Writer to writer: From think to ink - Gail Carson Levine 2014
On blogging
Closing the circle
Returning to where we began, with the blog, reader Leslie Marie wrote, “How about a post about WRITING blogs? I’d like to start one but have absolutely no idea what to write. I think my biggest block is just fear of some sort holding me back!”
My blog is just my blog, a universe of one. To educate myself a little about the wider blog world, I checked out the blogs of a few fellow writers for children and young adults. Some wrote about themselves and their lives, which you can do too: chronicle your days and provide insights into the person you are. A friend suggested that I do the same, which in a way would be making myself into a character, because we can never present our entire personalities in all our complexity; we have to decide which aspects of ourselves we want to share. I imagine this kind of blog as similar to writing a memoir. The memoirist becomes a character, someone whose company the reader enjoys.
This sort of blog would also be somewhat like journaling, if you were journaling for more than yourself. Suppose you visit your Aunt Susan and you blog about the day. Well, you want to give your reader an image of your aunt, so you write that you adore her. You say she wears her brown hair pulled back in a ponytail, and her lipstick is always fading. Is there a brand that sells faint lipstick? you wonder. (You can post photos of her, too, if she gives you the okay.) When you hug her tight, you’re surprised at how thin she is under her big wool sweater.
This is great stuff because it’s full of detail, and we should put as much detail into our blog as we do into our fiction. Blogging is writing, after all.
Then Aunt Susan starts questioning you about the month since you saw her last. She’s such an amazing listener that you remember occurrences you had almost forgotten, and, because she’s so sympathetic, you confess something that had embarrassed you, a little event. She declares it of no consequence, which makes you feel utterly relieved. You post all this on the blog, too, minus the embarrassing incident. You’re no longer ashamed of it, but you still don’t want a stranger coming across it while doing an internet search—because we have to remember always that when we click publish on our blog, we’re doing exactly that. A blog is a form of e-publishing. Our blog is going out to anyone in the entire world who has web access.
Suppose the afternoon with Aunt Susan proceeds happily until she asks about your best friend, Nora. The two of you quarreled last week and you absolutely don’t want to talk about that. Even though you tell her you don’t want to discuss it, she says, “All the more reason to get it off your chest,” and suddenly you wish you’d never come.
This last part we shouldn’t post. While we must be aware and concerned that strangers can see our blog, the likelihood is much greater that people who love us will read it, which includes Aunt Susan, whose feelings would be hurt. If we want to let her know her badgering is unwelcome, we should do so privately.
Suppose the afternoon continues downhill, and our thoughts turn downright hostile. In your journal, to be read only by you, you might write those angry thoughts. You might let yourself be whiny and resentful. You might wonder why you’re cursed with such a nosy aunt, and why she has to heat her house to ninety degrees, and why she can’t cook anything other than meatloaf, which tastes like shredded cardboard. That’s fine in a private journal. Ranting is one of the joys of journaling. But not in a blog. These things follow us for decades!
(An advantage of fiction is that we can make one character whiny and another nosy, and no one will identify the character as us and our real-life Aunt Susan.)
Now that I’ve scared you silly, I’d like to say that blogging is very worth doing if you’re careful.
In addition to writing about your life in general, you can:
• Pick a single aspect of your life to blog about, like public or private school or homeschool or babysitting or your writing (again exercising caution about negative remarks or—important!—the slightest hint that might be taken as threatening).
• Take a journalistic approach and report on any trips you take or on local doings, such as fairs, museum exhibits, concerts.
• Blog about world, national, or local news and present your own perspective.
• Have friends write guest posts.
• Present interviews with interesting people in your life.
• Blog about subjects that interest you. For example, you could review books.
• Write a how-to: how to make pie crust from scratch, how to paint with watercolors, etc.
• Create a visual blog with your photos and drawings.
• Offer information that people may need or want.
• Combine all the above. While I’ve made my blog about just one thing, yours doesn’t have to be.
As an example of the next-to-last kind of blog on my list, Agnes, who follows my blog and who is homeschooled, created her own blog as a resource for homeschoolers. It’s a wonderful idea. I’d guess there are lots of homeschooled kids and their parents who welcome the information, and curious people, like me, who were educated in classrooms.
Like Agnes, I chose to blog about a subject I know well, and my blog is a how-to about writing. I’m very aware of my blog readers out there in cyberspace, so I set a tone that I hope is friendly, encouraging, down-to-earth, and funny. The blog does create a version of me as a character. In real life, I possess the qualities I show there—but of course I’m more complicated, and I have my bad moments, too.
