Bookending Your Blog Posts

Photography: James.

A fairy tale can be described as a story that begins “once upon a time” and ends “and they got married and lived happily ever after.” There’s more to it than that, of course. Folklorists have come up with a bewildering list of categories and types to describe all the different ways in which wolves eat people and princesses end up happily hitched to handsome princes. But you always know when a fairy tale begins and you always know when it ends.

Blog posts don’t have such obvious little techniques. Writers hurl themselves in, hoping to create a first paragraph that will look inviting, stand out on a home page, and generate enough curiosity to pull the reader into the body of the post.

You can start big, with a concept (as this post does), attaching the idea the article contains to a bigger theme and setting it in a context that gives another depth of meaning. Or you can use the first few sentences to summarize the point of the article. That’s a favorite of news reports; if the reader is going to give up halfway through, he or she should at least take away the main information the story offers.

Those two approaches alone should be enough to kill the blank page and get the words moving.
Ending the post though is often a little trickier. You know when you’ve said enough – or, if you’re a pro on commission, when you’ve reached your word count – but you need an ending that tells the reader your point is made. Movies roll credits, magazines have a back-of-book section, and books have conclusions. Nut apart from the one-paragraph summary crafting an end that feels final but which still leaves the idea firmly planted in the reader’s mind (where, hopefully, it will grow into a beautiful thought) usually takes a bit of wit and planning.

How Do You Say It’s Over?

One option that always works is to bookend the article. Refer back to the metaphor or the argument made in the first paragraph and you’ll show that your piece has passed through a process: the opening paragraph introduced a concept, the body did something with it, and the end showed what happened to it.
It’s a strategy that appears to be standard at The Economist. The newspaper’s recent obituary of Tsutomu Yamaguchi, a double nuclear survivor, for example, begins:

“WHEN he had stopped crying, Tsutomu Yamaguchi would tell you why he called his book of poems “The Human Raft”. It had to do with the day he forgot to take his personal name-stamp to work, and had to get off the bus…”

and ends:

“He began to be comforted by three things. One was a set of drawings of the 88 Buddhas of the Shikoku pilgrimage, whose outlines—robes, haloes, calm hands—he devoutly painted in. The carbonised, face-down Buddhas of his tanka found peace again. The second comfort was in “simple acts of kindness”. And the third was an image of his life as a baton, passed on every time anyone heard or read his testimony. All these batons might form, together, another human raft.”

The metaphor, repeated at the end of the article, gives the readers a sense of closure, provides the image with a new meaning — and ends the story. There might not be a marriage or a feeling of happy-ever-after, but as readers, we know the story is finished, and as writers we’re shown another way to say “The End.”

The Secret of Successful Freelancing

Photography: Ninja M.

It looks like the ideal way to work. There’s no commute, no boss, no schedule and no Friday evening assignments ready to ruin a planned weekend. As a freelancer, you’re in control of your own fate and your hours are your own. That’s also true of the unemployed though, and for many freelancers, the difference is little more than a change in the title and the numbers on the unemployment check. But it doesn’t have to be that way. It is possible to be a freelancer – even a freelance writer – and make enough to pay the mortgage, feed the family and have a little cash left over to enjoy your Saturdays.

It all comes down to a mixture of professionalism and contacts – and it’s the professionalism that’s hardest to acquire.

When you work for a company, your success depends entirely on your position in the hierarchy. Whether you rise, stick or leave relies on your relationship with your boss – and on his or her relationship with your colleagues. Being an employee might mean being part of a team but when only one of the team is heading for a promotion, it also means a dog-eat-dog environment in which your prime concern is you. As a freelancer though, it’s never about you.

It’s always about the client.

The Freelance Customer Is Always Right

Whether you’re writing content for the Web, producing code for websites or designing graphics for ads, as a freelancer you’ll soon find that the customer really is always right. Even when he’s wrong about the project, he’s right when he says that if he doesn’t get what he wants, he won’t pay. The result is that successful freelancers quickly learn to lose their ego and focus on the client’s demands. You get to voice your opinion, but the decision is always down to the person who holds the purse strings. That relationship between pay and performance really does bring out a different kind of professionalism, one in which you genuinely try to put yourself in the client’s shoes and deliver the product he didn’t even know he wanted.

That professionalism should grow naturally, with experience, and with the pleasure of receiving freelance pay. Contacts will come the same way. Freelance careers often start with nothing but an Elance profile and a dream of a better way of working. Sometimes, they’ll come with a client or two in the form of a former colleague who’s moved on to a different company. But eventually, they build up to a point at which you’re serving a handful of clients most of your time and contributing to a number of others some of the time. The trick is to make sure that your biggest clients are kept happy while you keep your eye out for new clients to replace them should they decide to pull the plug.

