More Blogging Reflections

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I started this blog for a few reasons, one of them being to work through some of my writing problems in a public space. Some readers may recall several rants against realism I posted, and in many ways those were brought about after I noticed the same problem in my work that I saw in slush piles. In short, I have gradually realized that “realism” and “literature” are not the same things. Simply producing writing that seems life-like or is based upon things that really happened does not automatically make a story literary. Realistic details don’t matter unless they are contributing to the overall vision of a story.

Although I’ve definitely covered craft issues such as characterization, action, setting, dialogue, etc., here, one powerful concept I’ve embraced is that great stories can be thought of as full explorations of their subject matter. This is where the idea of a “conceit” comes in: writers identify ideas or images that obsess them and then write to discover more about that idea. The concept of writing as a discovery process rather than the means of taking an already fully formed idea and putting it on the page has been a powerful one, and I’ve taken that to heart over the past year. It can be terrifying to feel like every sentence is a mistake, that you’ve been let off blind folded in a field and told to find your way home, but I took the leap of faith and now realize that bad pages eventually become good if you keep working at them. You do find your way home eventually.

I also wrote a number of reviews for films and books over the past year—about 20 films and 18 books as far as I can tell. I saw a few more films and read a few more books than I reviewed, but these reviews provide a good record of my intake over the past year.

The “notebook” concept, with my posts being divided up into separate phases, has been fairly successful. Over the past year I’ve used the blog to work through side projects, with the current one—an album of electronic music—almost complete. Not all my posts have pertained to the phase I was working on but some of them have. I’ve enjoyed this flexibility and the projects (fingers crossed for this current one) have been successfully completed.

If I went back to the beginning and started blogging all over again, the only major change would involve starting two weeks in advance with my posts. As I’ve noted several places, rather than sitting down and writing a post every day, I write them a week in advance and auto-program them. This gives me more control over the writing and development of the posts and prevents last-minute issues from interfering.

Two weeks of lead time would have given me even more flexibility in how I managed my time. Some weeks I found myself crashing to get my posts finished for the coming week, and a longer lead time would have helped. I probably would have written a number of better posts.

Although I actually enjoyed a certain lack of relevance to my posts—they were dictated mostly by my own interests and my own schedule—I think I would be a bit more attentive to timeliness and relevance if I ever go back to blogging once a day. The ongoing conversation between bloggers as linked to contemporary events and issues is a major positive attribute of the blogosphere, and yet I did not really participate in this conversation over the past year.

Tomorrow’s the big day—post #365. See you then!

Blogging Tips and Tricks: Reflections after a Year of Blogging Every Day

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Thursday will be post #365 at The Living Notebook in just as many days. So I thought this would be a good time for a moment of reflection and analysis. (The Living Notebook? Reflection and analysis? The words barely seem to have anything to do with each other…)

First of all, let me be clear that I never intended this blog to become some kind of popular go-to site. It’s not, really. But more people have visited the blog than I ever intended or expected—over 20,000 views as of this writing. And I have regular followers and commenters. Although I’m delighted that some people find my writing useful and interesting, I never expected that to happen.

Maybe it’s self-evident, but I was surprised to find that going through WordPress “liking” and “following” people will lead them to “like” and “follow” you back. Another thing? People click on your Gravatar image and find your blog that way. Which makes “liking” posts doubly important: every time you leave a little image of yourself on someone else’s blog, you’re creating the potential to drive traffic to your site via that image.

The Biggest Surprise

Regarding actual posts, what surprised me the most was that the creation of original content is not the best way to get your blog noticed and your posts shared. People have cynically noted that some of the most popular Twitter accounts and blogs do nothing but share inspirational quotes (or how about Horse ebooks, which shares nothing but gibberish?) and yet this seems to be a good thing to keep in mind if you’re just trying to get started as a blogger.

Indeed, three of my most popular posts during this 1-year period were rehashes of unoriginal information:

  • “Does Your Story Pass the Bechdel Test?” was my Freshly Pressed breakthrough post, with over 2,788 hits in a single day on August 7, 2012. But I wasn’t generating any new material with this post; I simply introduced the WordPress community to a concept they hadn’t heard of before. I found out about the Bechdel Test myself from someone posting on Facebook.
  • “The Skinny on Literary Cover Letters” was essentially a re-blog saying “Go check out this other article.” But my post was re-tweeted by a company with thousands of Twitter followers after I tagged the company in my post. The page has over 400 views as of this writing. This was another post I saw on Facebook.
  • “Get That Science Fiction Manuscript Ready…” was one of my most shared posts, and it was simply a write-up regarding an announcement for an open reading period. I saw it posted via mediabistro.com on Facebook and just reposted the announcement with a catchy title.

