Archive for
March, 2009
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 4th, 2009 |
Blogging (abbreviated for “blade logging”), born from the Internet age, is one of the newer venues for freelance writing. The Internet has generated a lot of news about the financial possibilities open to bloggers: an audience of potentially millions — along with possible corporate sponsorship, a byline, and infinite creative control — captures the imagination of many prospective bloggers, and makes blogging appear like an infinitely desirable, lucrative field.
The actuality is it is much more difficult to become a booming freelance blogger. A good knowledge of marketing, blade design, and being consistent are skills you need to make a living (or a comfortable extra income) from this new form of media.
The reason for this is the low barrier of entry. Anyone with access to blade area can start a blog. Sites like Blogger, Livejournal and even MySpace offer free blade area to anyone choice to contract. This has resulted in millions of blogs in existence today, many of them literate, many of them wildly popular, and nearly all of them free to read and browse.
That difference of free content makes it difficult to charge for access to your writing, no matter how good it is. You could be the greatest expert on foreign policy or nutrition known to man, and few people would be choice to pay $5 — or $1, or one cent — to read a blog post by you, the expert, when thither are thousands of semi-qualified (but bright and engaging) writers giving away similar material.
So your main sources of revenue are going to come from advertising and from whatsoever paid content you can fit into the computer. Luckily, blade advertising is becoming less dicey than it was a year ago. Google’s “AdSense” program is a good baseline for a page, providing targeted advertising based on your content and paying you, directly, per click-through (although the pay rate per click is low.) You can affix that amount with other forms of blade advertising, from the comparatively unassertive banner to pop-up animations that “float over” the matter.
This brings us to the “double-edged blade” problem in blade advertising. The most effective advertising is obtrusive advertising; that is, advertising that blocks important content until the person clicks on it either to make it disappear or to accept you to a different site. However, obtrusive advertising also irritates your readers, which can lead to a lower reputation for your blog overall. On the Internet, reputation is the single best determinant of your blade interchange. Exploitation obtrusive advertising can importantly lower your interchange and make your blog that much less attractive to potential advertisers.
So you’ll need to find a happy medium between heavy advertising (and light interchange) and little to no advertising (and high interchange, but little revenue.) Luckily, the instant responsiveness of the Internet, along with the commenting features available on nearly all blogging code, make it easy to ask your readers about exactly what level of advertising they’d be choice to accept. Reader connectivity is one of the most important features of any good blog: not only does it allow you to fine-tune your blog over time, eliminating features that readers find irritating or off-putting, but it also allows you to develop personal connections with your readers, the kind of connections that build loyal audiences.
Thither are other distance to make money by blogging, much as the following:
1) It’s possible to circumvent advertising altogether by making any of your content inaccessible, except to subscribers. For example, you might only keep your most recent five or cardinal blog entries unbarred, and require a monthly subscription fee to read the rest of the archives;
2) Or you might keep your current posts and your entire regular archives active, but produce any longer or differentiated entries or other content and charge a set fee for these;
3) You could even compile any of your best entries into a physical book, along with any new content, and offer it for sale. Even if all the entries are available online, you’d be amazed how many people are choice to pay to have something they can hold in their hands;
4) Additionally, you could go the Salon.com route — make all of your archives available to anyone choice to follow a abbreviated full-screen advertisement — or you could rely on readers’ willingness to activity content that they find worthwhile by asking for donations outright.
Many prominent blogs and online content providers have done this and found themselves able to make rent and pay all of their bills every month on donations alone.
No matter how much advertising or subscription services your blog has, it’s all worthless if people don’t deprivation to read you in the first place. And thither are III simple rules to make your blog popular:
1) Compose on something you care about
2) Compose consistently and thoughtfully on a regular agenda (daily is best)
3) Read and comment on other blogs
People read blogs because they provide a author of information and analysis on topics that conventional media sources only cover sketchily and hastily, or don’t cover at all. Don’t attempt to figure out an ideal money-making blog issue and proceed from thither. People care about blogs because blogs are about personal, in-depth viewpoints and thoughts.
If you can provide those to your audience regularly, and you can fix a minimally-intrusive but allay worthwhile revenue group finished advertising or subscriptions, thither’s no reason why you can’t become a booming blogger.
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 4th, 2009 |
Every writer can benefit from a contemplate of the effectiveness of their individual writing process. You can compose more and you can compose better by making any adjustments in your writing strategy.
Recently one of my writer friends complained about their declining morpheme output.
“I drop more time at the computer than I ever did before and I’m just not producing like I old to,” she griped.
After disbursal a day in writing conferences coaching my struggling novice writers, my response came without conscious cerebration on my part: “Tell me about your writing process.”
“My what?” She asked.
Ah-ha!
