The Slow Blog

Breathe, relax, breathe, let it come through. (Photo credit: honor the gift)

I received a terrific and helpful link this morning to an article by Anne R. Allen. In the article she talks about the Slow Blog Manifesto and what it means, as well as what it can do for the writer in general. I’ve fallen in love. I admit it.

For the first time in three years, I’m getting the kind of advice that makes sense to me as a writer of something other than blogs. Anne enumerated the eight Slow Blog Manifesto rules for long-term success as follows:

1) A slow blog has a longer life-span.

2) You reach more people by commenting on other people’s blogs than by madly posting on a blog nobody reads.

3) Busy people are less likely to subscribe/follow a blog that’s going to clutter their email inbox/rss feed every day. 

4) Everybody has bad days. When you have to think of something to say on the day you got that nasty/clueless review/rejection, your emotions are going to leak out.

5) Nobody can come up with that many interesting posts. When you slow blog, and you don’t have anything to say, you don’t have to say it.

6) Writing nonfiction—which is what you should be writing on your blog—uses a different part of your brain from fiction.

7) You write narrative–remember? The blog is supposed to be about getting your name out there as a creative writer. It’s an aid to your serious writing, not a substitute for it.

8) Trying to blog every day is impossible to keep up, so you’ll constantly feel guilty. 

With these rules to go by, I no longer have to feel guilty for not having new material here each day, or on any other of my sites. I can take pride in having one good piece a week that readers can take away and think about and, perhaps, utilize in their own daily activities or thoughts. And readers don’t have be slammed with announcements, notifications, and guilt for not looking in on my blogs each day.

Suddenly numbers of hits makes more sense to me. If I begin living my blogging life by these eight rules, I have more time to work on large projects, give more quality content to my readers, and still feel as if I’ve accomplished something during the week. That’s a big deal around here.

So, for those of my readers who feel pressured to read here each day or even every other day, rest assured that as the month progresses, your labor here is be lessened and, hopefully, you’ll have some terrific things to take away when you do come by. Perhaps you’ll see an interview with an editor you’ve yet to know, or an indie publisher that you might need in future.

And if you’d really like to look at the original Slow Blog Manifesto, you’ll learn all of the reasoning and the projected benefits to such a course of action.

I’ll see you all in a couple of days. I can’t let go quite that fast. I still have things to do this month.

Please take a moment, as well, to pop over to my new collaborative site—Two Voices, One Song—to view a new post behind the Red Door and one in the Home Theater. I think you’ll enjoy both of them.

Until your next visit, a bientot,

Claudsy

  Related articles

• How often to blog (or not)? A new blogger/writer’s perspective (katenewburg.wordpress.com)
• Who Authenticates the Blogged Word? The Publishers or the Readers? (Feature) (popmatters.com)
• How To Choose A Niche For Your New Blog (dailymorningcoffee.com)

Whether Love or Not

 

Writers are strange creatures. We wander around our world, a love and hate relationship with that thing we do called writing. Beneath all the setbacks, the frustrations, and the seemingly endless revisions, we cannot quit being writers.

Dream leads to storylines. Storylines pulse through us until we cannot stand the beat any longer and we must DO something with them. It doesn’t matter if we believe they’re good, fully functioning ideas with potential for greatness. What matters is that we thought of them, felt a sharp pricking sensation when they flashed through our minds, and they whispered to us.

This relationship we have with our writing fluctuates with the events and daily routines of our other lives; our lives outside of sitting at the keyboard and communing with the inside of our heads and the movies playing there. It flutters as butterfly wings on the verge of take-off; delicate in form and newness, steel-strong in carrying power. It surges as tides of vibrant, sometimes stereophonic, images that wash over the outward reality of the moment, escorting us to places beyond, among those who don’t frequent our neighborhood.

Dramas vie with sweet romance, which oft-times takes a detour through the war zones of our world to pause amid the childlike wonder created by harpies that fill the skies with black ragged wings and voices ready to pierce metal armor, while children stand ready to protect the innocent from harm.

