Category Archives: writing

The Cereal Aisle Is Full Of Blueberry Vanilla Almond Granola + The Internet Is Full Of Discordant Blogs

Writers, right now, are vying for spots on cereal aisle shelves.

Last month, Jane Friedman, a woman I’ve regarded as the editor for Writers Digest (though she’s since moved on to the Virginia Quarterly Review), shared this post by L.L. Barkat on her blog.

In it, Barkat told writers to stop blogging.

The title cycled like a nasty Google Display Ad traveling from one webpage to another as I browsed my Twitter feed.

Of course I disagreed. Of course I believed in blogging the way engineers believe in calculus or truck drivers believe in the speed limit (emphatically, that is to say, even when the rest of us groan trapped behind the mammoth beasts crawling our fast-lane interstates).

What he was saying was maybe, probably, OK definitely true for experienced writers. They’d done the dance and shimmied and shook for the whole literary world and we just craved more from them.

But for those of us who cannot make a small booster seat out of our published works, blogging is still a core component of writing growth.

We Blog For Ourselves

Writing is a personal act of creative expression. If that definition hasn’t hit you over the head yet, let this be a reminder.

You write because you need to say something and it’s bottled inside you like a message bobbing through the ocean of your heart for a hundred years before making landfall.

But your publishing content online should never ever smack-me-over-the-head-if-it-does alter that fact.

Blog for you and watch yourself grow. Watch your ideas converge. Watch your self-expression refine.

You don’t have to blog to do that, and sometimes the criticism of a few measly pageviews at the start will be enough to make you click the red circled (or blue squared for my PC lovers) X at the top of your web browser.

(That’s a shame, kids. That’s a real big shame.)

But if you stick around because it’s for you — or at least the people you care about — and you’ve got direction and drive, you’ll grow emotionally and intellectually from the experience.

We Find Our Voice In The Abyss

There will always be a difference between those who start blogs and bloggers. It begins with dedication and follows through with a mission.

Imagine starting a new cereal brand. You’ve got a wacky name in a stiff all-caps serif typeface printed across the top of each box (all different sizes, too) and you’re wondering why Wegmans and Shop Rite and Giant and Piggly Wiggly and Krogers refuse to put that future household name on the shelf.

Because. It’s Not. Going Somewhere.

You could have the tastiest blueberry vanilla almond granola sitting fresh and crunchy in a tight sealed eco-friendly recycled plastic pouch but ain’t nobody got time for your discordant cereal dreams.

There are too many other product lines featuring blueberry vanilla almond granola for anyone to even dream of picking your hott mess off the shelf, even if you didn’t get shut down by the big guys.

The same thing happens when you load yourself up with blogging ideas that don’t meet in the middle with some larger goal.

You write about the final exam you failed and then about the time your grandmother walked in on you toweling off from a hot shower.

You write about the reason you love one-for-one campaigns and the art of mastering the Facebook page as an Etsy storeowner.

And ya wonder why nobody put you in their Google Reader (oh, sorry, forgot that that ship has sailed out to the Bermuda Triangle)?

The abyss of blogs is too great for you not to write with a common thread, a dedicated mission of sorts, and expect somebody to stick around.

When you get serious about blogging, you find two things: your voice (because err’body decided writing didn’t have to be boring but nobody wanted to write with a little fear in their bones) and your purpose (for blogging).

It’s a little bit magical when you don’t think too hard on it. When you do, though, you realize that all those shenanigans you’ve been pulling by messing around, treating your blog like a diary that the whole world is privy to, only prevented you from practicing writing as a thing you, like, get paid for?

Yeah.

By the way, every month I send out a short + sweet newsletter brimming with cool finds related to the monthly theme. It'd be stellar if you subscribed. If it's not worthy, it doesn't go in the newsletter. That. Simple.

Let Us Taste The Ice Cream

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I didn’t often listen to my mother’s writing advice growing up. She was full of it, too. Jamming my eardrums with steps for five-paragraph essays (which I still loathe) and red-penning the crap out of my school papers.

She made time, almost every year, for a visit to my English class where she would, inevitably, tell me later that night over dinner that that boy over in the back corner? He seemed nice.

So I tuned most of her lessons out.

Except, it turns out, one of the most important ones: to write like I spoke.

