Who’s Up for a December Writing Marathon? Some Proposed Rules.

Running Shoes | By Photo.Bugz on FlickrI know that many of you might be writing for National Novel Writing Month, and if you are – I hope that it’s going really well for you. Writing 50,000 words in a month is not an easy task, and it can be very exhausting. I knew that my schedule for November wasn’t going to allow for NaNoWriMo, so I wasn’t able to participate. Admittedly, I feel a little guilty about not making a concerted effort on my writing this month, even though I’m waiting to hear back on several projects.

So, in the interest of “getting back into it” I propose a December Writing Marathon for 20,000 words minimum. The reason why I’m suggesting a smaller word count, is because I know that that “goal” is achievable, even during one of my busier months. Before I invite you to participate, I’d like to propose some rules for this Marathon, in the hopes that you’ll be inspired to get some writing done, too! Remember, if you want to chase the rainbow, you need to put your running shoes on first!

    1. Determine What Your Personal Goal Is – Do you know what it is you want to write? Whether you’re writing for a game, a novel or four short stories of 5,000 words each, before any of us starts writing for this Marathon, we should probably figure out what we want to write.
    2. Post Your Personal Goal On Your Blog – Once you have your writing goal figured out, why not add some content to your blog and write about what you’d like to work on? After you do, feel free to shoot me the link by posting a comment and I’ll collect everyone’s goals.
    3. You Must Write Every Day Or You’ll… – In order for this to be a true “marathon,” I propose that we sit down once-a-day and write something, even if we’re blowing past the 20,000 word count goal. If we don’t sit down and write, we think of a personal activity that we’ll have to do instead. For example, if I don’t sit down and write each day, I’ll have to spend a half an hour going through paperwork or I’ll have to tack on an extra workout.
    4. At the End of Every Week, We’ll Revisit our Writing Goals – Instead of summing up where we are every day, I recommend concentrating on the writing and then revisiting the word count on a weekly basis. Like we did with our writing goals, we could simply sum up where we’re at with the marathon by writing up a short blog post.
    5. If Some of Us Don’t Hit Goal by December 31st, We Keep Going Until We Do – The key with a marathon, for me, is not to worry about the best time but to focus on finishing. Yes, I believe 20,000 words in a month is very achievable, but for some of you it may still seem pretty daunting.
    6. We Avoid Talking “About” Writing, Game Design or Publishing – This is a tough one, but this rule comes from something I’ve noticed. Talking about writing or editing doesn’t help you get the words down on the page. In fact, it can be a huge distraction. December is one of those months where there will be enough distractions, especially if you’re celebrating the holidays. I propose we try to minimize talking about writing while we’re on the Marathon.
    7. At the End of the Marathon, We Write our 2010 Writing Goals – If you’ve never written this many words in a month before, this exercise can help you understand whether or not you’re interested in writing professionally. For me, I plan on focusing on a couple of speculative projects, and I hope that the marathon will help me shape my fiction writing goals. By the time the Marathon concludes, I believe we should all have a pretty good idea of what we want to do next.

So those are some simple rules that I’d like to offer for the Marathon. If you’re interested on providing feedback, feel free to take a look at these rules for the December Writing Marathon and tell me what you think. After I get some feedback from you, I can post more “official” rules before December begins along with some helpful tools.

Photo Attribution

November 19, 2009
Permalink ∞

Writer’s Block? Check out this Horror Plot Generator

ready-set-scareIt’s often funny how I get ideas from the weirdest places. Last month at a writer’s meet-up, we were presented with some word lists to help foster our creativity for character types. Before I went to the meeting, I was having a terrible week. (I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about.) I was in that black pit of despair, to the point where I just couldn’t write or be social, which pissed me off even more. Enter the writer’s group and its profound effect on my psyche.

Coming out of that meeting, I was so energized that I thought about how cool it might be to create this random horror plot generator for FlamesRising.com, to share with other authors and game designers.

