Technical difficulties

I wanted, at the outset of this blog, to keep consistent for about the first week or so with at least one post per day to the blog.

I started out rather well, until yesterday afternoon.

Then, I ran into technical difficulties.  Not with the blog, actually that was fine.  I had looked in on it, and even gotten a comment from an online colleague.  [Thank you again, Tom.]

No.  Just as I was about to start writing up a post, I ran into technical difficulties with my Internet provider.  Specifically, with my e-mail. 

Technical difficulties has become more and more a part of the writing, and in fact other remote work, context in the Internet age.

This was particularly frustrating because I could see the list of e-mails, with several highly important incoming e-mails in two or three contexts but I could not access my Inbox.

I called the company’s Tech Support, and the Rep first determined that there were no line or speed problems or outages of that sort.

She and I then spent nearly two hours on the phone figuring out fixes for things on my computer that might affect my Internet and e-mail access.  In fact, some of those things did need to be done . . . for one thing, the ISP I use doesn’t support Firefox and I haven’t figured out some of the functioning since the last time I upgraded my system.

She loaded both Chrome and Internet Explorer for me through desktop sharing, which improved performance all around.

After all that, however, she determined that indeed some of the malfunctioning was on the ISP’s end:  the webpage itself had a malfunction and their techs were working on it.

The company gave an estimated “fix” time of up to 48 hours!  Which I thought was outrageous.  They allegedly were going to need at least 24 hours!

In the end, the complete outage lasted about 4-5 hours, but some functionality is still deteriorated today.  I can now look at e-mails and send and forward them, but sometimes a Forward doesn’t apply the “Forwarded” tag.  And I can’t copy text from one e-mail to another, such as running a business e-mail through an e-mail to myself to test whether or not it is garbled, as I got in the habit of doing with Firefox but may not need to continue to do with Chrome or Internet Explorer.

By the time I got done with Tech Support, at about 4:15 p.m., I was exhausted.

I actually wrote the next post  [the one before this post] offline even then:  but I knew I was too tired to tell if it sounded like something I should post so I left it until I could review it in a clearer state of mind.

An outage of that magnitude is rare for this Internet Service Provider.  However, coping with this kind of issue in the days of remote and telecommute work also becomes part of t the landscape of both the writerly and the business world.

How do you cope in the presence of technical difficulties that inhibit contact with your professional contacts?

What is personal development?

Another sub-niche I’ve written extensively in involves personal development topics.

This comes usually under one of three headings:  general self-help, related to career development, or related to religion and spirituality.

So, just what constitutes “personal development”?

To me, the term personal development involves any activity, or group of activities, that enhances an individual’s way of life.  This can include things like making a business plan, setting personal goals, doing activities like games and puzzles that exercise the mind, and physical exercise and recreation.

Personal journaling, the forerunner of online blogging, certainly can serve this function. 

So can creative writing in any form, or independent study of a topic.

Having at least one personal development activity on an ongoing basis can enrich anyone’s life.

Perhaps defining what that activity should be, or how you can enhance such an activity you already participate in, could make a fulfilling New Year’s resolution for you.

Figuring out something you want to do, something you might enjoy, makes a more attractive way of setting New Year’s resolutions that the traditional “go on a diet” or “get more exercise form of such resolutions, don’t you think?

So . . . what about toys?

Toys and games represents one of my niche writing areas.

Initially, it just happened that way.  I actually became associated with an online publication in that field as a telephone researcher first. 

Eventually, that let to a chance to do write several articles and some product descriptions.

Later, I found myself doing several web content articles for that publication.

But . . . for those who become writers because of a love for the craft . . . they certainly find a relationship with writing and toys and games.

For writers who love the craft, they experience many kinds of writings as a type of play.  It can become a game to fit the parts together.

For me, it makes perfect sense that some of my earliest freelancing came in the area of writing about toys and toy stores.

Tying this back into my post just before this one:  for those who reluctantly need to write for business purposes . . .

