Archives for January 2020

Ep. 155: Blog vs. Memoir and Couch to 5k for Writing – Bonus Episode

How do you decide if writing a blog is for you if you’re writing memoir? Are blogs even still a thing? And how do you boost your reading and writing comprehension like runners do with Couch to 5k? (Bonus fireplace insert question!) Thanks for Lorajean, Erin, and Catriona for today’s questions!

Transcript

Rachael Herron: 00:01 Welcome to How Do You Write, I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 patrons. If you’d like me to be your mini-coach for less than a large mocha frappuccino, you can join too at http://patreon.com/rachael.

00:15 Well, hello writers. Welcome to a bonus mini-episode of How Do You Write. This is episode number 155, I am recording on December 4th of 2019, and I am going to try to get through three questions today. Bam, bam, bam. Quick like a bunny. So the first one today comes from Laura Jean. Laura Jean, I just have to say is my ideal reader, she has always been my ideal reader ever since she became a fan of my books years and years ago, and now when I’m writing a book, I really do think about that one person that this will please. Especially when I’m writing romance, I want it to please Laura Jean. And it’s really nice to have that kind of reader in mind, so thanks, Laura Jean, and thanks for your support. 

01:01 And here is your question, Laura Jean, “I’m working on my reading comprehension and I think working on my writing would go hand in hand with that. Can you recommend exercises to get this process started? Like a Couch to 5K, but Couch to writing an email, Instagram posts, blog posts with cohesion”. This is such a great question. Reading comprehension and writing ability do kind of go hand in hand because we are always using reading comprehension when we’re writing. It sounds obvious, but a lot of people don’t quite think of that. So this is something that comes up for writers. I just jotted down kind of the things that I do to start something, I always need to break down tasks, including all writing tasks to smaller bits of information, otherwise, I’m overwhelmed. If I’m writing in my journal, I’ll just start writing free flow, whatever comes to me, but if I’m actually working on something that has any kind of a point, like a blog post or an Instagram post or a full novel, I need to know what that point is first, so I bullet point some things out. It sounds prosaic and businesslike, but for me it works. I think about two things, “What’s my point?” and “What’s my proof?”. The proof that proves this point I’m trying to make, that I’m trying to get across to another human being, it doesn’t have to be scientific proof. It can be a feeling that I had, that’s enough proof for me and for other people, especially like if we’re writing something inspirational on Instagram because we had a magical walk in the woods in which we realized that, yeah, we’re freaking just fine the way we are right now today. I am happy with my body, I’m happy with my brain, I’m happy with where things are, I can be content in this place. 

02:59 So yeah, I’ve had that revelation and I want to come back and tell people about it and show them a beautiful picture of a tree. I would think, “What’s my point?”. My point is perhaps something like, “I need nature to remind me that I’m part of it and that I’m okay as I am”, that’s my point. “What’s your proof?”, I start thinking about what I saw, what I heard, what made me feel that way, maybe what I was thinking about before I came to that revelation or how I was feeling before I came to that revelation, and I bullet point those out too. As I’m having these thoughts, I bullet point them out, I list them, and then I kind of flush them out. I flesh out the idea of how I was feeling before I went into the woods. And then I might flush out what the creek sounded like when I realized that, “Oh yeah, I’m part of nature too”. I might think, “Oh, you know what? I flushed that point out and I don’t actually like it”. Great, we get to erase it. Once you flush out those little bullet points, you put them together. You can add connectors if you want. Also, human brains are super willing to make connections. Sometimes I don’t even bother with transitions, people just understand what I’m saying. A real technical point that may help, and this is something that I’ve only recently learned, when you are writing, it’s very hard to compose when things are small or in a type that doesn’t lend itself easy to read. And it has been proven that if you type in Comic Sans, you write faster. Isn’t that interesting? 

