This month I’ve been participating in my colleague’s blogging challenge, and so far I’ve managed to post every day in the month of April, which means after tonight, that’s eight consecutive days of blog posts. All of the posts so far have dealt with writing, more specifically something related to Camp NaNoWriMo.
What I’ve found curious is examining which of my posts have been the most popular, measured by traffic or by comments.
The two winners so far are last night’s post, The Confession of a Perfectionist Writer, which I think has more comments than any blog post I’ve ever written, and perhaps my post Writing Partners, in which I did little other than post a photo of two of my cats.
My takeaways from this are that I either need to post about the inherent difficulties of writing, or just post more photos of my pets.
It also makes me wonder what makes for a successful blog post? Are there topics that resonate more than others? Or to be successful, should we all just post cute animal photos? 🙂
Beyond that, how should we measure a successful post? Should we consider overall traffic (stats numbers)? Engagement? Sharing? Something else?
If you have a blog, what have you found works the best for you?
Isn’t that what writers aspire to become? The kind of writers who can spew perfectly-composed prose, elegant plots, and compelling characters right from their fingertips, as if every time they touch the keyboard another gem gets added to the page.
I’d like to be one of those writers. Hell, I’d like to meet one of those writers! Because the truth is, very few people can write beautiful stories the first time around. Even the greatest writers of all time have gone through drafts.
When I was a high school senior, I was lucky to go to Marquette University and see some of J.R.R. Tolkien’s manuscripts on display. I was astonished to learn that some of the characters we know and love didn’t start off with the same names we know them today (I seem to recall Gandalf was one of them). I was even more amazed to see lines scratched out and scribbles in the margin. Tolkien! Even a man that brilliant didn’t get it right the first time around.
As you work on refining your skill as a writer, you trick yourself into thinking you can get it right the first time, every time, and then get disappointed when things fall flat. That’s where a lot of people give up, in fact. If you keep at it, you realize that writing is all about drafts and editing.
Once you come to that point as a writer, and fully embrace the concept of ripping apart all of your drafts, tossing countless words and phrases to the proverbial cutting room floor, something happens.
Hint: It’s not that you become a great writer and start publishing everything. Oh, no, it’s never so simple.
What happens is that you become obsessed with editing, and refining, and getting it perfect. Didn’t I say we all aspire to become perfectionists?
And once you fall into that trap, it can become just as crippling as the feeling the new writer experiences when nothing sounds right. You can get so caught up in the process of writing-editing-writing-editing-editing-editing that you can’t really move forward.
That’s where I was stuck last fall. I couldn’t really start new chapters, much less new projects, because the old ones weren’t done. I still had editing to do. I needed to finish.
When I participated in NaNoWriMo last November, I had to break out of that trap. NaNoWriMo is about quantity, not quality.
Wait, what?
Yes. The idea is that every day you write something new, and keep moving forward. You don’t edit, you don’t cut and paste. If you’re honest, you don’t even go back and re-read what you wrote for the entire month. Instead, you spend time every single day creating something new.
This is liberating, because you break out of the editing trap. You give yourself permission to experiment. You learn tricks to breaking out of writer’s block. And at the end, you have a massive piece of writing that could never have happened so quickly if you kept going back and editing, proofreading, cutting, changing.
I’ve managed to overcome the editing trap, but I’m still a perfectionist at heart. This means that it’s still difficult for me to share my fiction until it’s done, until it has been through the crucible of editing and been refined, purified, polished up to a sparkling gem. What I cannot do is put rough drafts out for all eyes to see.
One of my colleagues, Robyn, has just started a blog that stands in defiance of perfectionism. In Goodbye, Red Pen, she is doing what I can only dream about… writing and publishing a draft chapter every day. While I sit here belaboring the process of writing for my daily blog challenge, she’s actually putting herself out there, displaying her fiction as naked, unedited prose for the world to see.
I am so awestruck by her courage… and her gorgeous writing.
I’m also inspired by her example, and am considering posting a few snippets from this month’s writing as part of Camp NaNoWriMo here on my blog… but even then it won’t be everything, just the stuff that has passed through my harsh internal censors. Even the thought of doing it gives me hives, so we’ll see how it goes.
