#mygrandplan

[singingwiththedoctor]

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[comprasyhogar]

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[comprasyhogar]

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[franklywrite]

Where do Ideas Come From?

Serpentine mask uncovered at Teolihuacan under the Pyramid of the Sun outside Mexico City, Mexico.

  Where do ideas come from? It is a question all writers are asked and very few answer. I am going to answer it, sort of. I mean, I do not want to get kicked out of the union do I?

The reason most writers give a vague answer to this question is there is no one answer. Actually, it is the wrong…

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[franklywrite]

Start a Non-Fiction Blog: The first step of My Grand Plan

My Grand Plan began three years ago when I moved back to my hometown in Michigan and was born of necessity.

The job market in my little corner of Michigan is deplorable. The only full-time jobs are in fast food or at Walmart and the only work for an educated person is teaching unless your education is in an area needed by the auto industry. Since my degree is in writing, substitute teaching is the only work available to me. 

The writing is on the wall, it is time to stop being an artist and make writing my job. Okay. But how?

There is very little information out there about this. What little you do find usually wants to sell you something; blogging classes, website building and monetization packages, copywriting classes, self-publishing packages, marketing packages; the list goes on. The reason? No one really knows how to get there; each traveller must cut a new path.

Blogging is a good place to begin because it is a writer’s medium; ideas, writing, editing and proofreading are the heart of blogging; all the things a writer must practice!

Back when I had a full-time job in New York, I tried a few of the paid How-to blogging schemes and they all utilize the same scant information. The same information is available for free on Google's Blogs of Note and Blogger Buzz. It boils down to what I like to call The Big 4. I have listed them in order of importance:

Be consistent. 

Be incredibly helpful to your readers.

Create short, well-crafted blog posts.

Include interesting images that fit the subject.

Most successful blogs have all four. If you fail in one area, the success of the blog is curtailed. The exception to his is if you are famous before starting the blog or are a world-renown, recognize expert on the subject of the blog.

Where most fail is the first one, be consistent. A blog can be poorly written, contain no images and be all about the writer and will gain success if it is consistent.

Start a non-fiction blog

Why non-fiction? Informational blogs get far more hits than fiction blogs. You may not like that, but it is the truth. Most people do not want to read your writing, they want to read something that will make their lives better. So, find something you like to write about that will improve the lives of humans. 

Are you an expert in something other than writing? Is there something you like and wouldn't mind learning more about?  

Take a good long look at who you are and ask yourself what are my strengths? Create something that fits you and your life, after all, you are human, I hope. If it will keep you interested for the long haul, it will keep readers interested. 

Use a free blogging site, do not pay for a service or sign up for How-to-be-a-Successful-Blogger classes or buy their books. Commit to not spending any money until you make money.

Try a few things. I tried four different blogs before I hit one that stuck and people not related to me actually read.

The Rube Cook Blog

I created the The Rube Cook blog not because I knew a lot about cooking, but because I knew nothing about cooking. Learning something new and telling it to others is a favorite thing for me to do. It is this quality in me that fuels the The Rube Cook, my most successful blog. Check it out here.

Is The Rube Cook a successful blog?

A good question. Although it gets ten times the hits of this blog, I would characterize it as moderately successful. The reason for this goes back to The Big 4 above; it has interesting images and the posts are helpful, but are to long and posting is inconsistent. 

What The Rube Cook has going for it is, it is about one thing, food, making it easy to market; it is about something every human on the planet can understand; and there is not another blog like it. 

The Rube Cook could be more successful if one change was made; posting consistently. I am very inconsistent with it. Making the posts shorter would help, but consistency would have the greatest impact. 

Once a week, once a month, twice a week, every other week; it does not matter. Sticking to a schedule is key.

Is This Blog Successful?

I don’t know yet. People read it, but it gets one quarter the hits of The Rube Cook. A writing blog by definition has a limited audience. Writers want you to read their stuff. When they do read blogs they do it for one of two reasons:

It is written by Stephen King, J.K. Rowling or Neil Gaiman.

They want you to read their stuff. 

This blog is more consistent, the posts are shorter and I recently started including images. Since I’m not one of the writers named above; what gives FranklyWrite an edge is it appeals to both writers and non-writers because the driving force, me, is trying to make a living writing. Will I succeed or won’t I? Tune in next post to find out.

Time is a big factor in the success of a blog and this one has not been around long enough. Its success will depend on my success.

If you have questions please ask using the ASK button at the top of the page or the comments below. There were a lot of bits I cut to make a shorter post.

[franklywrite]

My Writing World Shifted One Hundred and Eighty Degrees

In my last post, I gave the reasons for creating My Grand Plan. I have a novel that is busting to get out and I want to sell my work through traditional channels.

