Do you make sure you have your favorite ink pen? Do you turn on music?
Maybe you have to be sitting at your keyboard at just the right angle.
Maybe you clean your area, first.
Have a seasonal drink, iced tea, coffee, apricot brandy at your side?
Do the household animals have to be outside? On your lap?
Phone turned off? Headphones and mic to dictate? Favorite browser for research?
Favorite word processor? A “wrist snappin' red rubber band.”
I like a cold drink, my favorite pen, (missing well over a month) Office 360 Word, (used to be yWriter but the new updates have made Word a true adventure) no
music, (it is distracting) and I have to be sitting at my laptop at just the right angle.
Some of history’s most celebrated authors swore by unusual and bizarre rituals. It’s possible we owe many great pieces of literature to the fact that they were so
meticulous in maintaining these strange habits.
Truman Capote
The creative genius behind In Cold Blood, Capote was a superstitious man. His writing rituals often involved avoiding particular things.
Namely, hotel rooms with phone numbers including “13,” starting or ending a piece of work on a Friday, and tossing more than three cigarette butts in one ashtray.
Ernest Hemingway
In stark contrast to James Joyce, Hemingway was a firm believer in standing while writing.While working on The Old Man and The Sea,he followed a strict regimen:
“done by noon, drunk by three.” This entailed waking up at dawn, writing furiously while standing at the typewriter, and eventually making his way to the local bar to get inebriated.
Join us on Sunday, July 19 at The Writer's Chatroom at 7PM EDT and tell us about your Writing
Rituals.
I am a social media addict. There is a section toward the back end of Facebook where you can check how much time you spend online each
day. I won’t share my count because, frankly, I am embarrassed about it.
Ask anybody and they will probably agree that a part of a successful marketing campaign includes Social Media. Am I using my time at Facebook effectively? I think
it depends on my goal.
Facebook has countless Groups for writers of almost any kind you can imagine. Some of them, for example, a Group called Authors where Noizchild and I are a part of
the moderating team. As I am composing this post, Authors has 45,640 Members. Join a few groups. Even if you don’t indulge in Full on Shameless Self Promotion, you can help other group members from time to time by commenting in the feed.
Facebook has Pages. Take a few hours if you haven’t already and make a Facebook Page as an Author or in the name of your Blog or for your Books. Don’t forget to
post regularly, even if it is just a quick image upload.
Start your own Group. It will take a while to set up, then you have to figure out how you are going to find members. I advise you to resist the urge to snatch
people out of a sound sleep and make them join your group. They get rightfully angry about this.
I just gave you some of the easiest ways to use Facebook. It is a start but to make it really work to find traffic for your blogs, podcasts, virtual tours and
readers, you may need a Planned Approach.
Facebook marketing is an organic resource for authors that can’t be overlooked. But from book updates to event
pages to promotional content, the number of tactics you can use to interact with readers can be overwhelming. As an author, how can you be sure you’re getting the most out of your Facebook page?
This is a long post but well worth the read.
Join us on Sunday at 7PM EDT to chat about
Facebook.
Crickets
What do you do when the idea puddle has dried up to a geometric webbing of cracks hard baked in the summer sun?
What happens when you sit down at your word processor and it find yourself deleting whole paragraphs nursing frustration because not a single idea is arriving fully formed, today?
What happens when you simply aren’t motivated to start something new and your WIP feels like you have written yourself into a corner and can’t even fake a way out?
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I’ve known more than one writer who denies the whole idea of Writer’s Block. They will advise you to push right past it. You can do it.
Then there are others who are glad to point out that maybe you just aren’t cut out to be a writer after all. If you can’t hear characters shouting into your ear or running away with the scene treating you as their own personal secretary.
I am not a person who multi-tasks so any project I am into generally takes all of my attention for as long as it takes.
I will close the computer and begin a crochet project and I usually go big when I do that. I will also set up a canvas and begin a painting project that usually takes weeks.
My third option involves finding writing prompts. I keep The Pocket Muse within arm’s reach of my keyboard.
