Capturing Chaos

I just had an article published at Associated Content for the first time in a year. I started writing for the site, but was unhappy with the various delays and glitches, especially the amount of time that it took for an article to be reviewed, and then published once I’d accepted their payment offer. That aspect of the site has probably deteriorated, if anything, but I’ve also become more serious about being paid for my writing, which means learning patience. The lure of instant publishing at penny ante sites has worn off.

I’m still going to have trouble writing the kind of SEO-oriented articles that lead to the better offers, but I’ll do it every now and then, with teeth clenched, and hope that page views will make up for low payments on the articles that come out of my own interests and ideas.

This is one of the decisions you have to make when the thrill of being published wears off and you begin to understand the potential for real income. Will you do the work that is highest in demand and that pays the highest wages, no matter how much you hate that type of writing? Or are you willing to settle for less money and retain ownership of your skills and your soul?

Take a look at How to Buy Great Clothes at Thrift Stores . It comes out my own experience, but isn’t the kind of thing that I’m really happy writing. And it shows.

I’ve been struggling through Ray Bradbury’s Zen in the Art of Writing, and I’m not sure I’m going to make it all the way through. I bought it on the recommendation of several NaNo forum posters, thinking that it would be a good addition to my small collection of books about writing. It sat next to Stephen King’s On Writing for quite a while, and for some reason I was reluctant to dip into it. A few weeks ago, I read On Writing again, for the third time, and thought it might be a good idea to follow up with Bradbury. If nothing else, the contrast would be interesting. Continue Reading »

I had doubts about using Twitter for networking and getting readers for my blogs, but I succumbed to some enthusiastic users, and signed on. Today, I’m signing off. Using social networks of any kind has been painful for me, and a waste of time. I gathered that Twitter might be different, but in its essence, it’s no different.

Two principles lie behind social networks. They allow you to link up with old friends and find new friends. And there’s the catch. If you don’t have any friends, and I don’t necessarily consider internet or real-life acquaintances my friends, then your only option is to find new ones. And that means very much the same thing it means in real life: hanging around the fringes where people gather, and asking to be friends with them. Continue Reading »

Here’s the final version of the original “off the top of my head free writing” chunk. I really should have kept this consecutive with the longer one, but so it goes.

“Why do so many unqualified people want to be writers? Words are all around us; they’re what we use every day, so it’s easy to think that there’s nothing special about them. If you can speak, you can write; for too many wannabes, daily conversation seems no different from what a writer produces and what ultimately shows up on the pages of books and magazines.

“It’s a very different thing, though, a different world, one you enter either prepared or unprepared. If you start out unprepared, and refuse to change that, you’ll eventually be cast out, whether rudely or politely doesn’t matter, except in how it affects your understanding. Too polite a rejection teaches nothing. It allows the incompetent to believe that if they just keep trying, the doors will open and they’ll be admitted to the inner sanctum and to what they mistakenly believe is an endless flow of money and adulation.

“If one of these aspiring writers looked at what I produced in a 15 minute writing exercise, they might be impressed, even awed. How can someone produce so many words in such a short time? And where do the ideas come from? They have no conception of what goes into becoming a writer, even one who’s just adequate. Even so, they’re convinced they can do it.

“At the opposite pole are those who think that they need to take courses, be instructed how to write. The great writers of the past would laugh at the idea, and so would most contemporary writers; their teachers were the writers of previous generations and those of their own generation worthy of their admiration. They might emulate those writers in the early part of the learning process, but mainly, they spend many years reading and absorbing the language and its uses.

“Reading is the foundation, the core. Without that foundation, it’s impossible to become a writer. The would-be writer who doesn’t read, who hasn’t been reading most of his life, is an empty shell, and all he will produce is the trite shorthand that makes up most of our everyday communication.”

I planned to post the edited version of the free writing excerpt today, but another topic started nagging at me, so get ready for a bit of a rant.

I’ve been coming across a lot of blogs set up to offer information to writers and would-be writers. Some concentrate on creativity and the mechanics of writing; other tend to stick with recommendations about where to write if you want to make money. What’s beginning to get my goat is recommendations that are rushed and uninformative, and even suspicious. Too often, the posts don’t indicate whether the writer actually has any experience with the site, or just ran across it in browsing the web. Continue Reading »

I was in the middle of editing another chunk of the free writing that I wrote about yesterday when I thought it might be interesting to post the original today and the edited version tomorrow. So here, warts and all, is another selection from the top of my head.

“Why do so many people want to be writers when they lack every qualification? They have illusions of adequacy because words are all around us, they’re what we use every day, so it’s assumed that there’s nothing special about them. There’s nothing we need to know about words or language because it’s part of our everyday experience. We think that the grunts of those around us and the grunts we offer then in return are equivalent to what a writer produces and ultimately shows up on the pages of books and magazines.

“It’s a very different thing, though, almost a different world. It is a different world, one you enter either prepared or unprepared. If you’re start out unprepared, and refuse to change your status, you will eventually be cast out, whether rudely or politely, it doesn’t really matter, except in how it affects your understanding. Too polite a rejection teaches nothing. It allows the incompetent to believe that if they just keep trying, the doors will open and they’ll be admitted to the inner sanctum and to what they mistakenly believe is an endless flow of money and adulation.

