Tag: Writers Resources

Can Blogging Lead to a Writing Job?

Cover of "The Elements of Style, Fourth E...

I read a Tweet on Twitter just now where the Tweeter had written an article about hiring writers for your blog.

Interesting.

I guess that I am still very naive about this blogging business. I mean, I’ve only been blogging for just under two years. I’ve only been blogging daily for a lot less than that.

Like most people, I assume –and yes I know that is a bad idea– that most people are like me. Writing about things that they are interested in while either trying to get the motivation to write or finish a book.

I do know that there are quite a large amount of folks who view their blog as resume (Curriculum Vitae) filler. They can presumably point to their view counts and follow numbers as some sort of standard of excellence, that they believe will show that they possess the talent to write professionally.

I can put my hand over my damaged heart and say that I never looked at blogging like that.

It sounds like a great idea.

Of course it also sounds a bit like the old, “I was spotted in the Schwab’s drugstore having an ice cream float by an agent.” Or the more clichéd, “Why Miss Jones! When you take off your glasses and let down your hair, you could be a model!”

“Why Miss Jones! You look beautiful without taking off your glasses…”

I suppose the literary version would be, ” Why Mr Smith, I had no idea that you could write so well! How would you like to work for us doing something that you are not only good at but love to do as well?”

It all sounds rather fanciful, but, I am sure there is some merit to the idea that blog writing can lead to employment as a professional writer. If you think about it long enough it does make some sense.

As a blogger you not only have to put your thoughts and ideas in down in such a manner that everyone can read them and understand where you’re coming from, but, you also have to add pictures and captions to help develop your blog posts and you are your own editor.

Editing properly, despite the helpful addition of ‘spell check‘ and WordPress‘s own ‘Proofread Writing’, is difficult. You can still commit all sorts of sentence sins and miss the occasional –or not so occasional–faux pa.

It’s a lot harder for potential professional employers to recognise your capability if your blog is full of grammatical errors or poor punctuation. Your creativity and originality can get lost in the shuffle of coma splices, dangling participles and shotgunned adjectives.

If this all sounds too daunting, you probably don’t want to start blogging if you haven’t already. If you are already blogging, just keep a copy of Strunk and White’s Elements of Style handy.

If it doesn’t sound too daunting, then you are where you need to be. Practising a craft that many aspire to become perfect at but so few can actually do.

Because blogging is writing, it can also be photographic in nature, but it still boils down to the writing. A picture may be worth a thousand words, but I’ll bet the photographer still has a few things to say about the picture he’s taken.

I do know that there are “professional” blogs out there, I’ve read them. But whether you are a professional blogger or an amateur, the rules are still the same. The big difference is that as an amateur you do all the work for no pay. Your recompense is the blog itself and the views, likes and comments that it garners.

I also would argue that because you do all the work that when you look back at a blog post and find a mistake, you overreact just that little bit more.

I know I do. I cringe if I find I’ve missed something after I’ve proofread the damn thing over and over. And before you ask, yes I do re-edit old posts. I have to.

I don’t know if I would enjoy writing for another blog in a professional capacity or if it would be as much fun or even as personally fulfilling. It would be nice to suddenly become a “professional” writer at 54, other people have started at a much more advanced age and been quite successful.

So I’ll keep blogging and maybe one day…

Blogging Heroes
Blogging Heroes (Photo credit: Wikipedia)
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Travelling Writers? What the Fudge??

Travel Guides
Travel Guides (Photo credit: Vanessa (EY))

I keep finding these blogs on the net by ‘travelling writers‘ and it’s making me a bit sour. Well jealous to be more exact and also a little  puzzled. It appears that all these travelling scribes are being paid for their jaunts. It also appears that they are making a living from it.

What a glorious job! I can’t even begin to imagine how something like that falls in your lap. Or conversely, how you even find employment like that. I don’t mind admitting that I would have killed (or come to think of it, I would kill in the present tense) for a position like that.