The moral of the story here? Make friends with generators of original content on Facebook and repackage what they post if you want to drive traffic to your blog and get people’s attention.

Another Approach

But there’s another way to get noticed—what might be thought of as the “consistent hits over time approach”—to get people to your blog. Though this approach has generated fewer page views than the above, over six hundred views in less than a year is nothing to laugh at.

With this approach, I wrote about popular short stories that every undergraduate literature student reads. Every time I look in my Stats Tab, in fact, I see that people have found my blog based on search terms that resemble the sort of questions teachers ask in class about these stories. All I can think of is that these posts must fill some need among students:

  • “Point of View in O’Connor’s ‘A Good Man Is Hard To Find’” which explores a curious point-of-view shift in one of O’Connor’s most famous stories. Nearly 400 views as of this writing, with my four top all-time search terms related to the post, i.e., “a good man is hard to find point of view” (30 hits) “what point of view is a good man is hard to find written in” (21 hits) etcetera.

Again, I wasn’t trying to drive traffic to my blog by choosing these topics. The traffic is just something I’ve observed in the wake of making the posts.

Awards

Awards are undoubtably a great way to get people to visit your blog since you’re essentially inviting another blogger to post a link to your blog in their space. Page views go up when you give out an award; there’s no question about it.

Contemporary Topics

Of course your blog is going to get more attention when it addresses an issue that’s “trending.” I’ve never cared particularly for doing that, but the posts I’ve made on “trending” issues have certainly gotten more hits in a short period than other posts. Case in point: my recent post “Oz the Cliche and Misogynist” which has gotten over 100 hits in under two weeks—more hits than many posts have gotten throughout the four, five, six months they’ve been hanging out.

To Conclude…

There are surely other strategies to get noticed as a blogger, and in fact anonymity (which I try to maintain) is probably not one of them. And I haven’t even looked into issues of framing—i.e., how the blog looks, its title, what it seems to be “about”—which surely impact the blog’s ability to get noticed. I never cared about that, because this blog has always been about my own personal journey as a writer. To the extent the framing and packaging has helped other people access my blog, that’s great. But I never approached the blog with the intent to grab people’s attention and to market myself.

Tomorrow, a few more thoughts on blogging.

Because, you know, I can’t just leave a topic alone after writing a thousand-word post about it.

A Promising Alternative to Duotrope…

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No, this isn’t an April Fool’s joke.

I just found out about The Grinder, a free web-based tracking system allowing writers to identify markets for their work and track submissions. It’s similar to Duotrope, the $50-per-year tool that was once free. The Grinder does not hide its post-Duotrope roots, marketing itself as a post-Duotrope site and noting: “We believe the value of our product lies in its availability and as such The Grinder is and always will be free to all users for all features.”

What they’re talking about here is the crowd sourcing aspect; the fact that the more people you have providing data to a system like this, the more useful it becomes. The problem with Duotrope deciding to monetize is that many of its users had to decide whether to pay the $50 or to walk away. Since many users happened to be struggling writers and graduate students in MFA programs like myself, many (also like myself), made the decision to walk away, which rendered Duotrope less useful.

I haven’t spent enough time on The Grinder yet to say whether it’s worth the time, but as I note in the headline, it seems promising. The two coders behind the system, themselves writers and zine publishers, appear to be working for free with a commitment to the idea of the system. They’re doing it for the love, in other words.

Signing up for The Grinder and trying to input a story I’d submitted to a journal back in September 2012, I noticed the system did not show I had been waiting on a response for over 7 months—it simply provided a default “zero days waiting” tally. So it clearly the platform has some bugs to work out. Nevertheless, it seems that The Grinder basically stole much of the front-end interface from Duotrope. They didn’t reinvent the wheel, in other words, which was a good decision. The interface is familiar and user friendly.

If you send your stories out but don’t use a submissions tracking program, now is a good time to start!

Whether you want to be a beta tester for The Grinder or pay $50 for the sleek but possibly less-useful-than-it-was-before Duotrope is up to you, however. Perhaps this summer I’ll have a better recommendation…

Think Before You Click!

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It has become increasingly clear to me that we are voting with our mouses and our keyboards. In other words, every time we type in a search term and every time we click on an article, we are essentially affirming that search string or that article to the Internet Gods.