Doesn’t it suck when Mom knows best?

Maybe, but it’s the reason I’ve been able to craft a place for myself in the blogging world. And the reason I latch onto other bloggers whose hearts beat faster when they hit publish on a new post.

We were not born to write so that our words could fill trashcans. We were not born to kill trees or waste ink or stuff envelopes with empty thoughts.

We write because we are human beings with voices and those voices sit inside us like dormant volcanoes ready to erupt when something strikes us passionately or fervently.

It’s that lack of selfness, that manufactured voice, that pains me when I read a blog post or a magazine article written with so little personality it nearly fades into the background.

You’re a blogger; you understand.

We fear voice because it is vulnerability in the biggest way. We fear having our fingers on the pulse of our wrists because the minute we know what we want to say and how we want to say it? We have to.

To write well, you’ve got to have at least an ounce of reckless abandon in you. You’ve got to let go of the constraints a bit. You’ve got to stop forcing square phrases and overused idioms into your paragraphs and start feeling exactly what you want your reader to feel.

You’ve got to leave a chunk of your heart on the page.

It’s a massive risk; I get that.

It’s like calling your best friend to tell her your boyfriend didn’t get into the same college as you and she’s like, “Suck it up, man. Life’s tough.”

(She’s allowed to say that eventually, but not in between your heaving sobs.)

Or she said, “Cool, so what do you think of this dress? Should I buy it?”

You don’t know how your readers will react — or if they’ll react at all.

So you totter along writing “dear diary” entries about the ice cream shop you discovered last Friday night and the boy in anatomy class you’d like to offer your body to demonstrate.

But you don’t let us taste the ice cream on our lips. We don’t get a brain freeze. Our fingers don’t go numb. Our heart rate doesn’t increase.

That’s all we want from you — to feel your humanness so deeply it yanks us into a time where sitting in front of a computer is akin to opening an encapsulating novel.

Gosh, we want to dream with you.

Let us? Please, please let us. We will become insomniacs for you.

Writing Stellar Cover Letters: 5 Small + Mighty Parts

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You are not your resume. You are so much more than that, lady.

You might be your cover letter, though. (Sorry!)

It’s the only handshake you’ve got before somebody sweeps in and offers a face-to-face or voice-to-voice conversation about a job or an internship.

I know you’re a hardworking, passionate, busy-till-the-sun-comes-up-tomorrow kind of gal, but the world doesn’t yet.

Your cover letter is the window to your future job, so if you love what you do as much as you act like it, the best thing you can do is create something that showcases all you have to offer in a one-page letter.

A few years ago, I thought of these suckers as arbitrary top pages for short story submissions. I was a small fish in a big, loud, rambunctious crowd. My confidence in the publishing industry was miniscule.

In the wake of looking for an internship, an honest-to-God, get-my-hands-dirty internship, I hit the backspace button on that theory. That spring, I wrote nearly 90 cover letters.

Why Now?

A few weeks ago, I received a message from an old high school acquaintance who wanted some hands-on advice for her fellow college grads and undergrads. They were wading into the water, hesitant to jump into a career path, but even more so to begin putting themselves down on paper.

I could understand that. I could totally, gut-stirringly understand that.

That’s why I began writing passionate, but economic cover letters. Nobody wanted me to tell them in a 1,000-word essay why I had always dreamed of working for them (thank God I only said that, with total honesty, a handful of times – there are only so many ‘dream jobs’ we can envision at the ripe age of 21).

It boils down to one question: why should they spend more than five minutes reviewing my file before tossing it out – what can I do for them? Why does my experience matter?

Three words for you. Connect. Those. Dots.

Writing those letters becomes the art of dissecting apart our past to barter towards an ever-changing future. The best we can do is work hard, put our time where it best suits, and learn all we can to leverage it weeks or months or years down the road.

Let me propose a few alterations to the throwaway self-introduction.

Part One: You Love Them + They Should Love You Because ______.

You’re writing to inform them that you (really want this job, basically) because you have experience (in the same industry, in a similar industry, in a similar position, doing similar things) and, because of that (really think they ought to consider you).*

*Everything in parentheses is broad and/or slang for something professional and specific.

