Abigail M. Schilling

I'm a replacement for Lisa Stone. I was writing my seminar on the plane. I didn't go to the sessions today because I was preparing. You will find all that on my site.

Writing is a form of communication. It's hooking up one brain to another. Not about words. Or commas. Or headlines. It's about communication. If you think about that then everything else will make sense.

Why write at all? Why Bother?

therapy
to learn
To entertain
to teach
to make a difference
to try and help somebody

How many people here write just to get it out?

Who doesn't care if anybody reads it? Five hands.

Who cares but doesn't matter how small? Most. Everything I'm going to be saying here is geared towards that assumption. The stuff will still apply if you don't agree with that assumption.

Why write online?

community
free
immediate
you don't need to be a good writer (I'm glad you said that. 97 percent of anything is total and complete crap. If you do a little bit you are in the top 3 percent.)

How many people write your own weblogs where you are the writer? Most of the people.
On behalf of clients or employers? Some.
Group blogs? Some.
Email lists, forums? Some.
Twitter? Most.

How many people use email? That is writing practice. This stuff takes practice. Never underestimate practice. Even a 140 character twit.

What do you like about writing?
subject matter
feedback, when somebody says "that's perfect"
the craft
expression, artistic satisfaction
documentary
building your personal brand
enforced reflection (Do me a favor and bring that up later.)

What aspects of writing do you find difficult or challenging?
How I write is elementary. I'm a mom.
Shy away from getting emotional deep.
How do I write non-academically.
Writing ADD--can't finish something long.
How to engage the community so they keep coming back.
Perfectionist.
Feel like I have to research everything.
Full of crap words.
Being compelling AND unique.

I'm terrible at monologues so this is going to be a conversation.
Email: amy@gahran.com
Twitter: agahran

I don't know everything about anything, including writing. Neither does my dad. He doesn't know that.

There is no single right thing about writing. It's an art, not a science.

I've linked to several articles I wrote.

Remember what I said about brains hooking up?

Writing is a lot about the process. Thanks to online community, you can actually experience the process more. Because it's a process, the important thing to do is keep writing. You can do writing practice in any kind of writing. It's hard. Don't get down on yourself. Be willing to experiment. You will never improve if you keep trying to do the same thing the same way. Online makes this so easy. Don't be boring. And especially don't bore yourself. You cannot do good writing if you don't have some level of interest in what you're writing. If you're boring yourself you're boring somebody else.

I'm a writer first and a blogger second. I want to blog once a week good posts, but it seems like people want more than that.

This blogging once a day thing? People may disagree with me, but I say bullshit. There is so much out there. If you care about the quality of writing... Your blog does not have to be a constant spew and don't feel pressure to be that way. Quality posts drive traffic.

The big thing is effective writing. We want those brain to connect. How many people only write for themselves? Just one. You know why? We tend to write because we want something to happen. We want to have some sort of effect. We want to educate. We want to persuade. You can achieve these things by just sitting there, you need the cooperation of other people, even if it's just getting them to think about something. Take a pause and think "What do I want to happen because I'm writing this?" When you are clear about what you want to happen, that makes the writing process that much easier. You want to consider WHO you need to reach. Be as specific as possible. Picture real people, individuals, sitting right in front of you. The more you can picture a real person, it makes the writing process easier. Because the difficult decisions get made for you. It's like WWJD. What are my goals and who am I writing for. You want to get inside their head as much as you can. What do they already know, feel, believe about the topic? So many journalists deny they have feelings about what they're writing about. Their mindsets. What reactions do you expect? White people don't talk about racial identity because the reaction might be they're racist. Once you connect it's a lot easier to say what you want to say. That makes the process work.

It's important to consider how much time they will give you. How many people will read a 1000 word blog post? Considering their time is speaking their language. The average rate that people read online is 200-300 words a minute. If you're lucky, someone might give you 1-3 minutes. Multiple the number of minutes by 250 and that's your word count. I know that a constraint. Try it though. If you don't feel comfortable writing to a word count, then that is something you definitely need to do. Engage people within their timeframe.