Do you think you might find completing such business documents a more enjoyable effort if you began looking at the process of fitting all the parts together as a game?

Tips for those writing on a “have to do” basis

While there are many kinds of business documents best managed by professional writers on staff or by outsourcing to professional freelance writers, many people in professional positions have to write a business document at least on occasion.

Often, the result of their efforts doesn’t stand them in good stead with colleagues or even their supervisors.

That all starts with the technical or executive professional having no idea of how to go about writing an effective business document.

There are plenty of documents best left to professionals, such as those that address more than one audience group or those that need to have a structure that a writer only learns to manage through practice.

But, there are some documents that others must write in the context of other professional positions.  And that often becomes a frustrating experience all around.

Literally, the first element of the problem is that such individuals often have no idea where to begin.  In reality, most writers who become professionals experience this same issue early in their careers.  It’s just that learning to overcome it is both part of their professional dedication and part of their job.

So, for this blog post, I thought I would write a little about where, when a ‘layperson’, so to speak, has to write a business document that writer should begin.

The first consideration to take into account in planning, and subsequently composing, an effective business document lies in understanding the nature of the audience the writer aims to reach.  In tandem with that, the writer needs to identify what it is the writer wants that document to “do” for the recipient.

This starts the writer off at the very beginning thinking about the piece of writing she will undertake couched in the needs of the reader rather than the viewpoint of the writer or the magnitude of the data.  This is why many of the best courses in business writing place a strong emphasis on audience assessment throughout the program.

That is why this in-tandem consideration of the audience “need” from the document with the identity of that reader rises to the top of the priority list of useful techniques for developing strong, effective business documents such as customer letters or progress reports.

This defines the purpose of the document, and the purpose has a strong influence on driving considerations in terms of both the most effective organization and effective style the final document should take.

Knowing what the starting point should be in writing a business document should go a long way to taking some of the aggravation out of the process for those called on to write such documents on a reluctant, “must do” basis.

Needlework and writing . . .

As I mentioned in my opening post, I have seven areas that I consider “niche” areas I’ve written significantly in.

The relationship of books and reading to writing is obvious.  But . . . needlework?

One of those is crafts, and though my writing in the area of crafts has been on more generalized, I myself am an experienced knitter, crocheter, and embroiderer.

Many writers see a strong connection between needlework crafts and the craft of writing.

No less an author than Shakespeare used the metaphor of knitting in his plays.  For Shakespeare, sleep acted to “knit up the raveled sleeve of care.”

The process of creating a crocheted or knitted piece in some ways parallels the writing process.  As does the writer, the needleworker starts with a mental vision, follows an existing pattern or creates a new one, and uses the supplies available to craft a finished piece of work.  For the crafter, the supplies are yarn or thread and needles or hooks.  For the writer, the supplies are a computer facility, or pen or pencil and paper, and possible research notes and an outline or other planning device.

Another needlework-to-writing parallel you may find in common currency involves the observation that fiction writers “weave” a story together.

Even in business writing, needlework can become an analogy.  On overly verbose report, or, worse, one with misleading information we may hear referred to as one that the writer “embroidered” some of the content of the report.

Because of these sorts of parallels in the two worlds of crafting and writing, the two crafts of needlework and writing have more in common than those unfamiliar with either or both might first suppose.

I hope you’ve enjoyed, found useful, or both some of these reflections.

Feel free to stop by again.  Just starting the blog has given me many ideas for posts, so I anticipate as I get it up and running I will be posting new content frequently.

Having discussed procrastination . . . how about writer’s block?

Writers at all levels talk about writer’s block in one form or another.

After years of experience in the writing trade, I maintain that the phenomenon called “writer’s block” doesn’t actually exist.

Oh, there are situations in which a writer just can’t get the words to come:  either on any writing on their project docket or on a specific project.

That’s particularly true of inexperienced writers.

What I maintain after years in the writing profession and a considerable amount of time in self-study on a variety of topics is that “block” exists, but that it’s a misnomer to refer to it as “writer’s block.”

