Writing

[Flickr credit: matsuyuki.] Lorelle spells out, at Blog Herald, the three sources that your web traffic comes from: search engines, links, word of mouth. Which one are you writing for? She offers some of the most convincing reasoning for focusing on “word of mouth” – a powerful form of communication now and throughout history. Write for word of mouth traffic, she says, and traffic from other sources will follow.

Another facet of that question is, “Who are you writing for?” I’d like to pass on some advice about writing that I learned a long time ago, which I’ve just rediscovered scribbled in an old notebook of mine. If you want your writing to be impactful and/or meaningful, write for someone that cares about you and what you have to say.

To clarify, while you write, imagine that you are writing directly for this person – in order to tell them a story, relate an experience to them, or teach them about something. Choose anyone that you know will listen to you in person, no matter what you’re talking about. (When I wrote for print, that person was my maternal grandmother. She doesn’t understand much English, but she enjoyed listening to her oldest grandchild. Since becoming a busy blogger, though, I’d forgotten about this technique.)

When you consciously write for someone that “cares”, your writing takes on an intangible quality that other readers will appreciate – whether they realize why or not. You’ll also find yourself taking care about how and what you write.

If you do this – that is, write from the heart, for the heart – then it doesn’t matter how many other bloggers are writing about the same thing. While being unique is preferable, your writing will still stand out. The links will come, and as Lorelle says, the search traffic will follow.

My own best writing in print – at least from my point of view – was produced with this approach. My forgettable writing – not so much. If you’ve never done this before, it’s something you might have to work at. In the bustle of blogging, it’s easy to forget even after you’ve achieved it. So ask yourself every so often, “Who am I writing for?”

If you thought white papers to promote your business were out and blogging in, join the club. But apparently there’s life in them yet. Brian Clark at Copyblogger talks about how white papers earn author Mike Stelzner $300K/year. There’s an affiliate link in that post to a free video where Stelzner discusses how he got into this writing niche. There are also additional free videos and other materials via subscription, some of which Brian is part of.

The video focuses on writing white papers for your business, but Stelzner earns his six-figure income from the fees he charges for writing white papers. So there are two ways that white papers can be beneficial to you, depending on whether you’re a business owner or freelance writer.

While writing white papers may not be for everyone, if you think you have the stamina to write a well-structured, expert document that’s longer than a blog post, you should look into this opportunity.

I have been playing around with two products, WriteRoom and Dark Room, which allow users the ability to edit text in a completely isolated environment. Essentially, these editors give users the ability to focus on the text, and only the text. For the professional blogger/writer, one of these text editors might become invaluable to your writing process.

Some of you will find either of these applications to be worthy as your new primary text editor, but the rest of you will think they are far to primitive, but if you are the former, like one of my followers on Twitter, you will absolutely love the concept of being able to write without distraction.

Another user on Twitter messaged me stating that text editing tools were the last things that distracted him while writing. I find that the text editor I utilize happens to have a dramatic impact on how productive I am when writing. For example, I have a difficult time using web-based text editors (like the built-in WordPress editor), but I absolutely enjoy using an application like Windows Live Writer and ecto to write my articles.

These applications will probably generate no interest for quite a few of you, but I have already decided to incorporate WriteRoom into my workflow. It is a throwback that I absolutely love, and I am usually the one that loves the fancy interfaces.

WriteRoom

WriteRoom is the first product that was created (as Dark Room is simply a clone of WriteRoom). Built for the Mac operating system (now supporting OS X 10.4 or later), WriteRoom was designed to eliminate the common distractions that are apparent with most text editing environments today. The application eliminates formatting, graphs, spacing, pictures, and more by focusing on only the most important aspect of a writing—the words.

A few features highlighted from the WriteRoom website:

• Full-screen editing Get free from your computer and its distractions. WriteRoom’s full-screen mode hides it all away leaving just you and your text behind.
• Document based auto-save Your documents are stored in standard text file formats and autosaved in the background to help protect your work in case the power goes out.
• Distraction free features The menu bar, scroll bar, and word count appear when you move your mouse to the edge of the screen.
• ‘Retro’-fit your cursor Prefer block cursors to bars? Hate blinking cursors? WriteRoom has every combination you’d want.
• Standalone or Edit-In Use WriteRoom on its own for all your text editing needs, or let WriteRoom be your ticket to full-screen editing for text in any compatible program.