Three Ways to Achieve Your Affects
1. Be engaging.
2. Be efficient. Get to your point. Develop the skill so that you have the option should you choose to.
3. Be readable. Don't make reading a chore. In terms of written communication, readability is so valuable. Vague word choices, poor grammar, all those things, no matter how slight, are barriers getting in the way from people reading you. Any obstacle means bye.

If you choose not to develop these skills, you are jeopardizing yourself.

Can I hear what people's goals are? Besides make money and have readers?

Complain.

But do you complain to find sympathizer or to complain to the offender?

It's different for every person.

What are your goals?

Depends on the type of writing. Journalism because I'm curious and can't shut up.

It is important to write from you own perspective, but you will get nowhere if you only write for that reason. Give them an entry point. Picture it like gears. Every point you give that reflects, locks a gear and gives momentum. That can pull the reader through the post, through the whole series of posts, through a book.

You talked about the effectiveness of having someone in mind. I find that who I imagine changes every day.

That's okay. If you are picturing different people that broadens your potential audience. More people can engage with you. It's difficult to do that within a book. A lot of people blog to promote a book or to do research. If that's your inherent goal, then you want the specific audience.

In the part about don't making reading a chore, I have actually exercises to help that (like abs for writing). How important are these hard core writing skills and tips to people here? (Not a lot of hands up.) Okay, so that gives us a lot of time.

Other things to talk about:
grammar
ethics
voice (do i like it?)
having a way to relieve stress
fiction
journalism

What do we want to focus on?

What type of blogging are people considered about?
personal
organizational (external and internal)

I'm sorry it's a little disorganized. Let's just take

let's say it's a travel column. Title is "Go Fish: What's in the Cards?" is about fishing in Oregon. But that won't help with google.

Wordtracker.com If you want to write something to succeed online the headline needs to tell you what it's about. It's not free, but it's so cool. If I want to write about wind energy in NC and how it interacts with hog farm. If you put in the keyword, word tracker tells you the words that come up in response to the search, the prevalence of them, helps you know what to put in the headline and the lead that will make it easier for people to find you. It's not about ad revenue, it actually helps the creative process. If the headline can't stand on it's own, you don't want to use it. That only words in print. It dies online.

Talk about comment tracking.

I spend twice as much time leaving comments on other blogs than I do posting on my own. This site, co.mments.com, allows you to bookmarklet links where you've left comments and then it feeds the responses for you. This lets you follow conversations and decide whether you should post again. This site doesn't work with all content management systems and there is nothing for email lists. If your best writing is somewhere that can't be tracked, you need to invent your own tracking system. If you're setting up a forum, keep this in mind. Ideally, you'll want to generate a feed.

Entry points.

Word tracker. It takes the words you're thinking about and gives you the words they're thinking about. Tools like this can help translate.

How does word tracker help the creative process?

It tells you words that are relevant. It can connect you with other audiences. Communities that are potential more helpful to you achieving your goals.

How do you do a headline in your voice?

Don't be boring.

I don't know how to start when I have so much research.

Blog your research process. Think of it as a pregnancy journal. Remember the 3x5 research index cards in high school? That totally sucked. Who ever did that? My dad. Take those starting points. Each of those is a post. You can still organize your information in a more academically acceptable way. But just blog your writing process and use it as your notebook. This is what I love. I'll be writing a series of posts on a complex topic. I throw up a cool link on my blog and I never lose that research. Make your blog your primary notetaking tool.

You talked about voice. I write for my company's blog? I feel like I have to temper my voice. How can you write without losing the way you want to talk?

How do I do that. Badly. My voice comes through no matter what and then I get in trouble. I say things that unsettle journalists. I have to be careful when I do that to say "this is my opinion" when I'm writing on Poynter. Negotiate as much leeway as you can to have your own voice. There is no such thing as an organization perspective. Orgs are made of people and people see things all different ways. If it's too late to negotiate, then make sure you have another outlet and make sure they aren't contractually preventing you from saying what you need to say elsewhere. A lot of journalists are prevented from blogging, from participate in social online communities.

