Tag: Writer Resources

On Writing: Social Media

Published on by Janet Sunderland5 Comments

SAMSUNGI’m participating in a Blogging 201 online workshop with WordPress. If you have a WordPress blog, these online workshops on Writing, Blogging, and Photography are free and truly valuable. I recommend trying one out and see if you like it.

The latest Blogging 201 prompt on Social Media was particularly helpful. I have Facebook and Twitter and Linked In, but I’d also heard about Pinterest and Instagram and had no idea whether they would be useful. I knew Pinterest had to do with photos, scrap-booking sorts of things, but that was about it. And that’s not what I do.

Here’s what Michelle W. at WordPress wrote and which I found very helpful:

Each network has different strengths. Facebook and Instagram are good for parenting, lifestyle, and personal blogs. Twitter is more technically-inclined and useful for pop culture and current events/political blogs, while Pinterest is great for blogs [with] lots of images, like food, fashion, and craft blogs. LinkedIn is ideal if you blog for business.

I did my research: Instagram is there to “share the world’s moments…” and seems to be more about photos than the kinds of blogging I do, and I have Facebook, so will pass on Instagram. But those of you who do photo blogs regularly might find it useful. A nice touch is the ability to fine tune your photos on the site rather than fiddling with them on another program and then uploading.

As a general rule, I don’t send my blog posts to Linked In. I have, however, taken advantage of the new feature in Linked In to write posts with a business/training focus with tips on writing. Those have had good readership.

As a general rule, I’ve also avoided sending blog posts to Twitter. However, from time to time I write a more current and politically focused post. Having the above information gives me permission, if you will, to post them on Twitter.

Many of us use Facebook and I appreciate seeing other writers’ posts there. An interesting tidbit I picked up from Jane Friedman: Helping Writers and Publishers Flourish in the Digital Age is that having a writer’s page on Facebook is less effective than allowing readers access to your personal blog. Readers want to know who the writer is and news of the writer’s life rather that simply what she/he is writing.

I’m sure there are differing ideas on this, but for me, that fits fine. In part, because I didn’t want another page to keep up with and in part because while I post photos from time to time and respond to family posts, I rarely to never post personal information.

Each writer or artist needs to find their own comfort level, but for me, what I have seems to cover my bases: Facebook, Twitter, Linked In, and a WordPress blog with several pages.

Hope the information helps you. Let me know what your ideas on the above are and whether you find a particular form of social media more helpful for your writing than others.

And keep writing!

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Yes, it really is…..

Published on by Janet Sunderland9 Comments

I woke early this morning feeling oddly awake. No aches. No stumbling weariness.  I thought it time to post a blog.

Writing has been – well, iffy, lately. Oh, I’ve been working at it: outlining journals from twenty-five years ago for a memoir; reading, filling my writing desk with Post-It notes and pieces of paper. Writing opening chapters have wandered as this post is wandering and have been cut and rewritten and taken apart and put back together again. And I was thinking, this morning, how much easier writing a novel might be than writing memoir as I do.

With novels, it seems to me, you only need your head. Easy. Well. That could be a problem too given how foggy my head has been these last few months. And my friend Theresa does a lot of research for her historical novels. Okay. Scratch novel-writing.

Maybe life has been on the chaotic side for everyone pretty much.

deskAnd yes, this really is what my writing area looks like and not a staged photo to say “writer’s room.” Mis-ordered chaos. Which is to say, I sort of know which pile to look in when I’m searching for something but not always.

What have I been doing all this time besides stumbling around? Writing grants. I’ve done that. Been to a lot of board meetings for Whispering Prairie Press because I involved in us in this whole process of moving ahead – somewhere – and to move ahead you need money and to get money, you write grants. So I guess I have been writing in one way or another.

Cliff and I have traveled. We drove to the Ozarks for a wonderful weekend and officiated at a wedding. We officiated at another wedding in early September north of Kansas City.  And I went up to Marshall County and met contractors to put an addition on the farm and to set up an artist residency for January (not on the farm, in Marysville). And last week, we went to Baltimore for my husband’s thirty-fifth anniversary of ordination and after that, went out to Ocean City for three days and stopped. Well, we walked a lot and that’s not exactly stopping, but every morning this was the view off our balcony.

oceanYes, it really was that beautiful.

Okay. So grants and travel. I guess that helps me feel a little less AOL.

I can’t say I’ve done a lot of house cleaning although over the summer, we did accomplish a fair amount of repair work on the house and refinanced.

And in May my book of poetry reached a reality between covers (in other words, published) and the months leading up to that filled with revisions and proofing and re-proofing and choosing covers and and and. Having a book published is every writer’s dream but when you get to it, whew! It’s a lot of work that swallows up days.

I seem to be going backwards in time to piece it all together.

“Know thyself” is a great idea in theory, but usually the knowledge comes in bits that you have to assemble like a picture puzzle when the top-of-the-puzzle-box-picture is missing. Or the picture changes. The structure to Knowing is less than clearly delineated.