The Writers Coin

I have a new post up at Wisebread today about how valuable you can be at work. For those of you that don’t know, Wisebread is a great personal-finance site and I write the occasional post for them. My newest post is about versatility in the workplace. Are you a hammer or a swiss-army knife? Head over there to check it out and see which one you are.

I also wanted to mention the tab at the top of the site titled WC Around the Web. This is the page that I’m using to link to anything I’ve written that isn’t on The Writer’s Coin. Sometimes these are guest posts and some of them are things I’ve written for partners like Wisebread.

Sometimes I feel like writing about things that don’t really belong on this site (even though I can do whatever I want…I run the joint) so in an effort to get the word out about my writing and my site, I’ll do a guest post for another site. That’s why I wrote about running and money at LazyManAndHealth.

And sometimes posts will cross pollinate with each other, like my If I Won the Lottery post at Wisebread. It’s kind of similar to my All the Money in the World series of posts.

Anyway, make sure to check them out and let me know what you think!

It’s very rare that I get to write a post that applies to both of my interests: money and writing. I’ve managed to get it done before when I wrote about how money legitimizing everything and when I analyzed how much writing pays. But this is another one of those posts where I get to satisfy both my financial readers and my writerly readers (if there are any out there—speak up if you are!).

So I’ve been complaining for a while about how writing for this blog has absorbed all the time that I could be using on writing fiction. I haven’t done much about it, but the other day it hit me that I’ve been blogging for over a year (since October of 2007) and I’ve consistently published around one post per day. So I can do it—I can write every day for long periods of time. Being a writer is within my reach—I even proved it to myself when I participated in NaNoWriMo.

In the early days of this blog I even published three posts in a day, although the quality of those early posts was dubious, at best.

And that’s when it hit me: what if I would’ve dedicated all that time to writing fiction instead of blogging about money? What would I have to show for it? Would I be on the bestseller lists yet?

Shoulda, Coulda, Woulda

It’s easy to look back and say I should’ve done things differently. But I’m pretty happy with the time I’ve put into this site and what I have to show for all the work I’ve done. It has allowed me to practice my writing, it has gotten me into a writing routine, and it even got me my current job. So it’s not like I regret having blogged for all this time.

But I’m still curious what I might have to show if I would’ve been writing stories or a novel.

So I took 10 random blog posts and took a word count—an average post is around 550 words. My old posts were much shorter and my current ones are longer, so this seems like a fair number to pick out.

Since October of 2007 I’ve published 525 posts and around 11 posts for other sites. That’s a total of 536 posts.

536 posts x 550 words = 294,800 words

That is a lot of words. It’s not Infinite Jest length or anything, but it’s a lot. A typical novel has around 100,000 words, so even if I cut this by half I’d still have enough raw material that I could call a novel. I might even have enough for two novels!

That’s pretty amazing. To think I could’ve written a novel+ in under two years is great news. That means I can do it. It means it’s possible. One of my biggest issues when it comes to writing is saying I don’t have enough time, but writing 500 words a day is pretty easy—I’ve proven I can do it. Now I just need to keep doing it with my fiction.

Granted, writing about one concept or idea or theme for that long is tiring and hard—but still. I’m taking the 294,000 words as a major victory.

To the Money Readers

I haven’t forgotten about you guys. You’ve probably already figured out the PF connection here—eliminating debt or saving money works the same way. Focusing on small amounts can work as long as you do it regularly over the long term. Granted, some PF writers like Ramit would have you focus on the big stuff, not the small details. And as much as I agree with Ramit on most stuff, I have to disagree here because, well, it would’ve fit into the context of my post. You start small and then you move up—that’s my take.

Saving a dollar here and there doesn’t feel like a lot of progress, but once you start doing that over long periods of time—that’s when it starts to pay off. Just ask Tricia—she just paid off over $37,000 of credit-card debt. Anything’s possible.

The Power of Gradual

It may not be sexy and it may take a long time, but by focusing on small bits of progress over a long period of time, anything’s possible. Now if you’ll excuse me I have some fiction I have to go write.

Photo by Zevotron

At work the other day, there was a presentation about SEO and how we can make all of our sites more SEO friendly. Instead of spending gobs of cash on online banners and such, SEO is a free way of getting your name out into the world. As any blogger can attest, a little bit of SEO research can go a long way.