So that’s exactly what we did. Here’s an example:

A centaur with the ability to manipulate pheromones, whose home base is in a state-of-the-art gymnasium, wants to build a time machine. Supported by bees, the centaur appears to have one weakness – friendly puppies. Interestingly enough, the centaur can write hieroglyphics.–SOURCE: Horror Plot Generator

Over several hours of interesting word choices and some fancy hours of programming from our PHP god, FlamesRising.com now has a random horror plot generator that people can enjoy. When I was working on this, I kind of went a little nutso with some of the word choices, so the generated plots range from paranormal romance to modern horror and every possible permutation in between. There are some pretty silly ideas that will generate, but there’s also some nuggets of inspiration there, too.

I’d like to invite you to check out the horror plot generator on FlamesRising.com when you need a little pick-me-up. It was a lot of fun to work on, and I hope that it inspires you like it did me.

October 7, 2009
Permalink ∞

How to Make Your Voice Heard in a Sea of Content

fishing-boatEarlier I talked about the concept of content saturation, which spelled out the sheer volume of content added every month and how it’s affecting your writing. Do you have any ideas as to how you can navigate through this sea of content?

First, the cold hard truth is that no amount of yelling, screaming or crying is going to get your content read. Think about the amount of content added every day as an actual “ocean” of words and your potential visitors are akin to “fish” that you want to catch. If you’re on a boat, screaming your head off, are you going to catch a fish? If you tell your potential visitors that “This is the best article I’ve read in a long time. By the way, I wrote it!” will they come to your site? Probably not.

Instead, ask yourself why you are writing your content to figure out what kinds of fish you want to catch. Is it “just” because you need to write something down? Are you writing for SEO value? Customers? What?

Before you can catch the right kinds of visitors, you need to figure out what you’re going to write and why you’re going to write it. In other words, you’re determining which “net” of specific topics you’re going to publish to attract the visitors you want. Think about it this way: just because you have a great article about widgets, doesn’t mean you need to get as many eyeballs as possible on the page. What you need is to ensure that the people who care about widgets read your article.

Once you determine why you are writing your content, the next step is to figure out what action you want your readers to take. Do you want your readers to comment? Subscribe to your RSS feed? Or do you want your reader to contact you to find out more about these widgets you’re writing about?

Depending upon what action you want your visitors to take, you can develop a content strategy that will attract “qualified” visitors to your website or blog.

Build a Strategy Based on a Stream of Qualified Visitors

So now that you know why you want someone to read your content, you can build a strategy to help attract or “bait” those readers. Before you start second-guessing what your visitors might want to read, think about building a customer profile aimed at their behavior.

Customer profiles can be pretty challenging to create for new websites, but they are a bit easier to develop if you have an existing base of content. This is where your web analytics package comes into play. Start taking a peek at your visitor behavior through the lens of “visitor acquisition.” In other words, how do visitors find your site? What types of content are they reading?

After you’ve developed some basic impressions, you can figure out what types of visitors you’re looking for and begin catering content to them. This is a win-win for both you and your readers, because your reader is getting something of value and you are getting what you desire. On the flip side, if you discover that the readers coming to your site are not interested in your desired actions, you may want to re-think your content strategy and test new ideas. As part of your content strategy, I also highly recommend that you test your new strategies on a 30-60-90 day basis, especially if you are unsure of what kinds of content you want to create.

If you don’t have an existing website or blog yet, my best advice to you is to determine why you want to develop an online presence in the first place. If it’s to help manage your online reputation, then perhaps you don’t need to create a ton of content to achieve your goal. Perhaps all you need to achieve your goals is to set up your “boat” and cast a line.

Whether you start catering to visitors by creating more of a particular type of content or look for ways through social media to “spread the word,” you can make intelligent, strategy-based decisions to attract qualified visitors.

In summary, to make your voice heard in a sea of content I recommend asking yourself these simple questions:

  • Why are you creating content?
  • What action do you want your readers to take?
  • How are you determining what to write?
  • Who are you writing your content for?
  • When is the best time to publish/promote your content?
  • Where are you publishing/promoting your content?

Happy fishing!

April 4, 2009
Permalink ∞

Content Saturation and its Effects on Your Writing

According to this article about amazing web stats from January 2009, there are an average of 900,000 blog posts published within a twenty-four hour period. Even if the average reader would skim through each post at a rate of one per minute, it would take approximately 1.75 years to read every one.

With this amount of content added on a daily basis, the web is rapidly approaching a point where content is becoming heavily saturated. Content aggregators that point to other people’s content are increasing in popularity, even though the demand for original content is not slowing down.