I am assuming the the post holders of these globe trotting writers are of the college educated, “I’ve got a degree in journalism, Literature and  English,” variety. They also appear to be quite young. (Trust me I am not ageist, it”s just that at my age anyone under 35 is young in my book.) I’m also a bit confused about how these folks get remunerated for their efforts.

I rather naively thought that everyone who blogged regularly was a lot like me. I don’t mean older with thinning hair and an expanding waist-line, I mean writers who had deserted their passion for the pen and pencil and were trying to come back to their abandoned love. I blog in order to free up my mind and see if I can still string more than two words together in a sentence and not wind up sounding like a jackass.

It has taken me two wives (and two divorces) two children, too many years away from my birth country and too long pissing about with things of no real consequence to realise that I never should have stopped writing. Funny how everything in this ‘literal’ direction of my life falls into the ‘two’ or ‘too’ category.

It took an injury at work to make me realise that I needed to spend my ‘off-duty’ time doing something more creative. I knew that acting was out of the question. I haven’t practised the craft in so long, that I think I’d be hard pressed to remember a single line, let alone blocking and camera angles.  Then there’s the question of scheduling. I don’t think that my ‘9-5’ job would like my ‘hobby’ encroaching on their turf.

So writing seems to be the answer. It was always my first love anyway. I just sort of forgot how to do it.

I retrieved my anciently old ‘Mike’s Writing‘  file folder out of the attic, blew the dust and cobwebs off it and looked at it’s contents. A random collection of short stories, news articles (yes I was published a few times long, long ago, but it was for a USAF newspaper and it didn’t pay squat), and a screenplay that I kept ‘tweaking’ until my tweaking time ran out.

Holding these written antiquities in my hands, I marvelled at how long it had actually been since I had put a blank bit of paper in front of me to fill with ideas and stories. Okay, romanticism aside, I also couldn’t remember the last time I’d sat in front of a black computer screen either. But looking at those old abandoned relics of my imagination, gave me a little buzz of excitement.

I remembered how I felt when I’d written them and then done some superficial editing and read the stories back. I also remembered letting a very small amount of people I trusted read them to see what they thought. Feedback had been good. I also remember not being able to afford the money needed to send manuscripts through the post to publishers who might or might not like my work.

These days, it seems much easier with the new e-books and kindle and their respective counterparts. So  I’ll try it this ‘new’ way and see if anyone else would like to read the fruits of my latest labours. Well, read them when I’ve finished labouring over them.

So here I am, wondering how on earth one becomes a travelling writer and how well it pays.  Not that I’m in the market of course, it’s just that I’d like to know just how jealous of them I need to be.

In the meantime, does anyone know of any job openings?

Writing boxes
Writing boxes (Photo credit: practicalowl)
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Making the Time

English: Writing «Shit_happens»
English: Writing «Shit_happens» (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I decided about a year ago, that I was going to return to my first love. Most folks will tell you that you never forget your first one and I didn’t. Lurking in the shadows of my mind was my first ever passion. Oh I knew it was there, but over the years it got pushed back further and further into that place in your memory that holds discarded thoughts, dreams, and passions.

Writing was and still is my first mistress. But I’ve been so busy playing the field that I neglected her horribly. Not that I was being consciously unfaithful it was just that I lost focus. I was so busy living and loving and trying out different vocations that I just forgot. For about forty some odd years.

But when my life took a sudden swerve into left field and I had to start over again…again, I rediscovered her. I just re-read that last sentence and realised that it seems to imply that I’ve only had to start over twice. That would be a massive understatement of the truth. I have had to start over so many times in my life that I’ve lost count. In fact the dislike of starting over was one of the big reasons I stayed in my previous unhappy status for so long.

The first love that I’ve been waffling on about is, of course, writing. When I had the sudden epiphany that I really could do whatever I wanted in my ‘new’ life, writing was the first thing that jumped up from the hidden recesses of my mind. I was at first startled by this jack-in-the-box behaviour and then I got excited.

I sat down and started my first blog. Random Thoughts for a Random World was born on the 29th of November 2010. Just over a month after my flight from my previous life.  This first post was a four sentence statement of my intent to try this new blogging thing.

