How many hours do we sit in front of a keyboard, going over our prose in painstaking detail, tweaking the minutiae of plot, characterization, and setting?
How many hours do we spend doing something about our health and wellness?
I bet the answer to the first question is a larger number. I know it was for me, but that’s no longer the case.
I’d like to tell you a story about a person who was dying. That person is me.
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I’ve been getting a lot of requests lately from people who would like to see samples of my writing. Like most writers, I feel a certain amount of fear when it comes to sharing the material I write. Having never published officially, I guess I’m lacking that psychological “stamp of approval” we all need at the beginning of our careers.
I hope you enjoy.
[Edit: I should point out, since I didn’t make this clear earlier, this was my first official attempt at Flash. My typical medium is novel-length fiction, with some excursions into short stories when I’m taking a character for a test drive.]
My fellow bloggers and writers +Katherine Vucicevic and +Jasveena Prabhagaran have been kind enough to nominate me for a Very Inspiring Blogger award! I am both humbled and honored.
There’s a commonly held belief among new writers that the rules are made to be broken. I agree to an extent, but if you’re an unpublished writer you break the rules at your own risk. Those of you who follow me on Twitter (@NatRusso) know how I love my “writetip” autotweets. Here’s another one of my favorites:
Don’t break a rule until you understand it. Learn the rules of grammar…then break them like a pro. But start with learning.
Continue past the jump to discover how this applies to not only grammar.
Those of you who follow me on Twitter know that I have a schedule of writing “tips” that I tweet semi-regularly. They often spark thoughtful conversations on the craft, which is one of the reasons I started them to begin with. But there is one tweet in particular that I receive no end of grief for publishing:
Writing is a learned craft, not a mystical gift from the universe. You can learn. Practice. Read. Write. Read some more. Write! #writetip
That sounds innocent enough, doesn’t it? Read on to feel my pain…
“Why should I be ashamed to describe what nature was not ashamed to create?” -Pietro Aretino
We’ve finally arrived! Welcome to Part 10 of a 10-part series on Using Twitter Effectively. We’ve covered all the dos and most of the don’ts, but one don’t remains:
Lack of activity.
This one is simple, so we’ll keep it short and to the point.
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If you’ve been following this series, then over the last 3 days you’ve discovered the evils of Auto-DMs, the tediousness of people who tweet their shopping lists, and the dark side of Auto-Tweets.
Today I’d like to take us one step further and talk about antisocial behavior and how it can <ahem> harm your efforts to build a writer’s platform.
In Part 4 of this 10-part series I covered the benefits of auto-tweeting, and I offered some links to automation tools that have helped me maintain a steady schedule of informational tweets.
In today’s post I’d like to cover the dark side of auto-tweeting. This should be relatively short, as I think you’ll find most of it appeals to common sense.
Tweeting every little detail of your life is a great way to make your followers lose interest in you.
“Ordering pizza lolz!” or “Need to scratch my foot” or just plain “lol!!!” with no further clarification. How many times have you seen tweets like these? My feed is loaded with them, and most of them have no context whatsoever.
Today, in part 6 of my 10-part series on Using Twitter Effectively we’ll cover the sort of things you probably shouldn’t share with the world.
Let’s go!
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