I look upon it as a more generalized phenomenon I label as “creative block.”

Over the course of my technical writing career, I’ve worked with programmers, systems levels developers, and scientists.  And by “scientists” I mean of the technical nature of the folks who deal in nuclear submarine matters.

Nary a one of them that I ever knew didn’t suffer the in-their-profession equivalent of “writer’s block.”

I’ve even met a few executive types who faced that same kind of experience in the context of a major planning decision.

In the course of self-study, I’ve read about mathematicians and inventors who faced the same issues.

As in the case of Elias Howe, a pioneer of the sewing machine:  who had to dream about sewing machine needles with the eye in the tip by way of spears so constructed and wielded by cannibals attacking him.

Sometimes the subconscious just needs to do its work for an interval.

And writers do not have a monopoly on that.

So, here’s to creative [writer’s] block:  and making the most of it.

For info on my writing expertise, visit my pro website at:

www.kristawriter.com

Controversy/Ethical Dilemma . . .

Recently, a popular romantic/suspense writer made the observation in an online community that she avoids doing reviews of the work of other authors unless she can give a five star rating:  and that the reason behind this is she feels it wrong to review the work of other authors unless one can genuinely rate the work as fundamentally flawless.

This writer’s background is in another field than writing.  I have extensive education in the writing arena, as well as several years in the business writing field and in web content writing.

I respect her deeply both as a person generous in her help to those still climbing the ladder and as an accomplished author.

But I don’t agree with the position.

I come from a background where one learns about the craft by tearing apart the work of other writers both to look for what went right and what went wrong.

Some of my earliest freelance work was in book reviewing.

I know of other authors who make book reviewing a part of their business model while also writing books themselves.

And, I was early taught that in business, writers need to have an openness to having constructive criticism and learning from it and that such experiences could not help but improve future work.

As writers or readers, we are consumers and peers before we become business people.

As such, I would view it as a perfectly appropriate endeavor for any professional writer to engage in forthright, honest book reviews of other writers to help the consumer decide if the book in question is worth the reader’s money.

Or even the reader’s time, for books obtained from a library or as a gift.

I hope to one day branch into fiction.

I haven’t written book reviews for awhile.

Would I write reviews again?

In a heartbeat.

The Writing Process . . .

The Writing Process . . .

I’ve got some extra time while Christmas dinner cooks, so I’m going to try to make multiple posts today.

I’ll start with some thoughts on the writing process that I hope will be helpful both to those who regard themselves as writers and business people who sometimes must write . . . or recruit professional writers . . . as part of their job.

Every writer is unique, and therefore experiences the writing process in a different way.

In fact, for professional writers, they can experience the writing process differently for different kinds of projects.

But, there are certain phases that all writers go through along the way.

Writers who have a dedication to the craft . . . whether professional writers or not . . . at least implicitly recognize each of these phases.

For those who must do some writing on the job but write infrequently and reluctantly, it might have some usefulness to read up a bit on these stages.

The first phase is what my professors back in the day called “prewriting.”  The prewriting stage can involve several sub-stages.  For example, if you have a topic assigned to you, then there’s no dreaming up a topic entirely on your own.  But for many college papers, for example, you must create a topic.  Then, there’s the interim situation:  you have to choose but you have a handful of possible topics provided to you by a professor or a standardized test.

Once you have your topic, the next question is whether or not it involves research.  If it does, then research is the second sub-set of the prewriting phase.

Next, there is the planning phase.  Depending on your project, this may involve outlining or some other method.

Those are the basics of the prewriting phase.

The next part of the writing process is composition:  which can take several forms.

Nowadays, many people compose right into their word processors or text editors.  Some, however, prefer to start out with a longhand draft.  For some professional writers, such as myself, it depends on the project.  I write much content directly to a word processor; but I still write fiction and unusual projects in longhand.

So, for those who start with longhand, “production” becomes a separate stage of the writing process.  Others may disagree, but I would include referencing in the “production” phase, so for researched material even those who compose directly onto a word processing or text editing system will have a bit of a production stage.