I aim for clarity and usefulness. I want readers to be able to put my posts to work. If I’m ever less than clear, I like being told, and if people have follow-up questions, I welcome them.
I don’t know what I would have done if blog readers hadn’t started asking questions. I could have written about what I was grappling with week-to-week in my writing, but I wouldn’t have thought of all the topics they’ve raised. So I’m grateful. When someone comments a few times, I start to feel that I know her, that I have a new writing pal in the ether of the internet.
Then there’s the frequency of your blog to consider. If you’re interested in collecting an audience, you don’t want to disappoint them by dropping out of sight for six weeks. Some people post daily, some weekly, and some when the fancy strikes—but I don’t think bloggers in the last group are concentrating on readers. I post weekly, every Wednesday.
And there’s length. Some who post every day deliver short bursts. Others write long daily posts; I don’t know how they find the time. My posts are substantial. I’m not satisfied until I fill two single-spaced pages and start a third.
For those of you who’d like to attract an audience to your blog, there are strategies you can use. I searched online for “how to bring traffic to a blog” and found a bunch of sites. You can too. To start, however, you can tell everyone you know about your blog and ask them to spread the word if they like it. The way I started to build an audience was entirely accidental. I was invited to write a message for NaNoWriMo. In it I included the URL for my blog, which was pretty new. My message went live, and—boom!—I had followers. Whenever I speak at a school or a conference, I say how to find my blog and website. The numbers continue to build, but slowly. I would love it if readers of this book come for a visit. You’ll find some topics that I haven’t gotten to here and some new posts. I gave the URL in chapter 1, but here it is again:
www.gailcarsonlevine.blogspot.com.
If you get a readership, be polite! If someone asks a question, answer it. If you receive a compliment, say “Thank you.” Readers will likely be drawn in and come back for more.
Occasionally, someone may flame—that is, comment unpleasantly, even outright nastily—or may post something inappropriate, as happened once when someone wrote in with a product ad. You have the power to delete, so use it! You’re responsible for the content and tone of your blog, which means you should check it regularly.
I also looked online for “blogs about writing,” and found lists of the most popular sites, which have many more subscribers than I do. I’m sure my blog is also visited by people who never sign up. The other blogs must have such visitors too. The most popular bloggers guest post on other blogs and include guest posts on theirs. They also host book giveaways.
It seems that people can earn money by blogging, which I do not do—except when reading my blog causes someone to buy one of my books. Some sites carry advertisements. If a reader clicks, the blogger gets paid (but very little per click). One of the blogs I saw had a tab through which a visitor could hire him as a freelance blogger or writer. For any of you who are thinking about ways to be a writer and earn a living while you establish your place in literature, blogging may be part of the picture, but you’ll have to do more research. Social media keep changing. We need to stay up-to-date.
I end every blog post with prompts, many of which are in this book. A nonwriting blog wouldn’t include prompts, but a how-to blog might end with an activity. In case you’re planning a blog about writing or are just curious, this is how I make up prompts: I mull over the topic I’ve been discussing, like plot or character development or, in this case, blogging. I wonder what’s in it that I can use. A blog-writing prompt would be good. Hmm . . . Where can I find conflict? Aunt Susan! Maybe Nora, too. And the possibility of trouble from exposing oneself unguardedly online.
Here goes. Writing time!
• Whether or not you actually set up an online blog, write a post for three different kinds of blogs.
• Write a story about your MC Madison and her aunt Susan. Create an argument. Resolve it happily or not. Bring best friend Nora into the story.
• Madison blogs about the confrontation with Aunt Susan. She’s careful not to write anything that will hurt anyone, or so she thinks, but Nora sees the post and reads between the lines when her name comes up. Write Madison’s post and what follows from Nora. Again, resolve it happily, or not.
• Madison applies to a music school (or starship school or unicorn-training school) she desperately wants to get into. Her audition goes brilliantly well, or so she thinks until the school rejects her. She’s furious and posts her rage on the blog, suggesting that the school’s admission policies are rigged. Write how this post changes her life.
Have fun, and save what you write!
We’ve reached the happy ending, but—oops!—I failed to mention that the best part of blogging has been the conversation with other writers. I cherish that, and I’ve loved extending the discussion in this book.
I doubt if we’ll ever use up all the possible writing topics, because we writers poke our pens (and computers) into every aspect of living: the problems, the suffering, the oddities, the joys. We keep asking, What next? And what after that? We explore it all, and so the conversation never runs out, writer to writer.