I have been blogging for about 2.5 years. I used to have my "favorites" blog posts on my sidebar. Now it's just "recent posts." How can I get mileage out of stuff I wrote a long time ago? Can I link to old posts?

It helps to have a "me collector." Rarely to any of us write in one place anymore. That's why we were talking about comment trackers. My writing is EVERYWHERE. I found out about this great tool. Ligit is a site search engine widget that you can put in your blog. You can feed into it all your other stuff: other places you write, twitters, co.mments, etc. Anything I can get a feed from I can put in the ligit. Make sure you have some sort of search in your back up. A lot of social tools use tags too.

Most of you already know how to write. The big thing is putting the content together to connect the brains. When I was researching stuff in my own archives, I found something that I had totally forgotten about. It reminded me of something else I wanted to do. Periodically search your archives for no reason. Search the word blue. Do anything you can to encounter things you normally wouldn't.

The more you can link out to the other people, it helps you understand what's going on out there. The better you will be able to communicate.

I link to other sites all the time. I don't understand how that builds traffic. Because people don't see them unless they're already on their site.

Your site will show up in the analytics as a referral URL. People come to see what you're saying about them. If you're saying something directly relevant to them, chances are high that they will keep and eye on what you're doing and even leave a comment. Also, google keeps an eye on all that stuff. The more google sees you engaging the better. AND it makes it more fun. Your blog becomes inherently more interesting.

If you find yourself continually saying the same phrase over and over again, make it a category. It addition to categories (depending on the community you're trying to reach, like people who aren't web-savvy, or using a mobile browser), leave a breadcrumb trail. "Since I last wrote about this..." and link.

Can you talk about using your blog as a writing sample?

That factors into using your blog as a personal brand. I've been writing online almost exclusively since 1997 and all my work has come to me. The more you become the Go To Person for something, the better. Not just setting up a voice for yourself, but owning your turf.

I have a couple blogs because I separate my content. One is professional for the google searches. Other stuff is somewhere else.

I've done that too to a certain extent. The problem with that is that there are so many logins, etc. MarsEdit is great for this. It allows you to post to several blogs at once. Scribe is Firefox plugin that does this.

Anything that is getting in your way, and preventing yourself from writing, needs to be eliminating. Think about it. Tune into to your gut. Is this part of the process bogging me down? Is it a real hassle for me to get a photo with a caption? Look for solutions. You solve that problem once

I've been putting my writing on a diet. I've been using Wordle.net to see what my post really looks like.

That's great. What she's doing is.. a lot of times we think we're saying something and being real clear about it. A tag cloud looks at all the words in your document and shows the words you use the most really big. You might realize you're writing about something different than you thought.

There is something called a Bullfighter's Guide plugin for Microsoft Word that watches for catch words.

There is also a tool like that that looks for legalese. What these tools have in common is that they're linguistic analysis tools. Looking at the words you're putting down. It can be a hell of a slap in the face, but it's good.

I would like to have my writing samples as a kick off to my blog. I was just wondering if you have a website that you want to go into a blog...?

You're talking about creating an online portfolio of your writing work. Most tools now allow you two different kinds of things: posts and pages. Posts are blogs in chronological order. But the pages can be anything: About Me. I've known several journalists working on books have taken their clips and packaged them on pages. Here is everything I've done on mountain lions. Pages are perfect for portfolios. And these are way easier to maintain then building a website.

Did you talk about getting over the hurdle to start writing in the first place?

Let's end with the beginning. Think about the ah ha moments. The last great thing you wrote was promoted by what? Was it an hour after you ate? A result of a great conversation? A movie? Cause you want to do more of that. Nothing comes out of nowhere. Understand your own processes. Set up your routine to condition yourself. A friend of mine, an ad copy writer, realized his best work came after he tortured his office mate. For some reason, it got him in a state of mind that produced his best work.

I hope this was helpful, sorry it was scattered. Go to my site for some great "nut and bolts" type things.

More BlogHer entries here.