It then sat dormant for another year and one day.

It was only after the dust settled in my transition from nuclear family member to single dad that I was able to set down and start again. I then sporadically published updates to this blog and garnered quite a few ‘hits’ on each update. All this was done in order to practice my shaky command on the English language that was all the more shaky because I lived in a foreign country that spoke and wrote a bit differently from the denizens of my birth.

I finally decided after about a year of so-so response to my first blog and the birth of a Tumblr blog that I quite liked, but never told me if I had any visitors to my site, that I started this one. I decided to make it primarily a ‘film’ site where I could talk about my other great love and anything else that caught my wandering attention.

So here I am fully immersed in writing at the very least my daily blog-posts and a bit more sporadically my first published work. The first published bit is still open to debate as I cannot decide if it should be a collection of short stories or a fully fledged novel.

I have to be careful though, because when you do a blog you can get carried away by just writing for writing’s sake alone. You end up like the Michael Caine charachter in Educating Rita, whose wife asks him when did he stop writing and start just talking about it. Or in my case not writing, per se, but writing about writing.

It is an easy trap to fall into. Blogging allows you almost immediate feedback. Feedback that at the very least tells you how many folks have dropped by for a visit. And that friends and neighbours is very gratifying.

So I have to make time to do the ‘real’ writing. The type that you don’t get immediate feedback on. The type you have to do that allows you to create an entire world and fill it with people and help them tell their story. The kind of writing that might just result in your creations residing in a cupboard or desk drawer alone, dusty and forgotten.

So if you’ll excuse me, I’m making the time to write and can’t gas with you, my dear friends and neighbours, for a little while. If I’m lucky we’ll see each other tomorrow, if life has other plans, well the party’s been fun and the next time I’ll bring a bottle.

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Guessing

I’ve given up trying to figure out why certain posts I put on my blog get a better response than others. I haven’t really been tracking it to be truthful. But I have noticed that some posts go through the figurative roof.

Looking at the ‘views per post’ doesn’t help at all. I know that I’ve read several other blogs that purport success secrets to increase your “viewer-ship” and widen your audience. I sometimes read these and wonder how do they know this and how do I know they’re right.

The easy answer is, I don’t. It is relatively easy to set down in front of your laptop and present yourself as some kind of “expert” or ‘know-it-all’ who can help every blogger and potential blogger to achieve their goals. But is blogging really about success?

Success is generally measured by income. We don’t, as a rule, measure success by ‘spiritual growth’ or by how much we enjoy our passion about a certain task,  job or hobby.

I  definitely don’t measure my blog’s success or failure by monetary means. Nor do I measure it’s “success” by the amount of views received over any given time period. I do get excited when I see that something I written about gets over a thousand views. But to say that I don’t get excited when something else I’ve written gets only one or two views, would be wrong.

I still believe that the main reason, I blog is two-fold. I blog to practise writing and to say the things that I don’t always have another forum to communicate my thoughts or feelings on.  Because I am not approaching this as a business or a hobby, but as an end to something else, I do get puzzled about why one blog post gets loads of views and another gets a couple of metaphorical glances.

But that is part of the fun I suppose and in a sense another aspect of learning. I am still writing things that one day I would like to see published. If for no other reason than to say I have managed to accomplish something that I’ve always wanted to do. But the other things I write are not for release yet. I am also, I’m embarrassed to admit, very ‘un-coordinated’ about how and when I write.

This lack of coordination, or self discipline if I’m really honest, means that one day I might write four articles; each one about things that are completely different from one another and on another day be hard pressed to write one.  And not for obvious reasons either. On the days I have to really work at writing one article, it’s usually because I can’t force my thoughts in one direction long enough to capture a single topic to discuss, discover or dissect.

I have figured out that blogging is a sort of mutual admiration society of  ‘like-minded’ individuals. It appears that “to get” you have “to give” in the area of likes, comments, and to a lesser degree, views. It is in this area too that I find myself guessing a lot.