Part Two: You Told Me What You Need, So Here’s How I Own That

You’ve got the job description in front of you — use + abuse it for two things:

1) You’re sure this is the right fit for you? Sure you’d like to spend some time trying to win over a gaming company hiring a programmer when you have never so much as picked up a controller but always did know your way around HTML – close enough, right?

2) You’re writing this section with an armful of actionable “I can do this and this and this” phrases in your back pocket. Please hold—you already do 95 percent of what’s in the job description? Did you mention that or hope they would infer from the job titles?

Part Three: So Those Programs? I Am Like A Jedi With Those Babies

Creative job descriptions are unique in that they tend to list every program your eyes ever scanned as a requirement or preferred qualification. Depending on what you’re applying for, you’ll be waist deep in a bulleted list of coding languages or design software or customer databases or social networks.

(A great reason to start loving your MacBook Pro until it spits out a beautiful new graphic/website/story/advertisement/business card/logo design/email campaign every single week. People love samples. They also love honesty. So if you can honestly own the whole Adobe Creative Suite, that’s something to write about – in half a sentence, of course.)

Part Four: Here’s Why My Work Meshes With You, Part II

One last call for winning them over. Better tell ‘em who they’re dealing with. I tend to write that I work well in fast-paced, detail-oriented environments. And yeah, it’s like, “Suuuuuuure you do.” But then, if you look at the jobs I’ve had, you start thinking that’s exactly what was required of me in all of them. So it’s legit.

What can you say about how you work? Why do you really love them and this opportunity they’ve got waiting to be filled? What two sentences can pack a punch before you thank them and sign off?

Part Five: Thanks For Not Using This As A Trash Can-Bound Basketball (Yet)

Sincerity + gratitude go a long way. Finding a perfect candidate in a mound of 200+ resumes has got to be tough. So when someone does get your cover letter + resume and makes it to the final paragraph, please oh please thank them for doing so. Just make sure it’s with a little more confidence than that section header above.

I’ve learned that practice goes a long way – not just with writing cover letters, but with work samples too. Also: please, oh, please, tailor them to the individual (person, if possible; company and position, if nothing else).

Before The Glam: 6 Staples For The Dirty Side Of Writing

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The idea of writing a book and seeing your name pressed into its spine is glamorous.

But the distance between the first line and the hardcover release is a cavern massive enough to echo when you shout across it.

It’s daunting, but thank God we don’t think about that when we write.

Because honestly, I don’t recommend dwelling on it.

You’ll get as far as you’re going to get by sweating it out and putting in the hours to craft a first draft and make tedious revisions, tearing the plot apart and piecing it back together.

Then, you’ll have to find someone else to believe in the story the way you did that first day, when the idea was thrumming in your eardrums and spurring your fingertips to action. You’ll have to get down to business.

Querying is the art of finding that representative: an agent.

When I queried my first book, I had no illusions about the ease with which I’d sweep some book fiend of her feet: I was 19. I knew 19-year-olds didn’t get book deals like they did manicures or driver’s licenses or boyfriends.

I knew it’d be an uphill battle, so I prepared for that.

It’s been four years since I’d been ready to make another hard-hitting attempt at representation, but since then my library of publishing resources has expanded.

Today, I’d like to share some of those with you.

1. 2012 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market by Adria Haley | 2. Getting Unstuck Without Coming Unglued: A Woman’s Guide To Unblocking Creativity by Susan O’Doherty, PhD | 3. Turning Life Into Fiction by Robin Hemley | 4. 2012 Guide To Literary Agents by Chuck Sambuchino | 5. The Writer’s Digest Handbook of Novel Writing | 6. Ready. Set. Novel! Writers Workbook by Chris Baty, Lindsey Grant, & Tavia Stewart-Streit

Digital Marketing + Communications For Creatives | Rewriting Life

Category Archives: writing

The Cereal Aisle Is Full Of Blueberry Vanilla Almond Granola + The Internet Is Full Of Discordant Blogs

We Blog For Ourselves

We Find Our Voice In The Abyss

Let Us Taste The Ice Cream

Writing Stellar Cover Letters: 5 Small + Mighty Parts

Why Now?

Before The Glam: 6 Staples For The Dirty Side Of Writing

Follow Digital Marketing + Communications For Creatives | Rewriting Life