04:40 If you write in Comic Sans, which is ideal for people who have dyslexia or other kind of difficulty reading, Comic Sans just doesn’t confuse the brain. I know it’s not the most attractive font to look at, but it is great for reading comprehension. If you are not battling reading comprehension of the things that you’ve just written, you write faster and you write better, you write cleaner. You can also use a bigger font. So a large font Comic Sans as you’re writing, not too large, you don’t want four words on your screen, you know what I mean? So give that a try, see if that also helps with that whole drafting process. And also, most of all, trust yourself. When you have made the points that you want to make, you can stop. If you don’t get to all the points you wanted to make, you can also stop. If you start a post of any kind, an email or a blog post or an Instagram post or whatever it is you’re writing and it goes somewhere else, that’s really interesting. A lot of times I will sit down to write an email or something to my list and it goes in a place I absolutely did not expect it to. In that case, generally, I will go back and revise the first part to kind of match if I need to bring it back in line. But sometimes the journey is the point, and that’s fine too. People are willing and happy to read interesting words and they want to know what’s in your brain. So I love this question, thank you, Lorajean.

06:03 Um, let’s see. Aaron has a– I told you guys you could ask me anything and I love this. “I read your opinion on Fireplace – maybe Fireplaces, I think I lost that word – as a former nine one one dispatcher – sorry about that horn honking out there, rude – but where do you stand on wood burning fireplace inserts?”. We’re about to have four giant cypress trees trim for the first time in decades, and I’ve already got about a half cord of dried split and seasoned pine from the giant Monterey pine that we’ve we had to cut down three years ago. There’s at least a quarter pine that still needs to be split, we could probably heat our home for the next four or five years by the time we have all the woodcut. I am a super fan of wood burning fireplace inserts, I think that they’re beautiful, I think that they do pollute the air, but you know what? Not as much as everything else that’s happening. Here, and Aaron, I know that you live on the coast, we do have spare the air day, so you just have to make sure that you don’t burn on those days, and you can always check sparetheair.org to find out what those days are. But otherwise, wood stoves are, especially when they have the inserts, they are efficient and they are generally very, very, very safe. I cannot think of a single fire that I ran while I was working for 17 years as a nine one one dispatcher that occurred because of a fireplace insert.

07:22 This is not legal advice, of course, you’ve got to make sure that everything is in working order and that the chimney is good, but they are definitely safer than just an open fireplace, which have burned down so many houses since time immemorial, so I love that idea. Do it or don’t do it, don’t take this as legal advice, Aaron, oh my God. Let’s see, another question from Aaron and from Katrina, basically asking the same thing. “Memoir versus blog, where to start, how to decide, either or both?”. That’s such a big question. It depends on what your heart wants. Isn’t that just a frustrating answer, Katrina? I know you and blogging, you do a great job with blogging. Your words lend themselves to blogs and it will absolutely fit into your memoir. So, Katrina, I say keep up what you’re doing. The nice thing about blogging memoir pieces or short creative nonfiction is that you can get eyes on, you can get readers that way. If you are going to blog these things, always have a place for people to sign up to your newsletter, even if it’s your very first blog post and you know that literally one person is going to read it and it’s going to be you. And you’re going to refresh it tomorrow and it will be you again and the next day. The thing about blogs nowadays is that there is so much information on the internet, it is hard to get noticed at first. The thing that changes that is to have more content. If you only ever put up three or four blog posts, no, it will almost guaranteed be seen by no one, because Google won’t give it the juice that you need. But once you have content, once you have time, Google starts to push people there and it starts to do its Google magic. 

09:17 As a place to be consistent and to give yourself kind of a purpose or a deadline, I think blogs can be great. You say, “Well, I’m going to do one blog post a week”, and that becomes a goal that you can meet. And at that point, you don’t care if people are reading it or not, it is a form of accountability. If your memoir, however, is– that works really well for pieces like a memoir made of pieces or a memoir made of essays in an essay format. If you are writing a memoir about a time in your life, a specific time during which you overcame something and learned and grew, it’s a little bit harder. You want to show that character arc all the way through your memoir and it’s a story, not necessarily essays. So if you’re showing a story, you can absolutely blog it, but I would be a little bit more hesitant about that because, just like a novel, you’re going to be doing a lot of revision on it, and if you put up all your first draft stuff, are you going to be comfortable with that later? If your first draft pieces are up there, and as you wrote your memoir, you realized it was actually about something else in your life that you want to illustrate, and now you’ve got these pieces of the book left behind on the internet, it’s 100% fine. I do not worry about copyright crap, I really don’t. Nobody’s going to steal these pieces and make a book and then try to publish it, I promise. It’s just about what you are comfortable having out there. So the smaller polished kind of piece, that’s awesome in a blog.