Finally, there is the review and revise stage of the writing process.  This involves rearranging material in a more reader-friendly order, checking grammar and spelling and that kind of thing.

Those are, essentially, the elements of the writing process.

For the most part, “submission” is not part of the writing process.  That’s either marketing, if you are submitting to a publisher, for example.  Or, if you are submitting an assigned project on the job, it’s customer service.  The exception may involve student tests and term papers, where the submission consists merely of handing over the project, in person, to a professor for grading.  In a sense, submission in that form is neither fish nor fowl.

Marketing and customer service are, perhaps, a topic for another time.

For more information about the business aspects of writing, visit my professional website at:

www.kristawriter.com

Spirit of Place

After this post, I plan to launch into varying the posts between information for those who regard themselves as writers . . . defined by those who actually write things regularly . . . and posts with information for people who do not enjoy writing but sometimes must do so.

The second group includes people who reluctantly need to write reports or other documents on the job [or to get a job] and college students in Majors with a focus on non-writing disciplines but who still must write papers for some of their courses.

If it were any other time than around a significant holiday that I began this blog, I’d delay this post until I had a few more of those posts in place.

But, because I began right at Christmas holiday weekend time, I’m going to diverge, here, into this topic now.

This is about writing, but it’s also about reading.  One’s reading for enjoyment or leisure time reading.

Back in the day, my college offered a course called “Spirit of Place.” 

What that referred to is the realization, primarily by fiction authors, of incorporating a sense of the location, or setting, into their stories.

Because many beginning fiction writers get their earliest ideas around a Christmas theme, I thought that made this a good Christmas Day post to the blog.

“Place” can be a very small location such as a garden or a particular spot in a house or a church building.

Artful fiction writers often create a sense, or “spirit,” of place so vibrant that the location actually becomes a kind of character in the work.

Even more so, you sometimes see this in filmed media, such as television.

For example, if one looks critically at the old television series The Waltons, after a time you realize that about 90 % of the action takes place in a half dozen or so venues.  Walton’s Mountain itself becomes a kind of character.  So do, separately, those subsets of the mountain.

Action occurs primarily in the following locations:  the kitchen table at the Walton home, John Boy’s room [and especially his writing desk], the school, the church, the lumber mill, on the mountain above the Walton home, and Ike Godsey’s store.  [With the subsequent addition of the various colleges the older students attended and John-Boy’s car traveling to and from.]

For an even earlier example from television:  what would Petticoat Junction have been without the Shady Rest hotel, the water tower, and the Cannonball steam locomotive?  And there’s a shared theme between these two series:  as with Godsey’s in the Waltons, Sam Drucker’s general store became a kind of character in Petticoat Junction.

Fiction writers also do this in novels and short stories.  Nathaniel Hawthorne capitalized on the spirit of place as the central focus in The House of the Seven Gables.

Modern authors often do this as well.  Romance author Jana DeLeon brings the lifestyle of the Louisiana bayou to life in her novels.  Historical romance author Marsha Canham has at least one novel in her cannon in which all of the action except at the very beginning and very end of the novel occur aboard sailing ships during the period the novel is set.

For novice authors learning the craft of fiction, the spirit of place often starts focused around a holiday such as Christmas or Easter and the family or community interactions prompted by such holidays.

An awakening of the spirit of place can get invoked in a budding writer by something as simple as a Christmas tree or the dining table during the holiday feast.

Usually, in most families, at holidays there is both celebration and conflict.  The spirit of place is a good starting point for many authors to define their first story ideas.

Add two types of conflict to such interactions, and the writer has the basic skeleton of the story.

From the reading point of view:  don’t you, as a reader, find the story more enjoyable when you have that tangible experience of the setting of a book or short story becoming as vibrant as an additional character to the people in the story?

I’m brand new to blogging . . . well: kinda, sorta anyway . . .

