Some Knowledge

I have been keeping a journal for years.  Right now, most of my journaling is online in my blogs.  For a long time, I would write down the events of my day in spiral notebooks.  I have a box filled with my old journal entries.  Most of this material was things like dreams and people I would meet on my job and anything that happened around the house.  All of this was practice writing.  The thing about a journal is that it gets you writing about something.  If you want to learn how to write, you have to actually do the work and write something.

I like doing my journaling online these days.  I like the idea of having something that exists on the web where people can find and read what I write and react to it.  It’s like getting published.  It is getting published.  There is no need these days for the expense of printing things up on paper.  Still, the paper market is always there if you end up with something interesting enough that it might be successful as a book.

The cool thing about a journal is that you can write just about anything you want.  You can write out your opinions on the news or the world.  You can write up your favorite recipies.  You can write about the things you do.  You can write about your dreams.  You can write little fictional descriptions of places that don’t exist.  You can make up sections of dialogue that might be part of a story or novel.  You can even keep a journal of your poetry.  The thing about a journal is that it’s your own personal take on life.  You do not need to get approval to write what you want.  The words in your journal should be your own.  There is no reason to copy and paste other people’s writing into your journal.  It is a record of your own life.

A journal can be worked up into a book.  Suppose you went on vacation somewhere.  Suppose you kept a journal of everything you did.  This might easily become a book.  You might even pay for another vacation by publishing your travel book about your last vacation.  Of course, there are a lot of factors in making money from writing.  You have to get a lot of people to buy your book before it pays.  Money should not be your motivation for writing, despite what Samuel Johnson says.

There are many benefits to keeping a journal.  It gives you a place to keep ideas that cross your mind.  It gives you practice writing.  It keeps a record of your life.  It improves your memory by having you use your memory to write your entries.  It allows other people to read about your views and opinions.  It allows you to explore life and ideas.  The one thing that most writers have in common is that they all keep journals.  Use your journal to improve your skills and communicate with people.  Who knows, in a hundred years people might be reading your memoirs.  Without some record of your life, you will certainly not be remembered by history.

I took a bit of time this morning and wrote three pages of fiction.  I don’t know what I’m doing writing fiction.  I just tried to make up a story.  The story was not very interesting.  Perhaps I need more conflict in this story.  Perhaps I need better names for things.  It’s hard to just make things up as you go along, but then, it’s probably harder for me to stick to a plan.

I think if I put in a certain amount of work on this project every day I may end up with something I can try to sell.  I don’t read a lot of fiction.  I am just not that interested in people who are trying to save the world.  I find villians far more interesting.  I think I am going to have the main character of my story become a villian.  Of course, how many people would be interested in a story like that.  Still, I could make it something people could identify with on some level.  It just takes a lot of work and time to write fiction.

Anyway, I just stopped by here to see how things are going.  I think I am going to go back and open up my word processor again and see where I can go with this story.  There is only so much typing I can do in a day, but over time it adds up.  The hard part is getting a story I am interested in enough to follow through on to the end.  Long projects have never appealed to me much.  I tend to give up in the middle and let things lie around and gather dust.  Perhaps I can work with what I started this morning and make it interesting.  Rome was not built in a day, as they say, so who knows?  Perhaps I can go somewhere with this fiction project.  At the very least it will be good practice and exercise for my imagination.

If you want to learn how to write, you should write something every day.  It doesn’t really matter what you write, as long as you put the time in and do the work.  Writing is like any other skill.  You learn a skill by practicing it.  There really is no other way to learn how to write.  On top of the improvement you will see in your writing skills, you will also be accumulating a portfolio of work.

I like blogging.  A blog is an excellent place to practice writing.  You not only get to do the work that will improve your skills, but you get to show other people what you do and perhaps get some feedback on what you write.  On top of everything else, you are storing your work online, so if you have a computer failure, you can still get at your writing.  A blog is the perfect place to practice writing and get your name out there in the world.

It is sometimes hard to think of what to write about each day.  You might write your opinion on the latest news.  You might write about something you learned today.  You might write up some experience from your life.  You might write about people you meet.  There are infinite possibilities to write about.  Pick something you are interested in and get to work.  Even if you only write something short each day, over time it will add up to a considerable piece of work.

I try to write several blog posts each day.  This post is my second today.  I have five blogs that I post to, some more than others.  Even if you do not want to share what you write with the world, you can always save work on your own computer and work with a good word processor, or you can go medieval and get a pen and paper and keep notebooks with your work.  Writing is a never-ending learning process, and if you work on it every day, you will eventually get good at this skill.