Content saturation is a challenge that every content creator (i.e. writer) must face sooner or later. There are a few effects of content saturation that are becoming more and more apparent each day, and I’d like to point these out to you:

  • It is becoming increasingly difficult to find the original source of an idea. All great journalists are taught that citation goes a long way toward establishing your credibility as a writer. Because there are so many blog posts created every day, the “original” post may get lost in a noisy sea of words and links.
  • Content saturation fosters plagiarism. When you have 900,000 blog posts created every day, it is very easy for any writer to fall into temptation. After all, if they take one person’s blog post or idea and re-formulate it as their own, who would find out?
  • A writer’s credentials are less important than the post’s or website’s content. In more conservative times, a writer’s background was as important as the content they were writing about. If you were writing about finance, for example, you either had a background in finance or you interviewed people in the field to ensure you got the details correct. In today’s environment, there is little-to-no differentiation between one writer or another, even if that writer has no background or experience in what they’re writing about.
  • It is harder to tell the difference between opinion, observation and fact. Many writers vie for stronger prose to express their point more authoritatively. “Top 10 Marketing Tips for Your Novel” for example, is one topic I’ve been reading up on. Not one of these articles provided proof of concept (e.g. case studies, real life examples) to show how or why these tips were important. While one of these articles might be more factual than another, without citations or credentials, it’s really easy for any author to get confused.
  • A reader’s attention span is nonexistent. Over a decade ago, this article talked about how readers don’t read the web, they scan it. This lack of attention span is forcing writers to write less words for any particular topic, not more. In fact, I did the math after reading this article about the change to WordPress.com’s homepage and found that, on average, each blog post was only 250 words.
  • It is more challenging to write on “original” topics. With that amount of content created each and every day, it’s quite possible that multiple people could be writing about the same topic of conversation at the same exact time.

In an upcoming post, I’m going to show you some techniques that you can use to combat content saturation to spruce up your writing and reading skills. For a different take on content saturation, read: Warning: The Internet is Almost Full.

March 23, 2009
Permalink ∞

My Number One Distraction from Writing is the Internet

The internet. Filled with webcomics, social media and news, its plethora of mini-games and interactive tools can sometimes distract me from getting a large word count out the door.

I find that as part of “creating my workspace” to get a lot of writing done, I can’t shut it off completely because I really like the notification feature when I get an “important” email. Instead I go invisible when wi-fi is available and I close my browser.

I know that the internet is my number one distraction because getting an email is like feeling a little ray of sunshine, like you used to feel when you had a pen pal when you were a kid. Although I have to admit that pen pals are much cooler, because you get “stuff.” There’s nothing like getting a physical, non-spammy letter or care package in the mail. Kind of like that scene in Harry Potter when the mail shows up. [Insert diatribe about how the world of Harry Potter might have been changed by the internet.]

Anyway, so part of this idea of finding space to write has evolved into setting aside blocks or chunks of non-internet usage and figuring out exactly what I use the internet for in my non-work hours to boost productivity. On the surface, it sounds a bit lame to be “scheduling” social time on the internet but it’s like that analogy of “get your homework done so you can get out and play.”

My personal belief is that it’s important for me to stay on top of social media for the day job and beyond. Some of social media for me is experimenting and playing around with the tools to see what might work for what I need it to do. It also allows me stay on top of how the internet is evolving because you never know where a new rival to Facebook might pop up. Either way, I can’t ignore my social media channels or do away with them completely, but limiting them is probably a good idea.

So to get more writing done in November for Nanowrimo, I know I’ll also need to go through my 1,398 emails and my 74 unread emails in the one account — should probably check my other accounts, too. Good thing this heated election will be over early November, because that will be one less thing I’ll be following that closely.

The more I think about ways to get off the internet, the more I realize (Delete.) how dependent I’ve become on internet communication. (Delete.)

Make that 72 unread emails and counting.

October 1, 2008
Permalink ∞
Previous Posts Next Posts




Monica Valentinelli > Books & Stories

Looking for Monica’s books and games that are still in print? Visit Monica Valentinelli on Amazon’s Author Central or a bookstore near you.

Archives

Back to Top