“If one of these aspiring writers were to take a look at what I’ve produced in the last 15 minutes or so, they would be impressed, possibly awed. How can someone just sit down and produce so many words in such a short time? And where do the ideas come from? They have no conception of what goes into becoming a writer, even one as mediocre in many ways as myself. Years of reading and absorbing the language and its uses. They think that taking courses, being told how to write, how to go about it, are what they need, but it never occurs to them that most writers have never taken a course. The great writers of the past would laugh at such a notion, knowing that their teachers were the writers of previous generations and those of their own generation worthy of their admiration. They might emulate those writers as part of the learning process, but they never took courses or had a teacher in the sense in which we understand teachers.

“So reading is the base, the core of everything that a writer is. Without that base, it’s impossible to become a writer. There is nothing to draw on, nothing learned. The writer who doesn’t read, who hasn’t been reading since early childhood is nothing but an empty shell, and all he can produce is wind the meaningless natter that passes for communication.”

Shortly before National Novel Writing Month began, I decided to find out what writing 3000 words in one day would be like. I planned to write that much each day for the first three days, and wanted to see if it was really possible.

It turned out to be easier than I thought it would be. I didn’t bother with plot or characters. I just sat down to do free writing about the act of writing. It didn’t matter whether the result was garbage or genius. The doing was the important thing. So I did it, and put it away without even looking at it. The idea was to give it long enough to be completely unfamiliar and then see if there are any gems to be dug out. Continue Reading »

Some days, it’s incredibly hard to focus. Even with a Plan, temptations constantly drag me away, or problems come up that have to be solved before I can take the next step. Part of the distraction is the Stumble! button on my Stumbleupon toolbar. But it’s also such a rich source of information that I have to take the risk of distraction almost every day.

I’m planning to start building Squidoo lenses once I have my two new websites fully tweaked and running smoothly, so It was a moment of serendipity to stumble across Captain Squid , a blog by a guy whose lifework seems to be building Squidoo lenses (he has about 500 of them so far — boggles the mind, doesn’t it?) and making a very substantial amount of money doing it. I’ve bookmarked the blog for future reference, but I’m also trying to tear myself away from reading more than a couple of posts. Continue Reading »

When you start writing on the internet with no clear goals in mind, it’s easy to slip into a comfort zone that eventually becomes a trap. We tend to stay with what’s familiar and easy, avoiding even the thought of change. Even if we do sense that we could be doing better, we’re not sure what the alternatives might be or what challenges we might have to face.

I’ve spent years writing online, making a little money here, a little money there, and sometimes no money at all. My writing improved; I learned the difference between traditional writing and content writing intended for internet readers, learned how to create a snappy title and an enticing opening paragraph. People let me know that they admired my writing, and maybe that’s why it took so long to venture out of my comfort zone into a world where the standards of judgment are very different. Continue Reading »

The second trigger for my departure from Triond was an article posted by a member. It had a cheery “this site is wonderful, we’re all wonderful, and together we’re going to make this the most popular writing site on the web” tone that reminded me of the crowd-pumping speeches that are a traditional part of sales conventions, and that are so often and so easily parodied. What really clicked, though, wasn’t the article itself, though it rubbed me the wrong way and set off BS alarms, but the comments. There were dozens, and every single one was in agreement, cheering the writer, thanking her for her encouragement, etc. I added my comment, which disagreed about the potential popularity of the site, and discovered, a day or so later, that it had been removed.

To digress a bit — smart, hard-working people can make money on these sites, but if they have a real talent for writing, they could make better money elsewhere, and probably with less work. So why do they stick with these low-paying sites? There are undoubtedly many reasons, but here are a few that I think probably rank high.

1. They’re emotionally needy and get off on the applause and admiration of their followers.
2. They’re excellent marketers (and manipulators) who know how to appeal to the masses. On sites where income is tied to ratings and page views, this is a valuable talent.
3. Their writing is good, but not good enough for survival in the competitive world of professional content production. Continue Reading »

I removed my last few remaining articles from Triond yesterday. It was the end of my second try at using Triond for a little extra writing income. I thought that I hadn’t given the site a fair trial the first time, so I would try harder. And I did try harder. I posted roughly twice as many articles as I had the first time. I stumbled a couple of the best ones. I read and commented on other members’ work, and I made “friends.”

To its credit, Triond has made a lot of upgrades to the site since my first residence there. Friending people means that their latest work will appear on your community page, making it easier to keep up with them. Most recently, Triond instituted a long-overdue feature — making your user name a live link to your profile and content when you leave a comment. Continue Reading »

Today has been a struggling-along-the-learning-curve kind of day instead of a writing day. I am discovering — again — that I develop a severe case of writer’s block when faced with large tasks without some kind of a framework. I have an entire website to overhaul from stem to stern on a new site. Creating the content first seemed like a good idea, but not much was getting done. Solution — create the box to put the content in and I’m more likely to get it written before my self-imposed deadline.