I’ve been thinking a lot about writing today.  I wrote 1900 words or so about the subjets on my computer.  I still have no idea what I want to write about.  I am just thinking out loud here.  Nobody reads these little random posts I put on this blog.  I think what I want to do is write a novel.  I don’t want to just write any novel, though, I want to write a novel I can sell.  This is a bit of a problem.  A lot of people write novels.  Not a lot of people manage to sell their novels.  Not a lot of the novels that get sold to publishers sell well to the general public.  It is a riddle wrapped in an enigma rolled up in a question mark.  What is a person to do?

So, this afternoon I am going to start yet another project.  It will not be another blog.  I have something like a thousand blog posts and articles already on the net.  The world doesn’t need any more random blog posts like this one.  I don’t know what the world needs.  I know what I need, though, some money.  So, I will get to work on a nice project.  I have spent so much time already doing research.  There is such a thing as thinking too much.  You can think yourself into a corner from which you can never escape.  Enough thinking.  It’s time to create something useful.

I went out to the bookstore this afternoon and looked at various books on writing.  Seems I have read lots of these already.  I read the first chapter or so of the Oxford Essential Guide to Writing, but it seemed a bit basic.  I don’t really need advise on how to form a sentence.  I read over the information on how to find topics to write about.  Basically, what this book says is to find something interesting that you know something about, but not something you know so much about that you will get bored writing about it.  Wow, some obvious information.

Books are expensive these days.  Maybe that’s why I haven’t bought any in a while.  I can’t see paying $20 for a book on how to write comedy that tells me nothing about how to write comedy.  Of course, I still have this book.  Maybe I should take a picture of it and try to sell it here on my blog.  People could bid on it in comments, then send me a money order for the price, plus shipping charges and I would send it off.  Of course, that would be a lot of work, keeping track of all kinds of bids.  Then there would be all the comment email spam in my email account.  More useless words to delete.

I think I gave away something like ten books about writing some years ago.  I am running out of shelf space for books.  I should just put a sign out front saying “Book Store”  and let people browse for something they might be interested in.  I’ve read two or three books on writing this year, and they were a bit non-specific in their information.  I don’t even know why I find myself reading so many writing books.  I am in the middle of one right now about writing horror.  Of course, if you’re reading this you already know that my writing is pretty horrible today.

So, I looked over a lot of books about writing than went to the magazine section to see if they had any mags about writing or literature.  Of course, I had no luck finding these.  I think I just wanted to get out of the house for a while this afternoon.  I’m thinking the future doesn’t look too good for paper book vendors.  I think people will soon be reading more electronic media on their computers.  So, I will continue to visit book stores every week or so until they go the way of the dodo and become extinct.

Back in July I started going to meetings of the Ann Arbor Writers Group on Tuesday evenings at the Arborland Borders bookstore.  Usually about ten people show up.  The meetings are informal and involve people passing out copies of their work, reading the selection, followed by people’s comments.  Most of the writers are working on novels, but I tend to bring in a poem each week.  The meeting is from 7:00 PM to 9:00 PM and any extra work that does not get critiqued is taken care of in the cafe after the regular meeting hours.

The group also holds meetings on Wednesday evenings at a Borders on the west side of Ann Arbor.  If you are in the Ann Arbor area and would like to get some feedback on your writing, you might want to check out this group.  Bring about ten copies of your work to pass around.  Fiction should be double spaced, with a maximum of eight pages.  Bring a pen so you can write comments on people’s work.

You have to get right to the point when you write something for the Internet.

It is best to write in short paragraphs and sentences.

Do not use words that are too unusual.  In general, write as if you are speaking to somebody with a sixth grade education.

Do not write long blocks of dense text.  This scares people and they will click away.

Put your important points in a bulleted list.  This lets people get your main points by scanning.

If you are trying to sell something, write about how your product will benefit your potential customer.

Of course, maybe you don’t care about all the uneducated, textually challenged persons who might find your site and click away because it contains nothing but a lot of words.  In that case, do your best and write what you feel like. On the odd chance somebody reads what you have written and is informed, then you have done your job as a writer.  Who’s to say what you put on the web is wrong anyway?  Write whatever you feel like, and if it’s any good, somebody will read it.

I just spent the last hour reading about libel and sedition laws.  I must have been really bored to have read legal documents like that.  Still, it was fairly interesting.  I don’t know if I actually learned anything, but there was a lot of information there.

I found some kind of law site by searching for the first amendment.  It seems we live in a country with at least some freedom of speech.  We can even criticize the government, which is how I found the whole sedition issue.
It seems in 1798 congress passed something called the sedition act, which made it illegal to talk about overthrowing the government.  So, the courts had to rule on some cases and found that yes, you are allowed to criticize the government as long as you don’t incite anyone to start shooting.  At least that’s what I got out of reading like ten pages of arguments.  It’s hard to get any useful information out of an argument, but that’s all lawyers write about, so it’s what I had to work with.

