Category: Writing

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Back At It, Again

Not too long ago I started reading a book entitled The Divine Guide to Creating a Daily Writing Practice by Pernille Norregaard, a free book I downloaded to my Kindle a little over a year ago. It’s a pretty good book if you are a struggling writer, or have designs on becoming one. Although it’s loaded with tips, the main point is clear from the title – if you want to write, you need to have a daily writing practice.

Something I don’t.

If you take a look at the graphic that opens this article, you can see that my writing practice, at least for this blog, has been nil for nearly a year and a half. In fact, the last article I published here was nothing more than a re-post of an Associated Press article on Dec 31, 2015.

I started this blog over five years ago with a couple of ideas in mind; first, I intended to write often and consistently, as in say, a Daily Writing Practice. At the time, it seemed like a really good idea and something I felt like I could and would do. I thought that frequent writing would help me improve my writing. It made sense to me that the more one writes, the better they become.

Well, I failed miserably.

Not only have I not written often or consistently, I’m not sure there’s been any improvement in my writing. I’ve certainly failed this blog.

Time after time I’ve started writing; fully intending to publish frequently on this blog and make it what I wanted it to be from the beginning. It’s not as if I can’t write. I think I’ve proven I can with the articles I have published. Comments from readers over the years seem to confirm that occasionally I could write rather well. It’s not as if I have nothing to write about. Anyone living in today’s world can find plenty of things to write about if they want, including me. It’s really just always been a matter of utter laziness and a complete lack of motivation.

So tonight it’s time for a change.

So if you are a kind soul and have a mind to, wish me well and stop by on occasion to see if I succeed.

And if you’re not and you don’t, stop by anyway.

Featured

Writing Success on WordPress

Courtesy Wikimedia Commons
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons

In my last post, I talked about the “Perfect Reader” from the point of view of the writer. I discussed several things that I believe define you and I as writers, because, truth be told, if you are reading this, you are probably writing something in your own blog – which makes you a writer. Maybe I have read it, maybe I haven’t; maybe I am your “perfect reader” and maybe I’m not. Either way, I applaud you for taking a chance writing and publishing what you wrote. Whether one person read it or one hundred thousand people read it, what does it matter? The most important thing is you wrote it and put it out in your little corner of cyberspace for someone else to read. For what you want is someone to read it. You really want someone to like it, maybe like it a lot, and in doing so, validate your existence as a writer. You might want to get paid for your writing – and in doing so, validate yourself even more as a writer.

I know I do. I would like that very much.

The question is, can you and how do you do it on WordPress? I don’t know if you can or not, but I believe I’ve figured out a couple of things in the nearly three years I have been blogging here. First thing is this: I believe writing your blog here on WordPress.com is probably the best place one can write and get the most exposure for their writing. Certainly it is for a novice writer. But, it is not the perfect place, and here is why.

Unless you are already an established writer with a huge following, your ability to capture readers, especially a lot of readers, is dependent on three things. First: your topic and the quality of the writing about your topic. Let’s face it, nobody is going to read atrocious writing, at least not for very long. Second: your timing and the tags you use must be spot on. Exposure, I believe, is a momentary piece of timing and luck. In other words, you have a very short period of time for readers to view your post and be compelled enough to read it and decide if it merits enough effort to investigate your blog further. Third: I believe anything you post is going to fail the timing and exposure tests unless you have a great, or at least good photo to go along with it. I believe this based on my own experience: To date, I have published 88 posts to this blog. Of those 88, the top three posts with the most “Likes” all included decent photographs. In descending order, they are: Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life | 2, “Super Sport” | Photo Challenge – Letters, and Weekly Photo Challenge: Street Life.

So, there you have it – my little three cents worth on how we as writers might, if we are lucky, and we write well enough, and we can either take, borrow or steal a great photo, we might just make it as writers on WordPress…and if we are really, truly, remarkably lucky…we might just get our piece Freshly Pressed.

So go out there and do it. Give it your best shot. And, good luck!