It’s not an ideal way to work – it means not one boss but lots of small bosses, and urgent work still comes in on Friday afternoon – but it is still a great way to earn a living.

Getting the Most Out of Email Interviews

Photography: smiling da vinci

One of the things that we’re hoping to see more of at Scribat is articles that make use of interviews. Not that there’s anything wrong with content writers producing expert advice or well-written opinion pieces – there’s a market for those too – but interviews always bring extra depth to an article. And if you ask the questions by email, they’re dead simple to do. Sure, you’ll miss the free-ranging chat that a phone interview can bring, and the connection with a contact might not be as deep, but you won’t have to make notes, the subject can answer in his or her own time, and if you ask the right questions, you should still be able to get the information – and quotes – that you need.
You just have to do them right.

1. Plan Ahead
That starts with careful planning. The biggest advantage that phone interviews have over email interviews is that they’re instantaneous. Provided you can get the subject on the line right away – and let’s face it, that’s horribly rare – you can have the information you need in twenty minutes and be on line to meet your deadline. If you plan your article ahead though, email interviews can squish that advantage. While some respondents will shoot you back answers within a day, you’ll do best by sending out your interview requests at least a week in advance.

And you’ll do better by sending out at least three. Not everyone will reply, so the more requests you send, the lower the odds that you’ll end up empty-handed. And if everyone replies, you’ll have a better pick of the quotes.

2. Keep the Questions Down
Ideally, you’ll want the kind of long answers that are packed with information and are filled with juicy soundbites that you can toss into the article. The likelihood that will happen depends in part on the personality of the subject, but it also depends on your questions. Ask lots of questions and the subject is more likely to give short answers to get through them all. Keep the questions to ten or less and you should find that at least some of them produce answers that are long and full.

3. Get Stories
You can do even more to encourage those answers by asking questions that generate anecdotes. Questions like “What was your favorite project?” or “What was the biggest challenge?” might be journalistic clichés but they do produce good answers. Put at least one of them in.

4. Read the Website
It’s likely that you’ll have questions designed to get the basic background information out of the subject. Much of that information though is often available on the website – and what you get back might just be cut and pasted from the About Us page.

If you have that information already, don’t ask for it again (even in the hope of getting a usable, original quote). Instead, pick something out of the bio and ask for more details.

5. Interview Businesses
The biggest risk of email interviews is that you won’t get the replies, and when you’re up against a deadline that’s a big risk. If the deadline is hard and real, then it’s time to hit the phones but one way to increase the chances that you’ll get an easy email response is to send your questions to businesses. They’ll understand the value of the publicity and respond with good answers. Make at least one of your recipients a company, and you can be confident of receiving at least one set of answers.

Learning How to Write

Photography: eclecticlibrarian

Last year, “Kristin,” a literary agent, received 38,000 queries from people hoping she could help them put their books in print. From those, she requested just 55 full manuscripts and of those 55, picked up only six new clients. That’s an acceptance rate of 0.0063 percent, or one in 6,333.

There are lots of reasons that an agent might reject a query. The topic might be wrong, either for the agent or the market. The structure might not work or the characters could be unconvincing. But often, it’s the writing.

Professional agents can tell, at a glance, whether a writer is capable of creating balanced sentences, whether she knows how to use words appropriately, dodge clichés and dig up new and interesting ways to express ideas. Yes, no, read on, reject… the decision often happens in seconds, sometimes as early as the first sentence.

It’s not always as difficult as it sounds, and not just because ‘no’ is the default answer. Redundancies like “fictional novel” are giveaways, and a failure not just to spell, but to spellcheck is usually a good sign that the writer has a low sensitivity to poor wordsmithing.

Learning Writing

Some aspects of good writing can be taught. Journalists can learn how to pull information out of interview subjects.

Bloggers can practice creating introductions and headlines that pull in readers.

Technical writers can take classes that teach them how to explain processes without sending their readers to sleep.

Talent can’t be taught, but it can be honed, sharpened and – most important of all – not wasted.

That happens when the writer reads a lot, reads carefully, and generates his or her own sensitivity to poor writing.

It happens when the writer reads his or her own work before publishing or submitting, and spots the clumsy sentences that trip readers up.

And it happens when writers write a lot.
Writing is a craft built on talent. Good writers might start with talent, but that talent produces better writing the more they do it… and the more they think about the writing they produce.