So I’ve been playing with the software on three different free web.2 site-creation hosts, trying to find one that I can use to build a new site without tearing my hair out in the process. And the winner is…. Synthasite. It’s all drag and drop, perfect for a CSS illiterate and HTML first grader. It’s even kind of fun, but I’m a writer, not a coder, so I don’t need the thrill of doing it all from scratch. I’ll save that for my cooking. Not tonight, though. I’ve spent so much time tweaking and dragging that suppertime has arrived with nothing done in the kitchen. Frozen pizza for me, with some extra Parmesan and maybe a chopped up slice of smoked pork roll.

I did accomplish one other small thing. I pulled all my articles off Triond. Maybe more about that tomorrow.

If you’re going to earn money by writing online, sooner or later you have to make decisions about where that money is going to come from. That may seem like a “Duh!” statement, but it isn’t. Consider how many blogs and websites depend on Google Adsense for income. How many decisions about where to blog are made primarily on whether you can or can’t have Adsense? If you’re hosting your own site, the question doesn’t come up, but if you’re using a free site, it’s very important. Debate over wordpress.com and Blogspot usually boils down to a choice between features and income.

For a variety of reasons, I decided that I don’t want to have an Adsense account or depend directly on Google for my income. I have no objections to Adsense or to earning money from it, as long as I don’t have to maintain an account of my own. The income from my Today blogs is based partly on Adsense, but the account belongs to today.com. The decision to write for either Hub Pages or Squidoo came down to choosing the one that doesn’t require me to have an Adsense account, and that’s Squidoo. Continue Reading »

I’ve been writing online for quite a few years, but without any sense of direction. I went where the atmosphere seemed friendly and where I could make a bit of money, but that’s as far as my thinking went. Over the last year, though, I’ve begun to think seriously about setting priorities, focusing my efforts, and trying to make more than just a few cents here and there. I always wanted to make more money, and I was pretty sure that I could if I put my mind to it, but I didn’t make the effort to work out what that would involve.

The bottom line is that I’m not cut out for a world in which SEO (Search Engine Optimization) is the ruling force. Finally coming to that understanding means that I can stop thrashing around, trying this approach, and then that one. I have a sense of direction that I never had before, and real, long-term goals.

Changing your Stumbleupon topic preferences and then hitting the Stumble button fifty or sixty times a day can turn up all sorts of interesting information. It’s not always just about the subjects that people are writing about, but the various approaches, the number of people writing in a given area, and how much of what comes up is old but still good — the evergreens. Odd but interesting perspectives that developers of Stumbleupon didn’t necessarily have in mind when they started the site.

Two topics that I like to Stumble are writing and blogging. The most obvious thing that jumps out when you’ve been hitting the button for days and days is that most people have nothing original to say. The majority of blogs about blogging are there to make money by telling you how to make money. There must be thousands of them, most of them fairly obscure and probably struggling to fulfill their own promises — “How to get thousands of readers for your new blog,”  “How to use AdSense to build an overnight fortune.”

The majority of writing blogs follow much the same pattern; “How to get started in freelancing,” “How to promote your writing career,” “How to write a killer article, use ‘it’s’ properly, write an attention-getting title,” and on and on. Thousands upon thousands of blogs and websites, all trying to win a little slice of the attention pie. And they just keep coming.

So here I am, writing about writing, and handing out advice. What’s my advice? If you’re going to write about blogging or writing, do something different, for heaven’s sake!

I planned to write about the pains and pleasures of National Novel Writing Month, but reality took hold of me, and I dropped out just short of 9,000 words. For the first time out of three tries, I had a plot — a real plot with a beginning, a middle and an end. So what happened?

But there’s an idea and a cast of characters that keeps nagging at me and wants to see the light of day, so maybe it will happen when the time is right. I’d like to think that I have one novel in me and that it could be a really good one. Time will tell.

Sometimes I think that the hardest part of writing online for money is deciding where to publish. With so many sites offering different opportunities, different pay rates, and different requirements, it’s easy for the beginning writer to bog down in a state of total confusion. There’s plenty of advice to be had. In fact, it seems that just about everyone who’s ever published online has an opinion. But are those opinions worth anything?

We’ve all seen “This site ripped me off and I’m warning every body to stay away because they’re a bunch of crooks.” And “You can make a fortune writing for this site. Just sign up under me and get started.” Who to believe, who to ignore? No matter what anybody else’s experience may be with a site, yours might turn out to be completely different. It doesn’t matter what site you name, every one has its haters and its lovers.

What I learned is that there’s no easy way to decide which sites are best for you. It really comes down to the equivalent of pounding the pavement and going door to door. First you read every scrap of information a site has to offer: how much it pays, when it pays, how it pays. About ownership of your material, about their format and their standards. What’s expected of you, and what you can expect from them.

If it all looks good, you sign up and start writing. This is the honeymoon, when you really get to know who you’re living with. Was the nice appearance a mask or the real thing? Give it a couple of months, but if the romance wears off too quickly, you may have to decide to move on and try again.