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Growing Your Readership (and Mine)

Tfile000401942226his week, Jane Friedman posted a video of her talk from the 2013 Midwest Writers Workshop on Audience Development. In the video, she shares her experience with starting a website: the quiet beginning, the learning curve, and the principles of cultivating readers “over the span of your career.”

Jane Friedman has over 180,000 (180 THOUSAND!!) followers on Twitter and tens of thousands of hits on her website daily. If you’re interested in readership and author platform, this video is worth the twenty minute investment of your time.

What I love most about her talk, besides her honest and humble perspective on how this all works, is her approach to any new (or ongoing) professional project, two simple words that I view as the underlying current in my work and writing:

Incremental improvement.

Writing as a craft is similar to audience development in that it grows or improves inch by inch. Page by page. On those days when I get caught up in (what seems to be) a lack of progress–on a story or on the novel–I need only look back on the last few months to see that I have been moving forward. In tiny increments.

As usual, it’s all about perspective.

And speaking of incremental improvement….

I’m also progressing to a new way for subscribers of this blog to receive email notifications when new posts go live:

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After Google Reader fell to the wayside, I turned to WordPress’ Jetpack plugin for readers to sign up via email. In the last several months, though, Jetpack has been letting in suspicious email subscribers–with login names like “puzzledhelp” and server tags like “topsandal” and a few risqué logins that might fit in better if I wrote erotica. Mmm hmmm…shady, if you ask me. The logins, that is. If you write erotica, more power to you. But, I digress….

While I love seeing my numbers rise, I don’t like thinking some tech worm has wiggled its way into my site. So, from here on out any subscriptions to this blog will run through a MailChimp campaign. I’ll be able to manage subscribers with a little more ease and comfort, and you’ll be able to manage your subscription with a little more control as well.

If you’re already subscribed, you don’t have to resubscribe. But, I do ask two things of you:

  1. First and foremost: if you receive more than one notification from me next week, please accept my apologies. I’m hoping, as I deactivate Jetpack and transfer everything over to Mail Chimp, everything will run smoothly and you’ll only see one email from me. But, technology isn’t always my friend.
  2. Should you receive more than one email from this site, feel free to unsubscribe from the email that does NOT include the MailChimp electronic stamp. If you have any trouble with this, contact me.

Incremental improvements. Little by little. Your patience is greatly appreciated.

(If, by chance, you’re not yet subscribed but would like to, MailChimp makes it easy. Just click the link on the sidebar.)

Are you able to see the progress–little by little–on your own projects, writing or otherwise?

* Photo credit: FlyingPete on morguefile.com

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Taking It All In: Details in Writing (& a Prompt)

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Lately, I feel like I’ve blathered on and on about how we incorporate details in our writing:

Enough is enough, right?

Or, is it?

Every time I come across a new article on the way details work in crafting a good story, I learn something new, or I am reminded of a forgotten element of the technique. Either way, how I use details keeps resurfacing in my work and in my discussions about the work, so I’d best keep listening.

In her essay, “Everything Has a Name (Or, How Gardening Made Me a Better Writer),” on Grub Street Daily, Celeste Ng hits on why writers must continue to hone this skill:

[Y]our job, at its heart, is to give everything—objects, events, emotions—its precise name.  Not “flower,” but He was waiting for the geranium.  Not “summer,” but Heat. A baseball field. Yellow grass, the whirr of insects.  Not “beauty,” but this clean bare plane of the top of her chest down from the shoulder bones like a dented sheet of metal tilted in the light. . . .To be a writer, you don’t need to have the name of every plant, or every tool, or every bird, at the ready.  But you need to find it, to point your finger and make the reader slow down, pay attention, look closer.

Slow down. Pay attention.

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Your work will translate into a better read for your audience.

The Prompt

Lost or Found. Write about something you lost or something you found.

Consider the specificity of your details. Don’t dress them in adjectives but give them names.

* Photo credit: Microphone, doctor_bob on Morguefile.com; Kids, me.

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Writing Memoir: the Side Effects of Telling the Truth

“There is a ripple effect each time a memoir is published, and while the memoirist cannot fully prepare for it, he or she should expect it.” ~ Anthony D’Aries in Writing Lessons: Memoir’s Truth and Consequences

file0001997823143Several years ago, I was pushing my daughter in the stroller while on a walk, and I came upon a story. Near my house, I passed a young girl sitting on her front steps. She was skinny, maybe thirteen. She looked bored. Then, I heard people I can only assume were her parents yelling at each other inside the house, their voices loud enough so that every word resounded as clear as the intonation behind it. I slowed my pace and gave a tentative wave. When the girl glanced up at me, I thought I saw the faint trace of a black eye.

At first, I kept on walking, doubting myself but wondering. Then, I turned around and asked if everything was okay. She looked at me like I was crazy. Like everything going on around her, behind her, and in spite of her, was just another day in Normal. Parents argue, they yell. This young girl waits it out.

Impressed by the image and by her indifference (and maybe by a little of my own guilt in walking away), I wrote “Red Velvet Sunday.”

Later, I had the opportunity to read that story on the radio, and I shared the link to the episode with family and friends. Even though the story was fiction, someone close to me said they hoped the story wasn’t born out of real life experiences. “Not a bit!” I said, completely surprised, and I wondered what they and others might think if I did write bits and pieces of truth.

When writing memoir, facts are set down easily enough; it’s everything in between—and the potential effects afterward—that presents the challenge. Andrew D’Aries warns the memoirist in his quote above, but a write can only prepare for so much.

I’m talking truth in memoir at Write It Sideways this week in a post that’s generating some great discussion. I hope you’ll stop by and leave your thoughts.

Writers love dialogue.

Read it here: Telling the Truth in Memoir: More Than Just Facts

*Photo credit: biberta on morguefile.com