WriteRoom is not without a price—$25 might be out of bounds for some, but I would urge everyone with a recent Mac based computer to at least give WriteRoom a try. There is a free 30 day trial, and that should be plenty of time to try the application out. However, the price is warranted because WriteRoom is continually upgraded—unfortunately, its Windows counterpart, Dark Room, does not receive the same benefit.

Dark Room

Dark Room, as mentioned before, is simply a clone of WriteRoom for the Windows platform. It is very similar in functionality, and it delivers as promised. As a matter of fact, there is almost little point in having a section for Dark Room, but there are some critical differences outside of the application itself that I must point out.

Dark Room is free, but that is also as a result of there not being as many upgrades or support. Also, and unfortunately, there is no support for Vista (yet), and this might be a turn off if you happen to use Dark Room and wish to switch to Vista in the future. Perhaps everyone should e-mail the author and ask for an upgrade. Regardless, if you are on a Windows XP machine, I think you should give it a shot—after all, it is free!

Recap

Virginia Huffernan of The New York Times put it better than I ever could have:

But if, when it comes right down to it, full screen is your holy grail, and the ultimate antidote to the bric-a-brac of Word, then you must enter the WriteRoom, the ultimate spartan writing utopia. Where Scrivener calls itself a “writer’s shed,” which suggests implements like duct tape and hoes, WriteRoom pitches itself as the way to “distraction-free writing” for “people who enjoy the simplicity of a typewriter, but live in the digital world.” With WriteRoom, you don’t compose on anything so confining as paper or its facsimile. Instead, you rocket out into the unknown, into profound solitude, and every word of yours becomes the kind of outer-space skywriting that opens “Star Wars.” What I mean is this: Black screen. Green letters. Or another color combination of your discerning choice. But nothing else.

*Emphasis added in bold type.

Oh, and did I mention that there is actually a free web-based clone of WriteRoom as well? Try DarkCopy (select full screen mode) if you want to try it out without downloading anything. I actually wrote part of this post on DarkCopy, and I really enjoy it, but you would really want to download WriteRoom or Dark Room if you wanted to work in a production environment.

Does the minimalistic full-screen view make you happy or afraid? Do you think that we have become too focused on fancy markup and formatting, that the words themselves are sometimes an after-thought?

Give WriteRoom, Dark Room, and/or DarkCopy a try and let me know what you think. It is a twist on text editing for sure, but I have already begun to believe that my productivity has improved by simply becoming less distracted.

[Image Credit: WriteRoom Main Screen—HogBaySoftware]

Outlining an article is one of the most productive things you can do to improve your workflow while blogging. Creating the outline for this article required only about two minutes to complete, and it will have saved me at least 15 minutes worth of editing time in the end on a typical article like this.

Ironically enough, it was only yesterday when I tried to write a short article without creating my usual outline. I spent around 30 minutes trying to reorder the content correctly as I didn’t want to start over. In the process, I nearly decided to scratch the whole article, but I have heavily revised it since then and will post it soon. This is why it is important to create an outline for all your articles.

My Outline Process

I have never before attempted to define my outlining process for writing, but I will do so as I best can right now. I have broken it down into four steps, and it is fairly simple—nothing too mind blowing here. Still, some people fail to do anything like this, and it is a shame that the short time planning out an article is skipped, but then more time is required to get the finished product.

Steps To Creating An Outline:

1. Come Up With An Idea

The first part in the creation of an outline is to have a solid theme/topic to work with. You must have something to blog about in order to continue the writing process, but some people start writing without having an overall idea as to what they will end up with. I would not suggest starting an article without at least having a basic idea of what you will end up with, but to each his/her own.

2. List Your Ideas

The next order of business would be to, essentially, create a list of each heading for your content. I sometimes like to create a list of the first sentence of each paragraph (which is the next step), but I mostly create a heading for each paragraph of content (as seen above). This method is simple, and it requires little time to place down multiple ideas.

