The Writer’s Round-up - 2021.02.16
The writer’s round-up is a weekly column that provides reflection, advice, and articles in the areas I want to develop as a writer: reading, writing, blogging, and marketing.
This week:
The real reasons for writer's block
Blog restructuring
Social media optimization
If you want last week’s entry, look here.
Photo by Green Chameleon on Unsplash
Reading
I received a recommendation to check out Neil Gaiman's Trigger Warning in a recent Reddit thread on r/fantasywriters. I started it, but was put out by the trigger warning he put in the first few pages. As I discussed here, there are people out there who want to read something that ends happily and with only lightweight drama. (A lot of people want to read about others’ suffering, so do not be discouraged from writing that, either.) The abundance of dark, gruesome fiction is quite off-putting. That said, I went right back to Sojourn. Though I am still resisting the urge to skim fight scenes, it is otherwise decent.
Don’t be afraid to skim! If the book is compelling enough to complete once, you will likely pick up the skimmed material on a subsequent read-through.
Writing
I struggled a lot with writing this week. I was overwhelmed by the number of things that I need to fix in the first draft of my current short story WIP to make it readable. I kept second-guessing myself.
As a writer, you might be familiar with the so-called "writer's block." Many prolific authors have wrestled at length with specific plot points or other issues in their writing, but these are not the issues faced by the majority of the writing population. Many writers simply struggle with writing regularly. The reasons for this and the attendant procrastination generally fall under these two umbrellas:
poor planning and/or prioritization (in effect, lack of structure/discipline)
fear of writing poorly or receiving criticism (in effect, taking oneself too seriously)
The issues that underlie these problems are closely related and can synergistically inhibit your writing. I forgot that I'm going to write poorly—a lot—before I write well. I found that revisiting my reasons for writing (or doing anything else difficult) and referring to them when stressed helped me get back on track when I'd rather have been gaming or reading other people's blogs.
Blogging
I restructured my entire blog last week. I used David Gaughran's website as a basis for the new layout with tips from booklaunch.com (specifically, the author website guide). The new layout should be cleaner and easier to use, especially for searches. Unfortunately, I don't currently have the resources to perform live A/B testing.
I haven't written many articles recently—I don't feel inspired, which means I have to scribble a bit until the ink flows again. I have to remind myself often that it's okay to rehash evergreen topics—especially on my own blog—no matter how many times others have done the same. As with stories, each author will cover a topic differently. There's no telling which version will most resonate with a reader.
Marketing
Now that I've gotten comfortable with using Buffer to schedule my social media posts, I need to optimize the times at which I post. Alison Schaffir published an article on Medium detailing the best times to post on social media for each social media platform. I would have liked to see a table; predictably, that decreases reading time—the main metric used for quantifying value added on Medium. (Busy readers like you and me prefer to skip the fluff and get straight to the value proposition—the meat of the article.) Turns out engagement is low on Sundays and 11:00AM falls into every platform's optimal post time range.
Meta
As I progress in my writing journey, I'm collecting advice and factoids like this into a cheat sheet so that I can use it as a value proposition for my newsletter.