10:54 If you are still exploring what this memoir is, it might just be best to have a first draft on your computer of the book, of the whole memoir, and if you still have that blogging urge, then do smaller pieces or cut down pieces that kind of stand alone and put them on the blog. Either way is fine, do what your heart wants and definitely don’t do a blog unless you really, really want to. There’s no reason, there’s no good reason to do it very early. Only do it if you really, really want to. I hope these answers help and if you would like to send me questions, you know how to do it. And I wish you very happy writing, my friend, and there will be a full-length podcast coming out later this week with Jeremy Spillman and you are going to very much enjoy that interview, I found him delightful to talk to. So we’ll talk to you soon my friends. Thanks. 

11:48 Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of How Do You Write. You can reach me on Twitter, Rachael Herron, or at my website, http://rachaelherron.com. You can also support me on Patreon, and get essays on living your creative life, for as little as a buck an essay, at http://www.patreon.com/rachael, spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L. And do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers at http://rachaelherron.com/write. Now, go to your desk and create your own process, and get to writing my friends.

How Do You Keep Writing When No One is Reading You Yet? Bonus Mini-Episode

Yeah, writing alone while you’re unpublished is so difficult. How do you keep your spirits up? How do you keep believing in yourself when you’re spending hours, weeks, months, and years doing something that has nothing to show for it yet? Listen along as Rachael Herron answer’s Leftie’s question on this mini-episode of How Do You Write.

Transcript

Rachael Herron: 00:00 Welcome to How Do You Write, I’m your host, Rachael Herron, and this is a bonus episode brought to you directly by my $5 patrons. If you’d like me to be your mini-coach for less than a large mocha frappuccino, you can join too at http://patreon.com/rachael. 

00:15 Well, hello writers. Welcome to episode number 154 of How Do You Write. This is a bonus mini-episode and today’s question is brought to us from Left. Leftie is a longtime listener. Hello, Leftie, I’m thrilled that you left this question and I hope that it helps other people. It’s a long question, so here we go. From Leftie, “A long time ago, you asked for questions for your newsletter for writers, and I asked you to give your advice to new-to-publishing writers about traditional versus indie since you know both from experience, and I’d still really like to hear you talk about this. But the question I’d really like you to answer is this one, how did you keep going when you had no agent and no publishing credit? You touched it a bit in the episode of the writer’s well, is it worth it, and you said that it’s the worst when you don’t have a published book. But I’d really liked to hear you talk more about this because it’s going to be soon five years that I’m writing really regularly with intention, that I’m learning about the craft and the business, that I’m really into it and close to 13 years of writing for fun, and sometimes I feel like I’m not farther along in my writing journey than I was five years ago. I love writing, I need it in my life, but with a little one and a partner and a full-time job, sometimes it gets discouraging to feel like I’m investing so much time in something that seems, at least to everyone else but me, to bring absolutely nothing in return. I know you have been there and you are now where I want to be and I’d really love to hear you speak about how to keep going from one place to the other”.

01:44 Oh, Leftie, this is such an incredible question and I also want to address the great tact with what you said, “I asked you a question and you never got around to it”. And I apologize for that, I remember you asking me that. So there’s actually two parts of this question, and I think that the really important and most difficult part of this question is, “How do you keep going when you are not getting any outside encouragement, any outside motivation?”. And that is a really hard question to answer for me. I was by myself and that is what I don’t recommend. So after I got my MFA, I tried to write three different books and totally failed. They’re in the drawer, they’ll never come out. And then I was writing by myself for another couple of years after that, all by myself. I had NaNoWriMo, which was my first experience with community, but I didn’t engage with the community on a personal level. So I went to a couple of writings, but never made any friends. So I was trying to write professionally and failing to really, really get my heart work done. I was not feeling to get to the page, but that was nine years. So if that makes you feel better, I was writing in the dark, alone, for nine years, seven years before I started NaNo, and then two years afterward.