3. Introductory Sentences

After I am done with creating my basic outline which consists of a header for each paragraph, I will then fill in the introductory sentence to the paragraph. This sentence should be the idea which the paragraph discusses; therefore, it should be easy to analyze the flow of your article if you take the time to do this step. Also, it should decrease the amount of time you take to actually write the rest of your article as you don’t have to interrupt yourself to think about what your going to write as often.

4. Check For Theme, Clarity, and Flow

After all the introductory sentences are filled in, I then give them a detailed read to imagine the content that will be written for those paragraphs to make sure the flow of the article is correct. As I have written before in previous articles for Performancing, the time taken right now to plan out your article will save you a lot of time later fixing mistakes.

It Just Works

These methods are simple ways to organize your ideas and maximize productivity. I have repeatedly stressed the importance of planning out your articles, and even if it is a 300 – 500 word article, it still warrants some planning. This was just some insight as to how I plan out all of my articles. It works for 500 word articles like this one, but I also have used it for 3,000 word articles that I have written in the past and right now.

Hopefully you have found a way to improve your workflow. Planning out your content is the best way to reduce the amount of editing you will have to do later on.

If you have a unique way to plan out your articles, please let everyone know in the comments section. I am open to learning new ways to decrease the time I spend writing.

This info was originally posted in Performancing’s Hive Community (which you should join!)

What I usually do when I write a listbait is:

1) come up with headline (defines the concept)
2) brainstorm list until I’m exhausted
3) remind myself that this is not a mid-term exam
4) write 1 sentence per item in the list (the “justification” for each item)
5) remove any items I can’t write 1 sentence for
6) pray that the sentence writing helped clarify my line of thought and jogs my mind for a few more items
7) Remove the chaff
8) Flesh out content with pics, videos, links
9) Identify a number
10) Refine the headline to fit the final content

In my view, the key to writing bait is not objectivity, but being comfortable with subjectivity and opinion. Strong, well-formed opinion that appeals to the emotions (or creates mental drama of some sort) is almost always the kind that performs the best.

It is a pleasure and honor to welcome Mr. Larry W. Phillips. In 1984, he was the editor for a book that has become an essential tool for the contemporary writer: “Ernest Hemingway on Writing.” The book is available on Amazon.com.

Preface to his Book on Mr. Hemingway

“This book contains Hemingway’s reflections on the nature of the writer and on elements of the writer’s life, including specific and helpful advice to writers on the craft of writing, work habits, and discipline. The Hemingway personality comes through in general wisdom, wit, humor, and insight, and in his insistence on the integrity of the writer and of the profession itself.”

Similar Career Path as Mr. Hemingway

Mr. Phillips, a native of Monroe, Wisconsin, began his writing career as a reporter for the United Country Courier newspaper. Before focusing upon books, he authored many magazine and newspaper articles.

Published Books

Covering the Second Coming
F. Scott Fitzgerald on Writing
Ernest Hemingway on Writing
Madison Retro
The Tao of Poker
Zen and the Art of Poker

Ernest Hemingway and “The Old Man and the Sea.”

Larry, please accept a warm welcome.

Thanks, it’s a pleasure Steve. I’m just going to write the answers to your questions off the top of my head– which may be the best way. I’m a big believer in “free association” (as distinct from stream of consciousness).

You were born and raised in Wisconsin. What attracted you to the writing profession, and who were some of your early mentors?

I’d say Hemingway was an early mentor. And possibly Mark Twain. Also, as a kid I remember watching episodes of the “Twilight Zone” on TV and keeping a notebook and writing down the plots to each episode. It’s hard to think why I did that. It just seemed somehow so cool that a plot-twist in a half-hour TV show could have such a big impact on a person. I guess I got curious about that, and why it was.

One my favorite quotes by Mr. Hemingway was “Newspaper work will not harm a young writer and could help him if he gets out of it in time.” Since you began as a reporter, how does that quote resonate with your own experience, and what lessons from that period assisted you as your career progressed into other areas?

This is a good question and a big subject. I think numerous dangers lurk in journalism for the writer who wants to go beyond journalism. Bloggers are actually closer to having the kind of freedom to really develop as writers, IMO, than journalists. I’ll give an exaggerated answer here, in order to show what I mean.

