AKA – the science of my blog entries…ignoring the fact that it bothers me that I have a formula for such a thing.
If y’all stick with me for a moment, I’m going to see if I can pull this off. I have no idea where this blog post is going (yes, despite my rambling I usually have a rough idea), but I’m going to make it work. I’m going to try and draw a writing paralell to what I’m doing at work right now because it’s pretty much the only thing I can think about right now. While I do this, you can experience the wonder that is my formula for writing blog entries.
Step 1: relate personal story that happens to be haunting me at the moment:
I work for a marketing company. For those of you who have never worked in marketing or advertising, there’s something very important to remember. A company pays a marketer to make them more money than the advertising costs. So if Bob’s Hardware pays $200, he wants to make back more in sales than that from the advertising. For the last two weeks I’ve been trying to prove that we’ve done exactly that for one of our clients. This is difficult because 1 – I’m using a lot of information created/assembled by someone who doesn’t work here any more, and I get to guess what most of it means because I don’t have instructions, and 2 – they’re program hasn’t been running long enough to produce tangible results.
Step 2: explain what this has to do with writing.
Umm….brain is telling me I need to figure out some way to relate this to agents, or publishing, or…I’ve got a few options. Let’s go with…getting published takes time, especially if you don’t have any information available at your disposal. Honestly, writing the book is the easy part. You’re welcome to disagree, but that’s how I feel. You get the words on paper, you pour out your heart and soul, and you feel a sense of relief at being able to purge that demon.
But if you want the rest of the world to see it…or even part of the world…you have to expose yourself. And that’s the hard part. It becomes infinitely more difficult if you don’t know how. When I finished my first novel (no, not God’s Girl Friday, the story I claim is my first novel, but something that I shelved long, long ago), I decided I wanted to be published. So I did what any aspiring writer did fifteen years ago when the internet was just AOL/Prodigy/Pipeline wrapped around Usenet. I went to the Barnes and Noble (we did have those back then with the dinosaurs…I think) and bought myself a Writer’s Market book. I bought the year previous because that one was cheeper, and figured if any of the publishers were no longer accepting submissions, they’d tell me so when I queried for guidelines.
As I got into the process, I realized I had no idea how to do half (okay, most) of what they were talking about. Querying for guidelines, sample chapters, synopsis, finding an agent. ACK! Kind of like when someone at work stuck this old logic in front of me and said “make this give us numbers”
The internet makes research a whole lot easier, if you know how to wade through opinions and how to temper it all with reason. Yes, I’m talking about publishing and work.
Step 3: Figure out how to finish with a question, because we all like to talk about ourselves, and asking readers a question is a way to engage them and know you care about their opinions. (AKA – it’s how you get comments ^_^)
So…how do you integrate other lessons learned in life to writing? Do you use it for character development, plot, the business end of things? Something else?
Or if you’d prefer, anyone else have as transparent a formula for blogging as me? I didn’t start out this way, it just happened.