03:15 In that time I wrote a total of four books, and the fourth book was the one– there was the NaNo, and I got an agent from it, and I sold that book. And I say that really easy and simply, and it sounds like it wasn’t hard and it was hard. My mass rejections came from that agent search and that was really difficult, and the most difficult part of it was that I was doing it alone. I didn’t understand how community was necessary. And Leftie, you already have such a leg up on that because you have this community, you have us, you are our friend. You know me and Jay over at the Writer’s Well, we know who you are and we know what you do. I follow you on Instagram and I find your Instagram posts on your writing journey completely inspiring to me. I’ve told you that before and I’m not blowing smoke, I try very hard not to blow smoke ever. You are already finding your community. But what I wonder, and if anybody else is feeling like this out there, I wonder if you have those heart close writing friends, close to you, where you live, that you meet on a regular basis.

04:24 I honestly think that that is one of the most important things for writers. I don’t think that I would be where I am if I didn’t have my core group of writing besties in the Bay area, in a place where we get together as often as we can, and that was a very deliberate putting together a people in order to have this community. And I cannot claim credit for it, Sophie Littlefield, who I’m sure you’ve heard me talk about, she put it together. And it was back in the day when grogs were a thing, group blogs, it’s a terrible word unless you’re talking about drinking grog, that’s okay. But a group blog called a grog is not okay, but we did it and she gathered together eight women whom she liked. She just picked them, she handpicked them, they were writers she knew from RWA, which is when I first started to get community. That’s what I joined, Romance Writers of America, and I met Sophie in it. Shortly thereafter, she started the grog, invited me, and those eight women are still so tight. We gave up the blog years ago. It was called Pens Fatales, I think it’s still archived out there somewhere. But it was almost an excuse just to become friends, we had to get together and talk about how the group cloud blog would work, we had to talk about who would write what posts and from that we fell into this friendship, but it was very, very deliberate on Sophie’s part.

05:47 And so perhaps anyone who’s listening to this who says, “I don’t have those in person friends”, it might be up to you to go out and find those. If you live in the Hinterlands and there is no community, there’s no town near you, then this is something you’ll have to do online. But I recommend that if you’re in a little town where you can make a couple of writing friends, even if they’re not writing in your genre, that’s totally fine, they just have to be people that you connect with on a really true level. I would say that my writing friends are my closest friends and I have a lot of friends. Luckily, I am lucky enough to say that, but the writing friends are the ones who get me the most. So form a group, do a meetup, you will get that guy who comes and he’s so annoying and he wants to run the group, and that’s okay because the group that you set up is really just a place to poach friends from. Then you start hanging out with those friends and talking writing all the time, and you’re not even meeting up anymore. You’re just getting coffee, you’re getting breakfast, you’re getting lunch. And it turns into a community that you can keep going through all of this pain and disappointment and wondering, “Can I really do this?”.

07:03 Because they’re saying the same thing. And that’s the most important part, is to have somebody to say this to. And I’m so glad that you have me, and Leftie, yes, it’s so hard to just keep going. Once you have a book published, whether it is traditional or independently, and let’s get into that really quickly, it will feel a little bit different. People before they are published always feel, and I felt this way, that being traditionally or being any kind of published would complete me. That was my goal in life, was to publish a book. Then once I published a book, the goal was gone and my goals for life got bigger and further away, and I still feel like I’m just touching the edge of the water I want to be in, but I understand the feeling completely. Today, traditional versus indie, it’s such a difficult choice and I really like how my friend J Thorn always points it out, “You can’t choose between traditional and indie, you can choose between pursuing traditional and going indie”. You can pursue the traditional path by going after an agent and getting that agent to sell your book into the traditional marketplace, which is usually the way it goes.