For now, check out her blog… it’s been a week and the story is fantastic. I can’t wait to see what happens next!
Founders Kentucky Bourbon Stout brewed with chocolate and coffee and aged in oak bourbon barrels.
As soon as I heard about this beer, a limited seasonal beer produced by Founders Brewing in Grand Rapids, MI, I knew I wanted to try it. Doing my due diligence, I learned it was supposed to be released on April 1 here in Austin, and I was prepared to go to my local “beer store” to grab some before they sold out. I’m friends with this particular store, Sunrise Minimart, on Facebook, and that’s how I learn about all of the cool new craft beers that they get.
Except they got the beer a few days early and although they posted an announcement on Facebook, Facebook decided I didn’t need to see that particular post, so by the time I realized what had happened, it was all gone.
It was a fail on the scale of Greek tragedies.
And then, a fellow homebrewer posted a photo on Facebook yesterday with, you guessed it, a four-pack of KBS. I commented on his good fortune, and he let me in on a great secret…
He had purchased extra!
Tonight, instead of writing as I had intended, I spent the evening drinking some amazing craft beers, including the KBS, which was just as amazing as you might expect from a beer with chocolate and coffee and aged in bourbon barrels. Words really can’t do it justice. The coffee is subtle but the chocolate is so rich, and the taste of whiskey is just the perfect compliment to the other flavors.
Oh right, words. I mentioned that I was supposed to be writing.
Well it’s late, and I’ve been relaxing and drinking beer. Most people in my sitiation would say, meh, I’ll skip it for tonight and pick it up again tomorrow. But not me. I signed up for Camp NaNo with the intention of writing every single day, and then agreed to a blogging challenge with a similar goal. It’s only April 3rd… I don’t want to be branded as a slacker on the third day!
So here, with less than an hour to go, I’m squeezing in my daily blog post.
As soon as I hit publish on this post, I’ve got some fiction to write before the clock strikes midnight, so I can log a word count for April 3rd. The good thing is that I’ve already decided that I want to continue to explore the history of one of my protagonists, and have several scenes already floating in my head. I’ve also decided that at some point he’s going to find an excuse to drink a nice craft beer. 🙂
I got off to a great start with Camp NaNoWriMo! I started writing at midnight last night, then I wrote again at a writers meet up yesterday evening, and as a result had logged over 3000 words for the day.
Then I realized I should do some more writing later, after midnight, which is my normal time to write, so I’d be sure to have writing done for day two. I just didn’t feel like sitting in front of the computer. So I wrote a big chunk by dictating it into the speech recognition doohickey on my iPad and saved it in Google Docs.
That actually works pretty well, especially if you’re writing in first person and don’t need a lot of quotation marks.
It’s actually how I’m writing this post as well, although I’m writing it directly in the WordPress app on my iPad.
At any rate I feel like I got some really good writing done, with almost no typing and absolutely no handwriting. I was able to explore some of the motivations for one of my primary characters, by putting his history in his own words.
So that’s my report for today. If you don’t want to write, then talk to your iPad for a while. And then save it. Score!
Yesterday I participated in BlogathonATX 2013, a day-long event in Austin, TX bringing bloggers together for writing, inspiration, site critiques, learning, conversations… and lots of coffee drinking and snacking. It’s a great day to hang out with old friends and make new ones, fix that blog that’s been stashed away in the basement, and clear the cobwebs from your writing brain.
And gain 10 pounds… because there’s never a shortage of food at BlogathonATX. Among other things, this year we had sesame chicken, sushi, fruit and veggie popsicles, artisan chocolate, kale chips, fresh organic juices, local coffee, and more candy and baked goods than was good for us.
As always, it was a great day and I can’t wait until the next one!
This month I’ve been participating in my colleague’s blogging challenge, and so far I’ve managed to post every day in the month of April, which means after tonight, that’s eight consecutive days of blog posts. All of the posts so far have dealt with writing, more specifically something related to Camp NaNoWriMo.