I’ve mostly become aware of this in relation to slate.com articles. Slate.com is a great online magazine, but sometimes their headlines are deliberately over the top and border on the SPAM-like: SEE THESE AMAZING PHOTOS! CAN YOU BELIEVE WHAT THIS POLITICIAN SAID? CLICK HERE. Etcetera. Their deliberately provocative headlines recollect the Drudge Report, which has some of the most troll-like and provocative headlines of all. CNN.com is coming closer, it seems, with every passing month. Some of the CNN.com headlines now make so little sense that I’m tempted to click on them just to figure out what they mean.

I have to keep reminding myself these days, though, that I’m voting with my mouse: that every time I click on a provocative headline, I’m affirming not just the article and not just the publisher who posted the article, but the concept of provocative headlines themselves. 

The publisher doesn’t care about my reason for clicking on a headline. All they care about is that I clicked and that I’m being exposed to the advertising that waits on the other side. The net (no pun intended) effect is that publishers will be compelled to find ever more provocative, ever more troll-like headlines to attract me.

The moral?

Next time you see a link titled something like “Is Obama the Devil?” or “Find Out Why This Woman Can’t Get Enough!” and are tempted to click out of curiosity or anger or incredulity, realize that your interest is being tracked and noted. With each click, you are affirming a world of gossip and slander and sensationalism and rejecting a world of fact-based, well-reasoned, objective reporting.

Think before you click!

What Are Your Literary Tics?

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Most writers have tics whether they realize it or not. For example, a professor once pointed out to me that I described two different characters in a story as “clean cut.” Not only is “clean cut” a boring and unhelpful description, but the fact I’d described two people this way showed that I cared little about them as unique characters.

In revision, I noticed five major tics in the novel I wrote for my thesis:

  • First, I used way too many em dashes (like this: —) and semicolons to connect thoughts that did not require em dashes or semicolons to be connected. Two passes through my thesis were focused on trying to reduce the number of em dashes and semicolons and to break one sentence into two sentences. While using em dashes and semicolons helped me during the first-draft writing process, as a matter of style I am not pleased with their overuse in the manuscript.
  • Second, I have an annoying tendency to add “that” in sentences unnecessarily. Although “that’ is an appropriate pronoun to use in some cases, in other cases “that” is implied and therefore unnecessary. For me, overusing “that” created an ease-of-reading issue. Each use, while not grammatically incorrect, slows the reader down just a little bit.
  • On the language level, I found that I sometimes provide absurd or inappropriate descriptions. This happens when I write something and never critically question it, skipping over a particular phrase many times in revision and noting that it’s grammatically correct even when it makes no logical sense.
  • Over using the conjunction “but” to begin sentences or set up contrasts. In particular, my “go-to sentence” appears to be something like: “[Character name] had always thought of themselves as X, but over time [character name] realized they were actually more like Y.” Editing involved removing some “buts” and replacing them with other types of transitional words and constructions. Preserving the sense of the sentence but modifying the language.
  • Last, and perhaps most embarrassingly, I found that I occasionally “over share” when it comes to characters and their sex lives. Sure, hearing about the sex lives of characters is always interesting, but is it always necessary? Nope. Several key edits involved scaling back on sexual content and thoughts.

These aren’t necessarily things I’m going to care about while drafting my next novel. I believe they’re tics that help me write. When I’m finished with a draft, though, it will be important to remember what I learned from revising this one.

If It Helps…

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…think of yourself as a bard in days of yore. You’ve just arrived in a town where you’re hoping to stay the night. You know that if you tell a good story, the people of the town will give you a place to stay, feed you, and cloth you. They might give you some money or things to trade, and you might even find a few listless men (or women!) throwing themselves upon you, begging you to take them away from their boring life and to share the adventures of the road.

What kind of story are you going to tell them? How are you going to make sure they treat you with the respect you deserve? How are you going to avoid getting run out of town, ridiculed? How are you going to satisfy your listeners?

Flannery O’Connor on “What Makes a Story Work”

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“I often ask myself what makes a story work, and what makes it hold up as a story, and I have decided that it is probably some action, some gesture of a character that is unlike any other in the story, one which indicates where the real heart of the story lies. This would have to be an action or a gesture which was both totally right and totally unexpected; it would have to be one that was both in character and beyond character; it would have to suggest both the world and eternity. The action or gesture I’m talking about would have to be on the anagogical level, that is, the level which has to do with the Divine life and our participation in it. It would be a gesture that transcended any neat allegory that might have been intended or any pat moral categories a reader could make. It would be a gesture which somehow made contact with mystery.”

- Flannery O’Connor, 1963, as reproduced here.

For more about “the anagogical level” you can scroll down halfway through a recent post here.