is the idea jump-starter for your writing: with 786 ideas, you'll never suffer from writers' "block" again.

 

I've got two, so I'm selling one on eBay.

  

The item number is 4534546987 if the link doesn’t work.

 

How to write copy for businesses

Copywriting is fun and lucrative. I've had several enquiries this week about copywriting: what it involves, and how to get started.

 

Here's a fast overview of copywriting as a profession.

  

If you need more, you can sign up for my copywriting course which helps you to start your own copywriting services business.

  

I've often said that if you can write an effective letter, you can write copy. :-)

 

If you're all at sea, you can take the free three-day copywriting mini-course.

  

Enjoy. :-)

Make time for your writing: do it FIRST

How do you make time for your writing?

 

You can't make any time, of course. We're all limited to a set number of hours in each day.

 

However, you can make your creative work a priority. Schedule it. Every day. Do your writing BEFORE you do anything else.

 

Write before you go to work. This means going to bed earlier, and getting up earlier. It means missing TV, movies, and social events, at least for the time being.

 

If you write before work, you'll start the day on a high, with a sense of achievement. If you leave your writing until you get home from work, you'll be "too tired" to write four days out of five.

 

Write first.

 

The ONE Big Secret Of Marketing Your Writing

Here's an excerpt from my ebook Tell, Yell And Sell: Marketing Skills For Writers that you may find helpful if you're uncertain about marketing techniques.

 

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There's a big secret to marketing your writing. It's a secret that many writers never learn. They don’t discover it on their own, and professional writers rarely bother to share it.

 

Here's the BIG SECRET: YOU NEED TO PURSUE AND WOO YOUR MARKETS UNTIL THEY BUY FROM YOU. That is, you need to make more than one contact with a market --- you need to make many, many, many contacts, until that particular market buys from you.

 

It makes sense. You have to make relationships in all other areas of your life, so why should marketing your writing be any different?

 

It will take many contacts for an editor to buy from you. If you give up too soon, you're letting yourself down.

 

Why does it take many contacts? Because editors are busy, and because they're also human. Discovering new writers in the mass of proposals and queries they receive every day comes last on an editor's long To Do list.

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In praise of reading, and stealing

Wonderful article by Jesse Kornbluth on reading and stealing from great writers. Of course, he's not talking about stealing as plagiarism. He says:

 

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Writers—real writers—are formed by their reading. It can be vast, it can be selective. But at some moment, the process freezes. Heroes emerge. And then the writer sees himself/herself as an upholder and extender of the convictions and style of those heroes. For me, the gods are Johnson, Flaubert, Dickens, de Maupassant and Orwell. And the catalytic moment was when Orwell praised "prose like a windowpane"—right there I found a mantra.

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Writers read. :-) Visit Jesse's Headbutler site for good stuff to read.

 

Fiction is visual: leap into the image

Write your novel by letting a movie unroll in your head. Describe what you see. Move into the image. Feel what the characters are feeling, think what they're thinking, and write that down.

 

Diana Gabaldon, author of the wonderful Voyager novels, has often described how she writes her books scene by scene, then glues the scenes together:

 

She describes the process she uses on her Web site.    

 

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I started my first novel--for practice, I never meant to show it to anybody--with no outline, no plot, no characters, even; all I had was a time and place, and a vague notion that there should be a man in a kilt .

 

I just started in where I could sort of see something happening, and wrote. The next day I wrote some more. Then I couldn't see any more happening there, so I wrote something else I could see. I kept this, and as I wrote tons of these little pieces, I got a sort of feel for the overall shape of the story, and could start to stick the pieces together and move them around.

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Writing practice: Your journal as catharsis

Catharsis is emotional release. This is one of the primary motivations most people have for keeping a diary.

 

You can use your journal to purge yourself of emotion any time you wish. For example, you may be so angry at someone that you want to scream and yell. However,  you know that this would destroy the relationship. So you write a page or 20 pages about your anger and the reasons for it. Somewhere in your emotional outpouring you'll sense a shift. You won’t be quite as enraged any more.

  

Purging yourself in your journal can be very healthy.

 

Writing practice: Write an entry in your Daily Log

Try to get into the habit of briefly writing out the thoughts, emotions and incidents of your day, every day. Think of yourself as an explorer in the foreign country of your life. Write about whatever you choose -- even the weather. Don’t think too much about this. Just write 200 words about your life today.

 

I use The Journal for my Log entries, because it's fast and easy to search my entries. I can search years' worth of entries within a couple of seconds.

  

Not familiar with The Journal? Download a free trial, to see whether the program meets your needs.

 

Hire A Copywriter # 6: The prices copywriters charge

Copywriters charge according to their expertise. Some copywriters charge by the hour; others charge by the project.

 

I charge by the project, which is fair to the client: the business that's hiring my services knows exactly what the cost will be.

 

Email me and send me a brief, and I'll be happy to quote on it.  

  

The brief is a set of instructions, a task description. It's your plan of exactly what you want the writing to do. If you're not sure what it is you need, tell me your challenge, and we'll discuss it.