The crux of the matter is, is my writing as good as most and better then some of the work already published? The honest answer to myself is no.

At its core My Grand Plan is:

To retype a copy of a book in my genre by a writer who is better then me and who I admire in an effort to improve the quality of my writing.

I learned to write TV scripts by transcribing shows on to my laptop in Screenwriter. The theory being that I could then write an episode of the show because I had already written one. I sat there at my computer starting and stopping the show on Netflix and typing each word into the format. It was not easy, but it worked.

The first spec script I sent out yielded an opportunity to work at Cartoon Pizza in New York. The comment from the head writer was it was hard to believe it was my first spec script. Well, it wasn't, but I did not tell him that! If it worked for TV, why not a novel?

The idea was not mine. When I was twelve, I read a book, "On Becoming on Novelist," by John Gardener. The only thing I remember from this book is the recommendation to copy the style of admired authors.  Copy your favorite books by hand word-for-word with all the punctuation. Somewhere there exists the first few chapters of "Gone With the Wind," and a short story by Mark Twain in my childish handwriting.

My writing got me into grad school and to New York City. I have been published in monologue anthologies. My plays have been produced in New York and in Russia. I have won contests. I do not say this to brag. I pride myself on knowing who am as a writer. It is the greatest thing I learned in grad school. I am a storyteller with a natural feel for dialogue and a knack for creating memorable characters who seem to come off the page and sit next to you in the theatre. Why do I think I am not a good writer?

Since I was in third grade I have been plagued by one thing; bad spelling. Couple that with the inability to remember comma rules and a habit of seeing what I thought I wrote on the page instead of what is actually on the page; and you have a writer who has been ridiculed, made fun of and in some cases yelled at for not having a basic competence in writing. I have a class ring with my own name engraved incorrectly because I spelled it wrong on the order form! These things have left me scared and afraid every single time I put something out there because it is going to come back with, “You want to be a writer and you can’t even spell “it” correctly?” A handwritten comment I once received on a manuscript.

You see, when you write scripts, spelling and grammar do not matter so much. When you write dialogue, you write the language the way people speak it. This is not the case with prose or non-scripted writing. Yes, there are editors and proofreaders, but it is your name on the by line and you have to know the choices to be made. There are things like sentence structure and a thousand other things no editor or proofreader can do. Long before your book is published you must demonstrate to agents and publishers extreme competence at writing the English language.

When I moved back to Michigan and knew my only writing outlet was prose, I started to practice. I started two blogs; this one and a cooking blog. I began to write short stories for the first time in 20 years. I even took an online grammar course. And I participated and won NaNoWriMo.

I pulled out some of my old short stories and they were pretty good. I was a decent prose writer before turning playwright. But those stories were proofed and worked in a writing group at Wayne State University and then re-written over a period of 20 years. I dismissed this first hint that my writing world was about to shift 180 degrees.

Here Comes the Shift

Reading my first issue of Writer's Digest in over 20 years, it is the best source for market information, I decided to write a 750 word story based on a writing prompt for their Your Story competition. This is the story featured in the post on this blog, "750 or Bust." 

The story did not place in the contest. I was not surprised since I thought the 1,300 word version was the best. I did not put it aside because it was so different from anything I had written to date and the main character was intriguing. I re-wrote. The story was more unique than it was good writing. The plan was to enter it in the Glimmer Train short fiction contest. I knew it was not a contest winner, so I did not enter it.

I thought and thought about the story. It needed something to pull it out of the doldrums. Then it came to me as I was ordering shoes online and remembered the pair I had to return because they made a funny noise after getting wet. If I could make the shoes of the guard unique and use their sound as a way of suggesting the character was being followed, it would raise the stakes considerably. I tried it. And the story came to life. I re-wrote again, and a little more and little more. I sent it to beta readers. I did more tweaking to it.

Then the moment of truth. I printed it and read it aloud to my dogs. This is when my writing landscape shifted 180 degrees. The story was so good I could not believe I wrote it. All my strengths came shinning through; an interesting story that kept you involved, characters that lived and breathed, a strong sense of place, and the right details. It was suspenseful to boot! But that was not all. The active voice, correct punctuation usage, varied sentence structure; all those writerly things were there and they were correct in the way a real writer would do them. A writer of prose.

Without my realizing it, when I am engaged on a story, when I am re-writing; I know how to spell, how to write a compound sentence, when to use a semi-colon and when not to. It is ALL there. How? I have no idea. 

I engage with a story about people in a way I do not on any other type of writing. That does not explain how I magically use commas and semi-colons correctly, but I am not going to question.

It is a very good thing. It is also a very scary thing.

I can do this.