Power-Writing-for-Everyone Archives

How to Write an Outstanding Blog Post

April 28, 2007 by Liz

It Takes ALL of You

What does it take to write an outstanding blog post, one that I look back on months later and still think it’s the best I could write? months after I’ve gone on to write about other things?

Choose to write about your passion whenever you can, but when you cannot, be passionate about what you write.

I write the most outstanding blog posts when I bring all of me to the keyboard to write. All of me is the one who’s been writing for years and the one who still remembers what it’s like to be a kid. All of me means head and heart together in every word. It means taking time to make sure that I’m there. Here’s a way you might do that.

Before you even begin, STOP.

Reflect on what you want to say. Know in your mind what your message is. Try it on for size. Imagine what you want readers to know, want them to see, want them to feel in their bones.
Give those feelings spectacular words such as breathtaking, exhilarating, compelling, stunning, amazed, intrigued, or entranced. Imagine being a kid discovering this information for the first time. Try to capture the way it would feel.

Those two steps will connect your heart to your head. When you stop to breathe before you write, all of you will be there when you click that first key.

Capture the whole message before you edit what you say. Trust your mind and your heart to give you the right ideas first. Worry about the sentences and the words later. The ideas are what you want to share. Make the ideas big. Make them real. Tell your story by showing your readers what you want them to see.

Use your own voice. Make the words sound like you think. When you read the words through, read aloud and listen to how the words sound. Do they sound like you do? Do they have rhythm and music?

When the ideas are right and the voice is yours, then look at the sentences. Are they long and short? Do they sparkle and shine? Do they say what you mean? Do they feel right? You probably won’t need to do much.

If your heart is with you, don’t be surprised if you find yourself feeling passionate, even emotional, about what you write. To this day, I still cry when I read some of the best blog posts I’ve ever written.

How do you write an outstanding blog post?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
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Introducing Bloggy Tag — I’m it, You’re it, I’m it. . . .

April 28, 2007 by Liz

As we established on Monday, a meme is an idea that propagates itself. Memes (rhymes with dreams) got their name from Richard Dawkins in his book, The Selfish Gene, and are the cultural counterpart of biological unit gene.

I get bloggy tagged often by the pseudo-memes that travel the blogosphere. I’m lucky the bloggy tags that march my way are usually fun and often offer a way they can be made useful or entertaining for folks reading my blog.

On Monday, folks asked me to start a campaign to rename the bloggy memes something . . . um . . . er . . . more appropriate. Unfortunately, I have no faith in my ability or strength to move the blogosphere in such a noisy way.

Heck, I got a passel of Bloggy Tags this week to address. That’s a force to contend with. So I choose to take a quieter route — one that makes sense for me –to formally describe and name what we do and give it a button of its own.

Introducing, “Bloggy Tag.” It’s a scattershot Internet version of the children’s game. Here’s how you play.

Do a written task or answer a question. Then tag 1-5 others to do as you did.

Tag your post with the button shown to the right to alert readers that you’re playing.

Link the button to the post of the person who tagged you, if you didn’t start the game.

Tell your readers to click the button to find out who came before you. It’s a surprise for them.

One cool part of the whole thing is that everyone can tell at a glance when a post is the answer to a tag. We no longer have to write extreme explanations about who made the tag. Once everyone gets the rules down, we won’t have to repeat them over and over either. YEA!

If it works for you feel free to take the button with you and use it the next time you get tagged. Meanwhile . . . this weekend . . .

Bloggy Tag Weekend: I have named this an Official Bloggy-Tag Weekend on Successful-Blog. I plan to catch up on all of the bloggy tags recently sent my way and any I might have missed in the past.

If you have bloggy tagged me in 2007 and you haven’t seen your answer yet, please email me at lizsun2 @ gmail.com with a link to the post that has your tag. Thanks in advance for that help.

After all, we can’t have mutant memes running loose on the Internet. The meme pool could contract a memetic disorder.

That would be bad.

Now on to a few games of tag, tag, tag, tag, tag, . . .

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you think Liz can help with a problem you’re having with your writing, check out the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

Great Writers Read Great Writers

April 5, 2007 by Liz

Once Upon a Time

If I asked you to name a great writer, who might it be? And if I asked you to name more than one, would all of them, any of them, have gone to a university?