A journalist has limitations. He can’t use slang, he can’t use the way real people talk (often), he can’t (or isn’t supposed to) include his opinion, can’t mention personal beliefs or convictions, isn’t supposed to draw conclusions, can’t use obscenity, can’t use long, odd or quirky sentences, can’t say anything bad about a company or product (you may get sued), can’t make the story too long, and on and on—I could list many other limitations. It’s rather like a painter being told to go paint a picture, but without using yellow, blue, red, green, brown, black, or purple. This is an exaggeration, as I say, but it hints at what the problem is, and what Hemingway was getting at.

What were your motivations and goals behind the book on Mr. Hemingway?

My exact motivation, oddly (and laughingly) enough, was that I had a file of Hemingway quotes and I was looking for a couple of quotes and couldn’t find them. And this had happened to me before. I became so frustrated that I decided to start at one end of Hemingway and go through to the other and collect all the quotes. In the end I had enough to send to Charles Scribner’s Sons, the publisher. A motivation then was to create a small book for college students based on Hemingway’s observations.

Could you please share a few of your favorite quotes?

I think the Hemingway quote about “finding the thing that makes the emotion” is very valuable advice to a writer. And the one about “making” a scene rather than just describing it. The latter is kind of what journalism does, while the former refers to recreating in the reader what it felt like to be there. That’s the difference.

In your opinion, what was Mr. Hemingway’s legacy on literature and how we write today? For example, what might have been his perspective about the Internet and blogging?

Hemingway should be studied, I think, just to see how he did it. He has some rather amazing word constructions and turns of phrase. The lesson is not to write like him, but rather to mull over the act of writing itself, and think about it. What does repetition mean? What does page after page of just dialogue mean? What does paring things down to the bare essential mean? What do I have permission as a writer to do or not do? Hemingway’s style is not really the way people write these days, but there are things to be learned from it.

Two of the most influential American writers of the 20th century were F. Scott Fitzgerald and Ernest Hemingway. Since you have written books about both men, and read many of their personal correspondence, could you compare and contrast their writing styles and personalities?

I think I wrote in the preface to the Fitzgerald book something to the effect that Hemingway was a “today-is-the-first-day-of-the-rest-of-your-life” kind of guy. He was always “breaking the plane” into the existential present. Fitzgerald saw things just the opposite, as a kind of “whole”, a kind of waltz on a yellow afternoon, seeing the whole of it, from A-to-Z. Fitzgerald’s particular writing trick– and a very difficult one to duplicate, even when you know what it is– was to “make things do things”. Shadows move against dressing-room blinds, stars “stir and bustle” and “neat sad waltzes” drift out through open doors. This is much harder than it looks to pull off. Fitzgerald also seems to key his writing to the continuation of a mood, rather than a plot. He’ll keep the same mood going, from scene to scene, and take up the book at whatever point necessary to do this, and the plot trails along almost secondarily. His books are the story of a mood (though the mood may change as the story goes along).

In your opinion, what are the necessary traits and attributes for a contemporary writer?

There’s a saying in the poker world, “It depends”. Should I raise, should I fold, should I check-raise in this particular situation? It depends. It’s the same for writing. It depends on what you want to get out of it. I read bits and pieces of a lot of blogs. Every so often you read one that is crushingly boring (for lack of a better word). You’ve all seen these. “I got up about 8:30 a.m. I made coffee. I moved the potted plant from the dining room into the kitchen. I called Julia. I looked out the window. About 11 o’clock I went to the grocery store.” And so on. Clearly, this person is never going to be ascending the steps to the podium taking down the National Book Award. But if this is what they want to get out of it– and maybe it is– it could be a form of perfection or something.

For everyone else I would advise: try to get down to the next level below the obvious level. There is a kind of obvious level that exists that we all operate on in our day, but just underneath this there are a lot of things going on of what we all really think. I’ll use an example from something I’ve been working on, about the decade of the 1950’s. The obvious level is the Tinker Toys and Lincoln Logs level. The level just underneath that is the way Tinker Toys tasted when you bit into them, the wood smell of the can, the sound the can made when you were filling it up, and so on. There is a kind of secondary level like this to everything. Look for it. Proust, in particular, was very good at drawing the curtain back on this level. After you read some of him, you start seeing it everywhere– and you realize it was always there.