Along the way, laughter bursts forth from words penned by housewives who profess a lack of understanding as to why the world operates as it does, who keep asking for logic, knowing that human machinations has little of that commodity. Music may soothe the savage breast, but words linger within our spirits, to uplift or depress according to their emotional impact. That is the power of what we do.

Uneasiness with influence and power may hold us static for a time. Fear may prevent us from exhibiting our writing wares as often as we’d dreamed, but it cannot prevent our words from finding release. Like life, writers will always find a way.

Photographers know the plight of the writer. Seeing an incredible sunset and not having a camera in hand, is worse than having a fantastic idea for a story or article—far worse. The photographer can only stand and admire the gift of God’s colors and design while it lasts. When twilight rules, it is gone forever. It cannot be recreated as it was. The writer carries her camera of ideas within her head. Recreating them, while not always simple, is doable.

Musicians straddle that fence of creativity between photographers and writers. They paint their images with musical notes. Like writers there is no physical image involved. The musician’s frustrations are like the writers’ when notes won’t come together as conceived or when concern erupts that patterns of notes are as another composer’s previous music. That concern reflects on a writer’s work as well.

Creative design work, regardless of type, generates that love/hate dynamic within the artist. An artist is what a person is, not what she chooses to be. Non-artists can do the work. That’s true. Non-artists can also put it away and never touch it again.

Artists can’t.

Regardless of how deep the chasm between our love of what do and our dissatisfaction with it, we keep returning to the keyboard, the pad of paper, the piano or guitar, the camera or the carving tools. Painters, in water or oil, acrylics or pastels, must find release.

There is no craving for us. There is only a need to release what is fomenting inside us, within our minds. To deny that surge of creative energy is to deny ourselves.

Whether Ready or Not

 

“Ninety-eight, ninety-nine, one hundred… Ready or not, here I come.”

That’s how most of us remember playing Hide and Seek; a bunch of giggling and squealing kids racing around, desperate for a hiding place, one slightly peeking “it” person with head buried—not too seriously—within her arms against a tree/wall, and an anticipated thrill of the hunt.

Being a writer is very much like that game played during childhood. We never forget the rules of the game. We continue to chase, with the anticipation of the hunt, counting days instead of seconds until we hear back from a publication about a submission, and squealing with delight when we make a connection with an editor who likes our material.

We understand that, sooner or later, we’ll get caught peeking when we shouldn’t. Editors tend to frown on those writers whose patience runs out before their manuscripts have had time to go through the editorial process. The ability to wait without fussing keeps editors happy.

The game is played the same way, regardless of which aspect we’re facing.

The game parameters that cover territory available for play are decided first. For instance, if we’re doing a preliminary work-up for a new story, novel, essay, or other lengthy prose piece, certain devices and work gets done first. Synopses, character studies, full outlines and the like are usually thought out to some degree before actual writing begins. It’s understood that these will change as writing continues.

Some writers, like me, have done preliminary work in their heads and will wait until after their writing begins before nailing down specifics in an outline. Other writers jot down entire scenes as they pop into the mind and string those scenes together into a loose story later, as a kind of first draft. However the writer chooses to design their work requires planning, whether subconscious or not.

During the writing process, bits of research necessary to the story can be as wily as any good Hide and Seek player. Winkling out the precise information needed can be tricky and time consuming; like racing from one likely hidey hole to another, looking for the last kid hiding. It takes forethought and planning about the likeliest search pattern to dispel one’s frustration in the search.

Once all the players are accounted for within the writing search, a huge chunk of the work is completed. That chunk, comprised of precise words and phrases, information for accuracy, and the most effective organization of the material, determines the rest of the hunt.

Polishing the copy, finding the best markets for submission, whether to agent or publication, and writing either query letters or cover letters take the writer to that moment of true anticipation about possible outcomes. Soon only patience and distraction will take over. A need to write something else will emerge to move the writer back to the keyboard.

Playing Hide and Seek this way never grows dull. It can be exasperating, tedious, inexplicably easy, and all stages in between, but never really dull. Perhaps that’s why those of us who knew from an early age that they needed to write can never put it away. The game hides within us, seeking expression, whether anyone ever reads our words or not. We must still play.