Libel seems to be trickier.  Apparently it matters in a libel case whether you’re a public figure or a private person.  It seems you can be more critical of public figures, because a lot of people talk about them.  Still, you can’t go around telling malicious lies about people.  It seems to matter as well what your motivation is.  If you are intending to hurt somebody’s reputation it is different than if you just repeat wrong information in good faith.  Figuring out why people do something is why we have a court system, I guess.

So, I read and read and it all seemed so logical.  None of the words were spelled wrong, and although the sentences got a bit convoluted, they all seemed to close up nice and logically.  There were some tricky issues with the whole fighting word thing.  It seems you can piss people off enough to make them attack you just by speaking words to them.  Of course, we all know this is true, but just who should you look to for judgment when some random person is standing there calling you all kinds of insulting names?  It’s hard to make a rational decision when you are blinded by anger.  Usually it’s best to walk away, or run, depending on how bad the person insulting you is trying to get you to start a fight.

So, I was reading about the whole legal issue of free speech and all to pass the time, and you know, you have to consider these things when you write anything for the net.  You don’t want to get people angry at you, but then, you are entitled to speak your mind.  I know on a lot of forums and comment-enabled sites there are people who will leave abusive or threatening posts.  It’s the perceived anonymity of the net that makes people think they can get away with being nasty.  It’s best just to be careful.  If you want to say somebody’s an idiot, perhaps suggest that they lack education.  If some person has a different opinion than you, leave your own opinion instead of an insult.  Communication is about an exchange of ideas, not attempts to enrage your opponent.

We live in a world where people accept violence and anger as forms of entertainment.  Perhaps it’s not surprising that so much animosity finds its way into the popular media.  It’s sad that we need courts to settle people’s disputes, but then, it gives the lawyers something to do.  Maybe I was bored to be reading up on the law, but the world might be a better place if more bored people decided to learn things instead of getting into arguments with each other.

Looked at very basically, there is one way to make money writing.  Write words you can sell.  Of course, there are several ways to sell words.  One of the most obvious ways to sell words is to write a whole slew of them and have them printed up on a stack of paper.  You can then sell this stack of paper as something called a book.  Of course, you don’t have to sell tons of words to make money.  You can write one short article and sell it to a magazine.  You do not even have to sell words to a publisher like a book or magazine publisher, you can sell directly to a corporation.  In this business model, you are a copywriter and write articles that either sell something or explain something.  Very simple.

Generally, there is not a lot of money in writing.  Writers are the low man on the totem pole when it comes to sharing out the cash.  Of course, if you are good and write things that people actually want to read, you can get a better deal from the corporations that sell words.  There is a whole industry in this world that does nothing but sell words.  These businesses are the publishers and their associates, the printers and retailers.  If you write a book of poetry that one hundred people in the world want to read enough to actually buy a copy, you will not make the publishers any money.  If you are J K Rowling and write a series of books about Harry Potter that tens of millions of people buy and read, you will become rich.

How you write is also important.  If you write like a college professor and it takes a degree in quantum physics to understand your article, you are not going to make any money off your writing because there is a limited number of people who can understand what you are trying to say.  If you write a long involved history of Outer Mongolia and have ten thousand footnotes in your book, your market of Outer Mongolian historians is not going to be sufficient to support your writing as a paying proposition.  If you write short, simple sentences that an eight year old can easily understand, there will be millions of people who can enjoy your work.

When you are writing you have to always think about your readers.  Why would anyone want to read what you are writing?  Are you trying to entertain your readers?  Then what you write should be entertaining.  Are you trying to scare your readers?  Then what you write better be scary.  Are you trying to educate your readers?  Then you had better do your research and present your material in a way that is understandable.

If you are trying to sell what you write in the standard channels of paper publishing, you will have to deal with contracts.  A contract is basically an agreement between two parties for the exchange of goods, services, and money.  Most contracts are written in such a way that you will need a law degree in contract law to understand them.  If you write a book and then try to sell it to a publisher you will probably have already fulfilled most of any contract obligations you would owe to a publisher.  Unless you plagiarized your work and did not have the rights to sell it, you should be fine.  If you get involved with a contract to write a book in a given amount of time it will be up to you to do the work and fulfill your end of the bargain.  As long as you do your own work or contract out the work to a freelancer, the publisher will probably not be able to sue you for breach of contract.  Any time money is involved in a transaction there is the possibility of litigation, so try to understand any contracts you sign and abide by the terms you agree to.