Abraham Lincoln, a self-educated man, wrote the Gettysburg Address.

Ayn Rand left the USSR in 1926 — her formal education was over. She came to the U.S., took odd jobs in Hollywood to support herself. Ayn Rand wrote The Fountain Head and Atlas Shrugged.

Truman Capote ended his formal education at age 17. He wrote In Cold Blood and Breakfast at Tiffany’s.

All of these great writers learned to write by reading.

That’s how writers learned through history. Writers learned to write before there were oficial writing teachers. What did they get?

They got the music and the structure of the language.
They got a sense of story.
They learned to put words together to make meaning.

Oh sure, they got much more. Every word they read taught them something about their writing.

Do you read like a writer? What would a writer of your sort be reading? How might a writer read in a different manner? Is reading blogs enough?

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you think Liz can help with a problem you’re having with your writing, check out the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

Are You a Writer? 7 Traits that Writers Have in Common

February 28, 2007 by Liz

Bloggers and Writers

Lately I’ve noticed a number of bloggers who draw a line between themselves and the word writer. I already knew a number of writers who do that as well. That word writer seems to be one that can take years to claim.

When I investigate why this is so, the answers are intangible. The idea, writer, seems to fall into a category with ideas like success. Every person is struggling to find a meaning that makes sense. It’s not about money. It’s not about volume of work. It’s about meeting a self-defined goal of becoming a writer.

Becoming a writer — that resonates with every writer I know.

People ask me how I knew I was, how I know I am, a writer.

Let’s talk about writers I know.

Are You a Writer? 7 Traits that Writers Have in Common

Naturally, if the idea of a writer is self-defined, I can’t tell you when you will feel that you can call yourself a writer. However, a few things seem to be true about all writers — from every first grader I taught how to construct a sentence to every great writer I’ve ever researched.

A writer is a paradox of ego and self-doubt. We need both to keep on task and to keep in control. Knowing oneself is the only way to invest in the work and still be able to let go when it’s time to stand back and revise it.

Writers often start out feeling like an imposter. The message we’re told is that the writing is strong and compelling, or well on its way, but we think the messenger could be mistaken.

Writers get lost if they compare themselves and their work to other writers. The same is true if they write for approval.

Even the most inexperienced writer knows when the writing is wonderful. The problem is that we have to learn how to tell when the writing is not good and how to have the courage to fix it.

Writer’s block is fear, or exhaustion, or both. It can be managed if we know its source.

Every writer is in a self-actualizing process. Writing is an apprenticeship. A writer is always becoming a writer.

Nothing in life can prepare you to be a writer, except everything in your life.

I would say the best advice is to paraphrase Troy Worman. “Don’t wait for permission to be a writer.”

Every day I write, I learn something about myself and other people.

How do I know I’m a writer?

Try as I might to avoid it, I simply must write.

Be irresistible.
–ME “Liz” Strauss

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Writer’s Block: Unblanking the Blank Screen

January 30, 2007 by Liz

Why the Blank Screen Is Scary

Ah, the blank screen.

The blank screen. It’s an invitation to look foolish, to be boring, to write something that we’ll regret. Some of us can use the blank screen to scare the proverbial pants off ourselves imagining how badly we might screw things up.

The blank screen reminds us that our thoughts will be there for the world to see.

A famous Guindon Cartoon said it better.

Writing is nature’s way of letting you know how sloppy your thinking is.

Fear of a blank screen, writer’s block, really is — a subtle fear of exposure — fear that people will see things in our thoughts.

Combine that fear with the idea of marring a pure and perfect white screen, and a writer can get totally ‘whelmed. (Who needs to be overwhelmed? Feeling ‘whelmed is quite big enough for me, thank you.)

It helps to know what we’re up against.

Unblanking the Blank Screen

The key to unblanking the scary blank screen is getting something on it we want to say. Some writers can type until they know what that is. I’m not one of them.

I find freewriting visually stressful. When I do that, all I see is a blank screen getting messier and messier. All I feel is me getting more and more distracted by the problem that I don’t know what I want to write.

What I do instead is look away from the menace of the vast white space. I get up and hunt down one sentence — only one — one sentence that says something I want to say. I use questions like these to help me.