08:17 No one can guarantee that you’ll get into that, it is a small number of people who get into that. It is still the gatekeeper system and it is still disheartening. The lovely thing about indie publishing is that you just do it. You just do it. You hire the cover designer, you always hire the cover designer, you always hire the developmental editor, and then the copy editor and the proofer. You do all those things, but then your book is just as legit. I think that at least 12 or 15 of my books are indie published, so I’m almost half and half right now, hybrid, and I can’t honestly tell you which I like more. I do enjoy the cache of traditional publishing, I always admit that, and I like going into a bookstore and seeing my book on the shelves. It is always a thrill and it is a thrill I hope I never get over cause I would be an asshole if that wasn’t a thrill. But independent to me is more fun. I have more creative control and I honestly, normally most years make more money in the independent publishing sphere.

09:21 So it is really about what you want and if you want to be traditional published and you want to go after the agent, then do that for a while. Go after it, give yourself a time limit. Don’t say, “I must be traditional published or I will die unpublished”. Why do that? Give yourself a year to look for an agent or two years or whatever feels comfortable to you, and then reassess whether you’d want to be indie. Or you can do what a lot of friends of mine do, they publish a few books indie while they’re taking this particular book, whatever, for whatever reason, that’s the one they want to save for the agent and take it out. And you could just keep on sending those query letters out. Remember that a hundred query letters is not a lot of query letters to send out in order to get an agent. I did hear about a guy, and I can’t remember, it was recently, he had sent more than a thousand query letters and had never been asked for a partial, so I’m thinking that guy might want to reassess his query letter at least. So know what your heart wants, know that it’s okay to go either way. Like I said, I love both, I really believe in my heart that for me, being hybrid is really my happy, sweet spot, and I find a lot of people feel like that. I know some indie diehards who are now thinking, “Well, you know, I wouldn’t hate trying a traditional deal”. It’s interesting how many kinds of different mad you can get entering a traditional deal. However, I have to say that the publisher that I’m with right now is outstanding and they are blowing away all of my expectations. And they are helping me solve my PTSD, which I’ve talked about for a long time, in which the P stands for publishing, the traditional publishing industry. 

11:09 So it’s hard. All of this is hard. It is hard when you’re published, but there is a special kind of lonely and discouragement that comes before you have that connection. And what exactly did you say here? “I feel like I’m investing so much in something that seems to bring me absolutely nothing in return”. It hasn’t brought you absolutely nothing, it’s brought you to us, it’s brought us to you. Make those connections, have a best girlfriend or two or three that you can sit down and talk about this with, I cannot emphasize it more. And if you have those friends and you’re still feeling a little bit parched, like you need more to keep going, tell them that. Build in a couple of reward systems, you know. If you want to go the traditional route, every 10 rejections from agents, you’re going to go get a mani-pedi with one of those friends, or something that pleases your heart. I am not into mani-pedies myself, but something that pleases you, that gives you a reward system. What you are looking for right now is that dopamine reward of somebody saying, “Yes, this is worthy”, and we have to give it to ourselves and we have to continue giving that to ourselves even when we are multi-published. And it’s amazing how we still have to keep loving ourselves and loving our work, and it’s hard, it’s really hard. 

12:37 So I love that you asked this. I hope that I said something a little bit hopeful. You are not alone, we all feel this with you and thank you for being inspiring to me, Leftie. And I believe, I don’t know if you want me to do this, but other people who might want to follow Leftie’s journey, I think if you just search Leftie Aube, A-U-B-E, on Instagram, you can follow her there, her posts are incredible. So there, Leftie, you just got some more community, I hope you don’t mind. All right you all, this was a little bit longer than a mini bonus episode, but no matter where you are, if you are in the United States, Thanksgiving, as I record this is tomorrow, good luck to you and family. Oh, what a holiday. So if you’re not, I just hope you get some good writing done and we will talk soon, my friends.

13:42 Thanks so much for joining me on this episode of How Do You Write. You can reach me on Twitter, Rachael Herron, or at my website, http://rachaelherron.com. You can also support me on Patreon, and get essays on living your creative life, for as little as a buck an essay, at http://www.patreon.com/rachael, spelled R-A-C-H-A-E-L. And do sign up for my free weekly newsletter of encouragement to writers at http://rachaelherron.com/write. Now, go to your desk and create your own process, and get to writing my friends.