Let’s turn to poker. On your website, you describe it as your vocation. When did your passion for poker begin?

Oh, I’ve been playing poker since I was a kid. Somewhere about in my 30’s I thought it would be a good idea to start spending a lot of time playing cards on riverboats in the Mississippi. I find high stakes poker players and world class poker players to be very interesting people. It’s kind of like the old joke about the mafia. “How do you know if someone is in the mafia?” Answer: “Well, if they are sitting in a restaurant and the person next to them gets hit in the head by an anvil, and they don’t even look up, then they’re in the mafia.” It’s kind of the same with world class poker players. Something like that happens and they don’t even flinch. There’s just something interesting about it. It’s almost like professional actors who you might meet. Most of them are great story-tellers too.

After viewing the titles of your poker books, is it accurate to say that you view the topic as more of an art than a science?

It’s just something you never quite get to the bottom of. Just when you think you know it all, you confidently bet 40,000 chips in a tournament, and a young kid across from you wearing music headphones and a cap turned around backwards, lights up with an expression like, “Aha! I’ve finally got him!” and he reraises you all-in for 200,000 more… So you fold your hand, and he turns his cards over to show you that he had nothing at all. Two terrible cards. It’s like that. You just never quite get ahead of it, or learn it all.

Kenny Rogers wrote a famous song called, “The Gambler.”

“You got to know when to hold em, know when to fold em,
Know when to walk away and know when to run.
You never count your money when you’re sittin’ at the table.
There’ll be time enough for countin’ when the dealin’s done.

Now every gambler knows that the secret to survivin’
Is knowin’ what to throw away and knowing what to keep.
Cause every hands a winner and every hands a loser,
And the best that you can hope for is to die in your sleep.”

Besides knowing when to hold them and when to fold them, what are other key factors for successful professional gambling?

Well, with regard to line 3 (above), you better count your money when you’re sitting at the table, especially if you’re playing any kind of big bet poker, such as pot limit or no limit hold’em. You need to know not only how deep your own stack is (for strategic purposes), but how deep everyone else’s stack at the table is, because it’s going to influence how you play the hand.

As far as professional gambling goes, there is very less of this going on than the lay person knows– the number of successful gamblers (over a large sample of time) is actually pretty small. This would include probably fewer than 10 or 20 people (if that) who actually know what they’re doing in sports betting handicapping, who wait for just the right spot to bet their money, and several hundred poker players and blackjack players that make a consistent living at a fairly high level.

You have been a newspaper reporter, magazine writer, and book author. If you were to advise a person who wanted to pursue a writing career, regardless of genre, what would you share with them from your own journey?

They should write to the level they want to get to and not feel like “failures” for not selling a million books or something like that. A lot of my writing just goes out to 5 or 6 friends. Maybe that’s all you need to do. Maybe that’s success. Maybe writing in a blog– or 2 or 3 of them fulfills you. I’ve stopped thinking that’s a bad thing– or somehow “not enough” in some weird Hollywood “success” kind of way. Of course, it would nice to sell a million books, but if you don’t, so what? Poets have moved the world with a few lines that didn’t even sell in their own lifetimes. Become more indifferent to the whole success thing. Write in your own voice. Be your own success.

Larry, thank you very much for sharing your insights and expertise.

Thanks Steve–
Take care–
Larry W. Phillips

About the Interviewer

Steve Amoia has published articles and book reviews about alternative health, art history, career-related themes, historical figures, Italian and international soccer, martial arts, psychology, and sport topics. His writing portfolio can be found here.

Do you have hundreds or even thousands of articles hiding behind those “previous” buttons on the bottom of your page? I bet that many of you do. They, unfortunately, offer little or no value to your readers. Valuable page views are being lost if you fail to make an honest attempt to promote past content.

Your living in la-la land if you believe that the typical reader is going to take the time to click the previous button on your blog over two or three times. I was once shocked to notice someone go back four pages on my technology blog, but even then I think it was one of my friends. It just doesn’t seem right. I mean, after all, you invested so much time into those articles, and while your blog may be prospering with new readers that are reading what you write today, they are missing out on all your previous hard work. Something must be done about this!