What something have I learned or learned about lately?
What news have I heard that I’d enjoy adding my point of view to?
What have I read that I might want to recommend?
What pithy comment was left on my blog this week? How might I respond?
What pattern, behavior, trend have I noticed?
What question do I have that I want answered?
What skill or a technique might I teach?
What argument might I give the pro/con to?
What lesson have I learned this week? What funny story can I share?
What pet peeve or problem have I got a solution to?

The possible questions are unlimited, of course. I start with these, and look through books, cabinets and drawers, and the refrigerator while I’m thinking. The moving around and looking helps my brain unfreeze.

It’s not long before a sentence warms up to me.

I go back to my computer, and I write that sentence across the screen.

The screen is not blank anymore. I’m no longer distracted by its emptiness.

Now I can get to writing.

That sentence? It often becomes my headline. When it’s not, it’s usually my last line. Can you tell which one it is this time?

What questions would you ask to help folks unblank the blank screen?

UPDATE: IF you don’t read Joe’s post Liz Had My Idea Before Me, you’ll be missing a clever and entertaining blogger’s post.

–ME “Liz” Strauss
If you think Liz can help with a problem you’re having with your writing, check out the Work with Liz!! page in the sidebar.

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

December 28, 2006 by Liz

Connecting to the World

Look in a scrapbook. Look in your wallet. You’ll find written messages. Diaries, wedding invitations, resumes, love letters, even our names are written as words. Yet, the best writer — the most prolific, the most proficient — is never finished learning, never finished becoming a writer. We are apprentices every one of us. We’re all in the process of becoming.

We’re all apprentice writers — part ego and part self-doubt. It’s the ego that helps us face down that blank page to say what we have to say. It’s the self-doubt that stops us from casting the movie about what we’ve written.

In this age of noise and clutter, we all need to be writers. Writing and publishing are the way we connect to the world.

10 Reasons to Write and Publish Every Day

We write to record our thoughts . . . and by recording them we think them through, rearrange, and re-organize them. We make our ideas clearer. We make our thinking stronger and more easily understood. We carve a path that a reader, a listener, another person can follow from our minds to their minds, from our hearts to their hearts. Writing is a connection waiting to happen.

Publishing makes the connection more natural and accessible.

Here are ten reasons that writing (and publishing) every day is important.

Writing every day makes us better thinkers. It takes our thoughts out of our heads and challenges us to express them in understandable ways. Effective writing is the opposite of seat-of-the-pants thinking.

Writing every day teaches us how to work with words in print, to construct a meaningful message. Like playing a guitar or doing math, writing takes practice.

Writing every day helps us develop a voice that is natural and consistent, strong and confident, and attuned to readers. Everything we write has an audience. Even when we write for ourselves, we go back to read, listening to what we wrote. We question. We consider. We critique our choices.

Writing every day improves our ability to craft remarkable prose that people want to share. Every time someone shares something that we write they add value to our ideas — when they change them and when they don’t.

Writing every day gets us comfortable with the conventions of writing and the conventions of writing give our messages credibility. The credibility is how society finds the appropriate place for our ideas.

Writing every day lets us find our personal writing process. We lose our fear of flying and learn our way around our creativity. We get familiar with what to do when we need ideas, how to know what we want to say, what is always going to be hard, and what parts are worth looking forward to.

Writing every day teaches us how to tell our internal editor to be quiet until we need feedback.

Writing every day makes us better, more thoughtful readers. We bring the insights and appreciation of a writer to what we read.

Writing every day connects us to people. We meet more people in print than we can ever possibly meet face to face. Many people will know our written voice as well as they know our names.

Writing every day makes us architects and builders. We record our history, and we imagine the future. We inspire and motivate, both ourselves and others. We make something that changes the world, something lasting. We make a unique contribution that others might use.

Everything written is inherently personal and at the same time dynamically social. In a noisy world, it’s the way we communicate across continents, across living rooms; with folks we just met and with every generation of our families. We write our dreams, our business plans, and ask questions. We read. We respond. We get the ultimate first impression.

Each time we write our voice becomes clearer, more focused, and stronger, until our writing is inseparable from our voice. Everything we write is written about us.

Publishing is how we talk to the world and how the world hears us.

What have you told the world today?

–ME “Liz” Strauss