What I found really interesting is how the presenter framed the stuff he was talking about. To make sure everyone understood the idea behind some of the complex stuff that Google does to crawl and find sites, he told a little story that went something like this:

So Google probably has the smartest engineers in the world working for them. And their number one directive that they’ve been asked to follow when it comes to their job is to do what’s best for the user. So if two pages look exactly the same but one of them is more popular than the other, Google’s engineers will make it so that popular page shows up before the other one. And if Google thinks a page is trying to do some sneaky things to try to game the system but aren’t useful to the user, then they will not only ignore your site—they’ll penalize it.

So as you’re working on a site and you’re trying to make sure it will do well on search engines, each time you’re wondering whether or not something you’re doing is sneaky or questionable, think of the team of Google engineers who are so good at their job. And try to put yourself in their shoes: ask yourself what the user would want and try to make it easy for them to find you. That’s what Google wants, and that’s what you should try to give them: keep the user in mind first.

The presentation was longer and deeper than that, but he kept coming back to this concept and I thought it was fascinating. He was telling everyone from engineers to writers the same exact thing: keep the user in mind and Google’s search engines will reward you.

OK, Now the Writing Part

What does this have to do with writing? I’m sure you’ve figured it out by now, but whenever you’re writing something it’s always good to ask yourself, “What would a reader think of this?”

Not to the extent that you should change things just for the sake of the reader—we’re talking writing here not mathematics and engineering algorithms. There is no “right answer.” But there is a consideration. Don’t forget about your reader—hes/she’s the whole reason you’re writing in the first place, remember?

This happens to me when I write a first draft of something as simple as an email. I’ll get to the end of it and think, “Boom, this is perfect. Off it goes!” Then I go back and re-read it and it doesn’t make a lot of sense unless you’re in my head (you don’t want to be in there, trust me). The best thing to do is to go back and try to reframe what I’ve written so that a third person could actually understand what I was trying to say.

That’s why writers hate first drafts and that’s why we need to “step away” from them before coming back and working them over. As Steven King has said, he finishes a novel, stuff it in a drawer, and doesn’t come back to it for around six months.

Why? He wants to be able to edit it from the point of view of his readers: with a fresh perspective.

Google would be proud of him.

This post was included in the Just Write Carnival over at The Incurable Disease of Writing

Like most other writers, I procrastinate in a variety of really creative ways to avoid sitting down in front of my desk and actually writing. Sometimes that means sketching out an outline of what I’m supposed to be writing, taking “notes” of ideas, or “thinking” of ways to conjure up a scene.

These little “pre-writing” exercises are nothing more than me putting off the inevitable: the writing.

Not Just for Writing

This goes for anything else you do in life (or try to). Procrastination is such a serious problem for so many people (“battling procrastination” brings back over 400,000 hits on Google) that there are whole books and studies dedicated to studying how it works and what we can do to fight it.

All so we can finally get some things done.

These are some of the tips you’ll find out there:

• Set goals
• Ask for help
• Reward yourself
• Be realistic
• Set a schedule

Some of these work OK and some of them fail every time. But there’s one that works every single time—without fail.

The Article

I had an idea for an article about three weeks ago and I knew it would be around 1500–2000 words long, which is longer than the articles I write here on The Writer’s Coin. So right away I was a little intimidated: this wasn’t going to be so easy.

So I started an outline. Then I set some time aside to write an intro. Then I read a little bit about the topic and jotted down some notes in the magazine I was reading. Then, finally, when I sat down to actually write it, I ended up going over those notes and expanding on them.

After four weeks, I had three different outlines, tons of pieces of paper with notes sketched everywhere, and zero words. And still I thought to myself, “I’ve got to think about this some more before I start to write.”

Classic procrastination denial talk.

Just Do It

Then yesterday something happened. I woke up and instead of falling into all the trappings of blogging and procrastinating (checking email, checking stats, emailing people back, reading other blogs, etc.), I simply sat down to write the damn article.

The night before the inspiration had come to me: just stop messing around and write it all from beginning to end.

JUST DO IT.

An hour and a half and 2,400 words later, the article was finished. I was very happy but also shocked that I had actually, finally done it. No secret strategy, no sneaky exercises—just sit down and do it.

Tomorrow I can edit it, make it better, or start over. But for now, I wrote the first draft and without a first draft, it would never go anywhere.

Next time you start to fall into the procrastination trap, give this strategy your best shot. If you manage to pull it off, I guarantee you won’t fail.

Photo by bbaunach