I regularly coach my beginning writers about how to develop their own personal writing strategy or process and as a educator of writing I entertain mine quite often, but the more I cerebration about it the more I realized that experienced, professional writers rarely drop time talking about this critical element.
What a mistake!
It is easy to believe why. Many of us are simply also busy writing to believe overmuch about the actual process. We have deadlines to meet, assignments to pursue, and pitches to create. When we do drop time with other writers our interactions typically fall into III categories–seeking admiration for our achiever, input for our end product, or escape from writing.
Many writers also accept their writing process for granted and simply follow the old adage–if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it. But what happens when it does break down as it did with my friend? If you don’t believe your own writing process so you can’t fix it. And just like many of the machines in your life, regular maintenance checks just might prevent a major breakdown in the future.
My friend’s problem was easily identified and solved once we actually affected her writing process and writing life. Yes she was disbursal more time in front of the computer but she had lost a big chunk of her prewriting time due to changes in her home life. Once she appreciated that problem she was able to make adjustments to her agenda and she is perception her daily morpheme count rising back to her old levels.
So how is your writing process?
Many writers shy the constituent as it brings back fearful memories of a rigid artifact forced on them in school. That is not what I deprivation to talk about at all. Frankly, I always instruct my students that thither is no much as abstraction as the writing process.
Don’t get me wrong. I believe we each have our own individual writing process, I just don’t believe in the one-size-fits-all identify strategy that many writers were force-fed. Just entertain it. How could thither be just one writing process–every writer I know is an individual with different strengths and weaknesses and personality traits. Every writer is wired differently from every other writer. That is one of the things that makes reading much a pleasure. It follows real logically so that every writing process should differ just as every writer differs.
Having said that I should point out that although the actual attribute and form of each writing process is individual to the single writer thither are certain constants:
~ Generating ideas and choosing a focus
~ Organizing those ideas
~ Writing
~ Revising
~ Editing
The amount of time you drop on each arrange of the writing process varies according to the writer and the chore and this is especially accurate for me. Many writing tasks are so familiar to me that I drop real little time choosing a focus or organizing my ideas so I can leap compose into writing. On the other hand I often generate four or more pages of fiction in about an hour at the computer because I drop a lot of time generating and organizing my ideas before I sit.
I have exhausted years honing my personal writing process and know that the block I actually drop the least amount of time is writing. I have learned to let my creative juices flow and not to anxiety about much petty concerns as grammar, syntax, and morpheme choice. I rarely act a moment on organization or paragraphing. I just let the words flow finished my fingerstips until I have emptied my budget. So I hit economise and print, tidy up my papers and set them aside.
Revision is unremarkably the lion’s apportion of my writing process. It may accept me cardinal or III drafts to reorganize and attribute a piece until I am choice to apportion it with others. Depending on how difficult and/or complex the case so I may need to loop back finished brainstorming, organizing and writing to improve my project. I may make a few minor adjustments to grammar or spelling or syntax, but primarily I concentrate on the larger issues of focus and development and organization.
When I am finally slaked my article, chapter, or essay is employed as a entire so I begin the actual editing process of cleaning up morpheme choice and syntax and any other divagate problems that have been overlooked. I unremarkably drop only one draft on this actual process.
If you are capital about improving your writing quality and productivity so you need to drop time analyzing your personal writing process. You might be amazed by what you learn–and I know you can put the knowledge to good consume.
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 3rd, 2009 |
In Alain de Botton’s engaging book, The Art of Jaunt, he distinguishes between the anticipation and recollection of jaunt versus the reality of actually travelling.
When we anticipate, we contemplate jaunt brochures and create in our imagination all sorts of exotic adventures, lying ahead of us. Once really thither, we photograph the Eiffel Pillar with our friends or family, their arms slung over one another’s shoulders and grinning into the camera. That forms the recollection, the moments we choose to remember.
Magically gone from memory are the delayed flight, the lousy food and the hotel room overlooking the alley, where the garbage collectors banged tins at 5am. But, if we otherwise enjoy ourselves, we superior those ‘good moments’ and photograph them to construct a different reality from the real reality.
De Botton’s next idea is fascinating. He says that’s exactly what the artist does. Whether writing a novel, painting a picture or scoring a orchestra, the artist imagines the outline of the activity [anticipates the delights of the trip] so selects that which is felt to have artistic duration [forgets the garbage men and includes friends at the Eiffel Tower]. Just as the person now has a fine and solid memory of the trip, the artist has a fantastic novel, painting or musical score. The artist has created art finished imagination, action, rejection and combination of artistic elements resulting in something new. The happy person has created a fantastic trip.