Alright, So How Do We Fix It?

Understandably, if you are running a site that consists of time sensitive issues like current events, news, or even technology, it is not as important to highlight that five paragraph article on why the iPhone will rule the world. On the other hand, if you do have any content that you have written in the past that could be of value to your readers, then you should do your best to make it easy for them to find it. Perhaps, at the very least, your hard work from the past will generate more back links with your newer readers.

There was a good reason you assigned tags and categories to your content (hopefully), and now is the time to explain why. Whether you prefer using tags or categories, these two methods are the primary link to organizing your previous content. They also give you great ways to pull out content as well. Good categorization of your content is crucial. Even if it doesn’t appear that way now, it might come back to haunt you later.

Pages

Using multiple pages that focus on a single or multiple related categories is a relatively easy way to spread your content out. Instead of limiting your readers to the last 10 or so recent blog entries, you could have your site also display the last 10 or so items from a broad set of various categories. News, previews, and reviews pages could be a relatively simple start for adding more value to previous articles. Already your user has access to more content than they did before.

Accomplishing this in WordPress can be somewhat tricky. Maria’s Guides has a great tutorial on how to create category specific archive pages. This is probably the best option if you do not want to bother with the other methods available. Once this is set up, everything will be automated as long as you manage your categories correctly.

Lists

If you check out a site like ProBlogger, you will notice that, even on the very front page, the site manages to promote content from years ago with the “Best of Problogger” section. You might not need to be so fancy with how it is done, but if you do, try checking out jQuery if your looking to do something similar to the tabbed interface. It does have the advantage of making great use of little space.

It doesn’t have to be that complicated though. Something simple like listing 10 to 20 of your past favorite articles from a few categories would be better than nothing at all. It is a great way to give your readers something to do other than reading your most recent entries.

Plugins

Alex King has a great plugin called Popularity Contest. It will allow you to keep track of all the views on your content, and with a little bit of code, you can extract information about the most popular posts. This will allow you to generate lists that display your most popular content. Many sites tend to do this, and maybe you should too.

If you want to make displaying lists of previous content easier, you could also check out Alex King’s Articles plugin. Most of the functionality can be done without a plugin, but this could make the task much easier.

Examples

The best way to learn is by example, so here are a few blogs to take notes from:

• ProBlogger – the homepage and archives page are excellent for showing off the site’s previous content. The ajax tabbed interface also allows much more content to be displayed in the same amount of space.
• ArsTechnica – separates past content with tabs on top; the “Ars Journals” section on the right also helps to show off additional content.
• Smashing Magazine – exactly what I was talking about before — the site properly highlights its best content from the past, even if in a simplistic manner.
• TreeHugger – in addition to featuring an amazingly unique design, the sidebars of the site are full of quality content from the past.
• A List Apart – while putting together an archive like this might be significantly more effort, it would unquestionably be worth it if you have that much valuable content.
• Zen Habits – features excellent use of previously popular content on the bottom of the page.

If you can be consistent with featuring your previous content, it really adds value to site. Readers might be, for example, more inclined to visit the site instead of only reading via content feeds.

Hopefully some of those sites will inspire you to spend some time and feature your hard work. If you have an article that you spent hours on that maybe didn’t get enough appreciation, it should be on the front page. Most of us don’t do this, and I will raise my hand and admit that I am one of those people. Fortunately, after joining Performancing, I have been thinking of new ways to improve my blogs.

This is a step in the right direction.

If you have a unique way of displaying your previous content, please let us know in the comments section. I would also be glad to help anyone that needs an opinion on how to make their previous content useful; just fire me a private message.

Alright, so I didn’t script the whole show. But if you watch to the very, very end you’ll see my first stab where I give a shoutout to my friends Graywolf, Sugarrae and the epicyclist who’s currently building a perpetual motion machine, Matt Cutts.

I’d be very interested to know what ya’ll think. I’ve been thinking about quitting the whole SEO / blogging world and going full time into comedy writing. Do I have a shot?