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All responses Most smiled responses
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I've been asked to hold off until the position is formally posted. I'll broadcast it once the listing is up.
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There was none. I was traveling for Thanksgiving.
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As I don't have an iPhone, I have not.
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asked by bankdraft
My inferiority complex. Lack of confidence has stopped me from doing more than any other obstacle in my life.
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Nap? What is this "nap" you speak of? Where I come from we have no "nap".
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Lie any other skill, the only way to get better as a writer is to actually write. My buddy David Finch just pointed me to this Amber Naslund post on how to go about the actual work of writing, and I agree with most of it: http://altitudebranding.com/2010/05/8-must-dos-for-aspiring-writers
I always point out that writing non-fiction is RADICALLY different from writing fiction. I write nonfiction almost everyday and at this point, while it all isn't art, I can pretty much hammer out a decent instructional, referential, or evaluative post on almost anything in an hour or so (excluding research). That comes from having regular deadlines for non-fiction work for the last decade.
Almost none of that writerly muscle memory translates over to fiction, which includes things like character, setting, and plot. Dialogue I can handle, because even my nonfiction stuff has a voice and a cadence to it, so giving that to characters is not so difficult. The structural meta-points of fiction? Those I'm still hacking at.
All of which is to say, if you want to write fiction, practice fiction. If you want to write tech articles practice tech articles. Write blogs; practice blogs, etc. You won't get very good at baseball by practicing basketball, other than simply getting in shape. You hone specific skills for specific results.
As to explicit practical tips, here are a few:
1. Writing is a habit, just like not writing
If you want to be a writer, you need to set aside time on a regular schedule and write. I'm a big believer in setting regular wordcount goals -- 300 per day is a good beginner pace, at least 3 days per week -- because it's too easy to "try" to write for an hour and just kill time. Having an output goal keeps you (or, at least, me) from dicking around. The goal doesn't roll over, either. If on Monday I feel the muse and blow out 1000 words, I still owe Tuesday another 300. That doesn't mean ignore the muse, but again, this is about a disciplined habit.
2. For frak's sake, read. A lot.
To continue the athletic analogy, the best athletes watch tape of their rivals to get better. The best writers are also copious readers, and not just of the genre or style they wish to write. And while I own and have read a few "How To Write" books, nothing is so helpful as reading actual writing. There are skills aplenty to be found in almost any successful writer's output. And if you paid for the writing in question, you know at least one thing about it: It did enough right that someone would pay for it. Figure out what that is and see if you can duplicate those qualities.
3. Join a writer's group, if only for the deadlines
This is advice I've personally done a lousy job of following lately, but do as I say and not as I do. To completely exhaust the athletics analogy, the best athletes play against the best competition they can find. And they do it often. Having a writer's group not only exposes you to other people's "game," it also gives you someone to whom you're accountable. To completely invert the athlete analogy, the best aspect of Weight Watchers isn't the meals or the guidebooks, it's the meetings. Having to face your peers and explain why you haven't written anything in the last week or month will do wonders in ensuring that you write something every week or month. There's no better managing editor than peer pressure. Trust me.
4. Don't wait to be inspired
The final point I'll leave you with is that the muse is a fickle bitch and you can't live your life on her schedule. Inspiration is fleeting and nebulous; writing is a job. Scott Kurtz over at PvP pointed me to this TED talk from Elizabeth Gilbert, author of "Eat, Pray, Love." It's a must-watch for anyone who does creative work, but especially so if you want to write. You write when it's time to write, inspiration be damned. That's what separates the writers from the wannabes.
http://www.ted.com/talks/view/id/453 -
Yes and no. I'm not embarrassed by the work, because I feel I offer a legitimate service in a burgeoning and profitable field. That said, calling myself a "social media consultant" is often like calling myself an existential astronaut -- all the words in the title sound familiar, but nobody knows what it means. My business card says "online media consultant" because that's a more comprehensible term to the average Joe or Jane.
As to whether I think this is a sustainable business, I don't think so. Not because social media consulting is a scam, but because the skill set is propagating so quickly.
In 1995, you could make really good money designing even the most basic web sites, because web commerce and web marketing was so new and so few people could do it. In those days, simply having a web page was enough. Quality and strategy were optional, and while most web consultants got by offering neither, the few that did have a clue survived, thrived, and now own multimillion-dollar consultancies that are slowly being destroyed by WordPress and Google Apps. That destruction has been fueled in part by the average marketer or publisher knowing what a decent web site looks like and merely needing an intuitive set of tools to make it happen.
Replace the word "web" in the preceding paragraph with "Facebook" and you have the current social media consulting market along with its eventual future. I'd like to think I offer some quality and strategy to my clients, but the point is that eventually everyone will be comfortable with social media tools and will be able to do this work by and for themselves. The role of the consultant in social media is ephemeral and the whole notion of "social media expert" as a widespread specialization has at best 2-3 years of life left in it. -
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Loading...Jay Garmon’s Bio
An aspiring fiction author, I am currently making a living as a writer/editor of software reviews and part-time social media consultant.