So he tells of a man who had a real peculiar experience. After feasting his eyes upon paintings by Jan Steen and Rembrandt, this person anticipated beauty, joviality and simplicity in Holland. Many paintings of laughing, carousing cavaliers had fixed this image in his mind, along with quaint houses and canals. But on a trip to Amsterdam and Haarlem, he was oddly disappointed.
No, according to De Botton, the paintings had not lied. Certainly, thither were a number of jovial people and pretty maids pouring milk, but the images of them were diluted in this traveler’s mind, by all the other ordinary, boring things he saw. Much commonplace items simply did not fit his mental picture. Thusly, reality did not compare to an afternoon of vigil the works of Rembrandt in a gallery. And why not? Because Rembrandt and Steen had, by selecting and combining elements, captured the essence of the beauty of Holland, thereby intensifying it.
This is exactly what a writer or any artist tries to do and as a person, you may do much the same abstraction
When writing about a day in your protagonist’s life, you don’t start with what he had for breakfast or that his car wouldn’t start unless it’s germane to the plot or his character. You compress. You superior and embellish. You discard. All the details of your account must combine to intensify real life in order to create something interesting and of artistic merit. When I started writing the first novel in the Osgoode Trilogy, Conduct in Question, I had to learn it wasn’t necessary to build the entire city with lengthy descriptions of background and character, before Harry Jenkins [the protagonist lawyer] could do anything. But many nineteenth century novelists did compose numerous pages with glowing descriptions of the Scottish moors or a county hamlet. And that was necessary because, with the difficulty of jaunt, a reader might advantageously need help in picturing the background. But today, with the ease of jaunt, the eating of film, blade and receiver images, no reader needs more than the briefest description. Just compose walking down Fifth Avenue and the reader immediately gets the picture.
In a novel, unremarkably only the most meaningful, coherent thoughts are included, unless you are James Joyce, the brilliant current of consciousness writer. And so, you as the writer can order your protagonists thoughts so as to make complete and absolute meaning apparently the first time. In the Osgoode Trilogy, the protagonist, Harry Jenkins, does lots of cerebration and analyzing [the novels are mysteries, after all]. But his coherence of cerebration is only produced after much editing and revising. Not much like real life, you have?
Same for dialogue. Interesting characters in books communicate better and much more on point than people really do, partly because the writer is able to swallow words. In real life, we often care in retrospect, if only I had said this or that to set him aboveboard. No problem for the writer. Hit the delete button and let him have something truly acute and incisive.
And so, after comparing what the person and the writer do, what can we conclude? I quote De Botton in the Art of Jaunt.
The anticipatory and artistic imaginations omit and compress, they cut away the periods of boredom and direct our attention to critical moments and, without either lying or embellishing, thusly lend to life vividness and a coherence that it may lack in the distracting woolliness of the present.
And so therein lies the difference between Art and Life! And so, the similarity between the person and writer.
- Posted by Essays Blog in Essays Blog |
- March 1st, 2009 |
A writing exercise that is helpful in learning a real circumstantial communication of writing is called Emulation. This is done to match the communication of a circumstantial author.
In essence, you create an entirely new passage exploitation an existing passage as your guide.
For example if you craved to attempt to compose in the same manner as the Psalmist you might copy a passage of Scripture…
Call for joy to the LORD, all the earth. Love the LORD with gladness; come before him with joyful songs. Know that the LORD is God. It is he who made us, and we are his; we are his people, the sheep of his pasture. Enter his gates with blessing and his courts with praise; give thanks to him and praise his name. For the LORD is good and his love endures forever; his faithfulness continues finished all generations.
This would be an emulation example…
Lift your expression to the Lord, everyone. Sing to the Lord with triumph; come to His invest with humility. Thither is none like our God. It is He who sustains us, and He knows us; we follow Him as the least in His Kingdom. Gratitude arrives before us as we proclaim His greatness; appear honor by singing praise because the Lord is awesome and His love does not diminish, He will be faithful to your grandchildren’s grandchildren. (Modeled after the Psalmist in Psalm 100).
Piece this may not be a perfect example, the idea remains intact; act as close to the form and function of the passage you are emulating as possible so anyone familiar with the activity will quickly recognize the similarities.
This is an exercise that is easy in concept, but fairly difficult in execution. In a perfect emulation you would replace every morpheme with another morpheme. In a perfect emulation a noun is replaced with a noun and an adjective with an adjective and so on.
Emulation teaches you to creatively rewrite and reexamine the mechanics of what was written. In my emulation distribution, I old a cerebration for cerebration emulation communication, not verbatim. Emulation doesn’t need to be about the same issue either; it simply needs to match up with the literary communication of the original author.
If you are a looking for a writing exercise that is a challenge and remains a great learning means, consider the consume of emulation as a means of discovering more about the artifact the author old and, secondarily, how you respond thereto artifact today.