BLOGGING FOR ASPIRING WRITERS

The difference between an aspiring writer and a blogger? Story.

A recent boomerpdx reader sent this comment about aspiring writers:

Superb blog! Do you have any suggestions for aspiring writers?
I’m planning to start my own blog soon but I’m a little lost on everything.
Would you recommend starting with a free platform like WordPress or go for a paid
option? There are so many choices out there that I’m
completely overwhelmed .. Any suggestions? Thank you!

Someone is asking the Old Blog Coach for ideas.

If you’re a professional and someone asks for advice, what do you tell them?

Tell them they’ve got a great eye for blogger talent. They know a superb blog when they see one.

Not a nice blog, a good blog, but a superb blog.

Let’s start there.

What is a superb blog?

A superb blog gives you something. It might be free, it might not be free, but it will feel free at the beginning.

That blog will offer a free ebook download. Do you download anything from sites you’ve just found besides their cookies and malware?

Aspiring writers often find blogs asking you to sign up for the free ebook.

They’re not asking for your social security number to join their social network. Not yet.

Once you give your email address you may or may not get a slew of email related to the place you left your email. That happens when bigger networks target the browsing habits of new members.

Like Amazon discovered, if you like this, you might like that, or this, and this, and this, until you abandon your old email and start over.

Don’t you think facebook customizes ads based on your facebook wall and who you follow? I think so. That’s just good marketing.

So many superb blogs have hooks you can never shake. This isn’t one of them.

With over a thousand posts up in fifteen categories, boomerpdx is a production machine. Any way you cut it, that’s a lot of writing, thoughtful writing, insightful if I may say so myself.

What boomerpdx offers to the aspiring writer is a mechanical way to understand writing.

If you’ve been to college you’ve taken WR 121 and WR 323 at the minimum. Your school wants you to communicate in a style that says you’ve got an education of worth.

If you haven’t been to college you’re the educational equal to Ernest Hemingway and other Nobel Prize winners for Literature. College isn’t the writer’s ticket, writing is the ticket.

Whether you start a blog on the free platform of wordpress.com, or download their freeware from wordpress.org and buy a domain and go self hosted, you’ve got to write a load.

That means writing on your down day, your off day, your I’m not feeling it day, your I’m not really a writer day. If you write, you qualify; if you write well you may get remarks calling you superb.

Aspiring writers need to write more than they’re used to.

If we’re all good on that we’ll move on. Write online, offline, on paper, on the wall, in a writers’ notebook, and most of all, read a ton and write the story the way you would have.

It’s not copying, or stealing, or cheating. If your writing sounds like one of the masters, call it a literary reference or writing influence.

The take away so far: write a lot and read a lot.

Now the hard part. What do you want to say and how do you want to say it?

The numbers one, two, and three come into the picture now. One. Two. Three. First act. Second act. Third act.

See this in your mind, or write it down. (Write it down.) First act is a normal world. Second act is an event or process that changes the normal world. Third act is the new normal.

Got it? Take WWII as an example.

First act: The treaty that ended WWI, along with the Great Depression, created a world of want. Broken families, breadlines, and economic woe were the norms before Pearl Harbor.

Second act: Bullets and bombs and fifty million deaths later WWII ends with unconditional surrender.

Third act: A mechanized world of peace moves forward while small war brush fires threaten to burst into conflagration at any peaceful moment. Nuclear bomb testing keeps the wolves of war from devouring us all.

How can you tell a world event type story with universal interest?

Find an unlikely hero who finds an unlikely love interest who together accidentally create a blue print for our modern world.

That’s my story, so don’t steal it.

I had Ben Affleck penciled in to direct, but he went with Batman instead.

Clint Eastwood would do it right. After Letters From Iwo Jima and Gran Turino, he’s knows the roles.

Quentin Tarantino would nail it.

But my best bet would be George Clooney. Monuments Men had the right WWII tone.

Still with me here?

Define your story, then work on the elevator pitch, a one minute story. Like this:

“It’s about a gifted airplane mechanic meeting a vengeful school teacher lady on a Pacific island to deal out punishment to renegade soldiers preying on her students. On their down time they work on electronic experiments that set the foundation of the digital world of today.”

Act One: Hero from affluent family sees world in distress and joins Army to help.

Act Two: During the Pacific War island hopping he meets teacher on his last island. She recruits his help against her own soldiers.

Act Three: After the war my hero goes home to find his life in more danger than it was in the war. He moves cross country and finds his teacher-love in a dream.

A last heads up for aspiring writer: The three act structure, beginning, middle, and end, works the same in sentences and paragraphs as it does as an overall framework.

Keep that in mind, or take Hemingway’s advice and “write the truest sentence you know.”

Get that down and you’re ready to follow up with a great story.