When I was posting to my first blog, Random Thoughts for a Random World (no a “closed” blog), I was very slow to start commenting on other blogs I read. I then found a blog that I really liked and began commenting. The little “love affair” lasted for a while, then the blogger complained that, although she loved my comments, I was using too much space to do so. In other words, could I please shorten my input.

I was a bit taken aback. I hadn’t written ‘Gone With the Wind‘ length comments, I saved that type of writing for my blogs, so I stopped commenting at all. Not only was I a little insulted, but, I also became very reticent about leaving comments on any blog-post. I got the idea that even though a lot of blog writers finished with a “and what are your thoughts” ending that, some of them at least, didn’t want feedback apart from the ‘you’re so marvelous’ variety.

Confusing.

Still, I’ll keep writing my little blog-posts and keep guessing why some are “popular-ish” and others are not. I will still hesitantly comment on other blogs that I enjoy and either agree with the posts topic or at least agree with the sentiment the author is expressing about his or her topic.

I will, in other words keep practising with the hope that I will progress in my ability to put two or more words together in a sentence and not muck them up too badly.

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Why We Write

Angel (TV series)
Angel (TV series) (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

I changed my morning ritual a bit today. I bypassed the ‘oh, so important first coffee of the day’ and went straight to my laptop. While waiting for it to finish loading all the various crap I have on it, I had a puff or two off one of my electric  cigarettes.

While I sat in this contemplative silence, my brain randomly homed in on an old Angel episode. I will pause here, midst diatribe and explain to the uninitiated who or what Angel is. *On a side note: can there really be anyone in the world who know about the Buffy-verse and it’s spin-off, the Angel-verse?*

The episode my fickle brain latched onto was Why We Fight, episode 13 of season 5 (the final season). It was a good episode, all of season five holds the record for best episodes in  Angel, well in my own humble opinion, anyway. But what caught my attention was the title, Why We Fight. I had one of those, I don’t know, ‘mini-ephinanies’ and thought that could be Why We Write and my brain shot out of the starter gate.

So, after a really long way around the barn to get to the subject, why do we write?

I think most folks do it because they like writing. Other folks do it because they feel they have something important to say. Still more do it because they want to become successful or well known. A few will do it because they are lonely and have no-one to talk to. A certain amount will use writing as a salve, writing down the irritating and infuriating things in order to deal with them calmly. And some do it as a means of holding on to their sanity while they hunt for jobs or are experiencing a change of life.

Of course the ‘why we write’ question has to do with the world of blogging.

I am not talking about writers of books, novels, short-stories, technical  manuals, et al. I’m talking about bloggers.

A lot of people obviously do it to become financially better off. At least that’s the impression you could get by reading some of the advertisements on the net.

How to be a successful blogger.

How to make money off your blogs.

These are just two of the adverts that claim to help you be both successful and financially secure from your writing.

But lets face it. The truth behind the reason to blog is immediate feedback. **Another side-note, I just had another mini-epiphany, I could have just as easily called this Why We Blog. But I’m not going to change the title. It sounds better the way it is**

When we write stories, fictional and non-fictional, we have to wait for feedback.  Is it good, bad, lacklustre, or worse boring? When we write for our blogs, we know our indented audience can see our work immediately. It takes the push of a ‘button’ to publish our article and in a flash our thoughts and ideas are there for the world to see.

And just as it takes the action of one finger to publish my words, one finger from a reader is all it takes for someone to “like” what I’ve written. Admittedly, more detailed feedback requires a lot more finger interaction with a keyboard, but what the heck, a comment is worth a hundred likes.

I don’t bother reading advertisements for success or monetary remuneration in relation to my blogging. I am not out for ‘world dominance’ of the blogging arena nor am I looking to gain a fanatical following. I do,  however love writing just for the sake of it. I have said of myself in the past that I have the writing version of ‘running off at the mouth. It’s still true.

And just as I would continue talking if no-one was listening, I would still write if no-one was reading.

I write because if you are talking and no-one else is in the room, it’s weird. If you write and no-one else is reading, it’s creative.

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