Of course you can always act as your own publisher and distribute your work over the Internet.  These days this is a simple operation.  You will still be bound by some general rules if you publish yourself electronically.  You should not publish anything that is slanderous or libelous.  You should not advise people to do dangerous things where they might sue you for reckless endangerment.  You should try not to piss off the government to such a degree that they charge you with something.  In general, what you write should be decent and harmless, in the extent that you are not intentionally advising people to break the law or damage themselves in some way.

Making money off your own writing is always a possibility.  You can either attempt to sell your work directly by charging people a fee to download your book, or to have access to your periodical articles.  If you expect to sell your work to people the same general rules apply as would in the world of paper publishing.  This means you should have useful, true information or an entertaining work of fiction.  From what I hear the fiction market on the net is not really hot.  Ebooks about making money are sold all the time on various hucksterish websites.  Decide for yourself what you want to write about and set up a shopping cart website with PayPal if you want to try your hand at marketing electronic literature.

The last way to make money off your writing is to go into sales.  You can sell advertising space on your website or blog.  Unless you have millions of page views a day this will probably not make you a lot of cash.  You might also sign up to sell various products as an affiliate, in which case you will probably be writing articles about various products and posting links to the main sales site at the end of your sales pitch.  I can’t say advertising makes for very interesting writing, but who knows, you might have your own approach that not only entertains but also sells.

Writing does not have to be only for money.  Of course, I think it was Samuel Johnson who said “None but a blockhead writes for anything but money.”  Perhaps that makes me a blockhead, because I seldom get paid for writing anything.  But who’s to say this hobby won’t turn into a paying proposition?  I doubt that even the most intelligent person in the eighteenth century would have envisioned where the distribution of information would be in the twenty-first century.  The world is changing and this network technology is still young.  I think the free exchange of information opens up more possibilities for the future.  I think in a hundred years historians will look back at the business of paper publishing as an idiotic waste of resources.

All you have to do to find out about these scams is to type those two words into Google.  It seems there are a lot of people in the world who write poetry.  There is a whole industry, an offshoot of the vanity presses, that milks these people of their hard-earned cash.

Here’s how a poetry scam operates:  First, you set up a website or take an advertisement out in a magazine for a poetry contest.  You advertise on this site or in this add some great monetary prize and the possibility of publication.  People send you poems, or upload them to your website through their web browsers.  Then, you have to do a little bit of work.

After you get these people’s poems you send them a form letter.  In this letter you tell them they have submitted a beautiful poem that is just a treasure, and you also inform them that you will be publishing their poem in an anthology.  Then the hook.  You tell your victims that they will only have to pay $59.95 for their own copy of this book, and they can send more money to have a biography or a photograph included in this book.  You might also offer commemorative plaques and award trophies, all for a price that is well above what you pay to have this junk produced.

Then you wait for checks and payments to arrive.  Anyone who orders the book, you include in the anthology.  Anyone who doesn’t send money, you put on a list for follow-up sales.  You take some of the cash you got for this book and buy a good print run from a cheap printer, and you have the books sent out.

Every month or so you have a contest where the grand prize for poet of the year is given out.  You send a letter to your victims telling them about this contest and telling them they can get tickets for a bit over $500.  When enough people send you money, you hold your contest.  You take some of the contest entrance fees and set it aside as a prize for the lucky few who will actually win.  The rest of the money is your profit, and this gets split up and used as salary for your employees.  Remember to keep good records for the government, you wouldn’t want to end up in jail for tax evasion.

Oddly, you wouldn’t think there would be too many of these scams operating.  Actually, there are a lot.  On Google, the search “poetry scam”  returns 166,000 results.  Of course a lot of these results are complaints people have posted against these operations.  Apparently, it is not against the law to run these kind of scams.  Some of the most popular have been operating for many years.  The fact that they call it a contest and sell you books that are never available in stores means that they are not technically breaking the law.

It’s easy to protect yourself from being taken in by any of these operations.  Never give money to anyone who offers to publish or award your work.  This is not how the legitimate publishing industry works.  In a legit operation, the money flows from the readers to the publishers to the authors and printers.  Any publishing operation in which the money goes from the author to the publisher is a scam, and they operate legally because they are selling a product to a customer, the author.

This is the modern age.  If you want to get feedback on your work and distribute it to readers, either submit your work to a legitimate publisher, or bypass all the contracts and nonsense and publish it yourself on the net.  A paper book is nice to read in bed or on an airplane, but aside from that, there is no reason you can not distribute your own work to the world with the power of computers and the Internet.  Of course, now that you know how the game works, you might want to set up your own contest and cash in on all the naive wannabe authors that are in the world.  You better hurry though, the word is getting out and soon it won’t be so easy to fool and rip off so many people.