I hope visitors with an interest in writing services will forgive errors in the first few posts while I’m figuring out the Blogger software.  I caught one in my first post, where I put an extra “three” in discussing my sub-niche areas.  I couldn’t figure out the post-publication editing system to fix it.

But, as to the writing nature of blogging . . . I’ve read it about it for ages, now.  And as I  understand it, it basically breaks down to writing journal-style to share online with folks interested in your topic.

That being the case, I’ve been writing in this manner for longer than I’m going to admit to.  Suffice it to say, I’ve been keeping a journal since my undergraduate years “long ago and far away.”  I’ve amassed volumes of such writings.

That being so, although I still keep my personal journals in longhand, I found the act of writing these blog posts very easy.  Nearly too easy, in fact.  Too much  like journaling, in which I don’t concern myself about the kind of errors that I missed in my introductory post. 

I’ll try to do better in the future.

Personal journaling among writers has somewhat fallen out of favor, and I find that rather too bad.  It’s a time-honored tradition for recognized writers and something I think today’s writers who avoid it miss out on considerable skills building by way of using a journal.

Such journals can incorporate long gaps of time between entries, at least at certain times.  But having a personal journal in progress, preferably in longhand writing, can add considerable dimension to a writer’s overall experience of the writing life.

And, since I’m trying to tie writing and business together in this blog as much as possible, I’ve also seen published reports on the value of journaling in the context of making on-the-job managerial decisions as well as in speeding up a job search for some job seekers, also.

For more information on the pertinence of business writing in today’s commerce market, visit my professional website at:

www.kristawriter.com

Procrastination – And When It Isn’t

Most writers struggle with procrastination to a greater or a  lesser degree.  Or at least they believe they do.

After I went through the full set up process for this blog . . . some of which I delayed until after making my introductory post . . . I decided I really should have begun a blog some time ago.

Was that procrastination?

In the context, not really.

Firstly, only recently did I come across information that caused me  to consider a blog a worthwhile thing to do.  So, I did not make it a priority as I should  have done. Most writers struggle with procrastination to a greater or a  lesser degree.  Or at least they believe they do.

Secondly, I have involved myself in a variety of different activities related to marketing my freelancing services.  I’ve submitted a number of client inquiries, and have worked on my LinkedIn network and some other types of writing to build a platform.

So, to some degree, my delay in opening a blog on writing and related topics boils down more to a matter of  prioritization and time and project management.

When a writer puts off certain projects in favor of others, but eventually meets the deadline . . . or, if it’s personally fulfilling writing . . . returns to a pet  project eventually, that’s not procrastination.

That’s simply good sense and managing the writer’s efforts adequately.

For further information on my background and expertise in the area of professional writing, visit my professional website at:

www.kristawriter.com

Opening thoughts . . .

I named this blog Writings, Etc. because . . . that's what it is.

Let me introduce myself.  I am a professional freelance business, technical, and web content writer.  I'm presently working towards doing more copy writing type of work, especially in the area of catalog copy.

Different types of writing call for different skills and techniques.  However, I  have found that certain writerly characteristics serve writers well across all types of writing.

One characteristic that underlies the making of a good professional writer involves paying attention to detail in the moment to life experience.  Another involves an enjoyment of studying on many topics.

As I prepared to pursue copywriting, I examined my own past articles and web content for the sorts of topics I've written about the most.  I identified seven potential "niche" areas I could pursue in the copywriting world.

Those include lifelong learning and educational services, the crafts of knitting and crocheting, horse-related topics including riding apparel, the household goods market, reading and books, toys and games, and the travel and tourism industry.

Additionally, three my spec samples for three of those niches represent at least two other sub-niches.  Those are spirituality and religion, and personal development along the lines of setting goals and planning one's work and marketing efforts. 

The sub-niches in some ways overlap with good writing planning and techniques.

So, I will try to tie in the blog posts to writing, but some of my posts may focus on some of these niche areas.

To know more about me as a writer, please visit my professional writer's website at:

www.kristawriter.com