Personal stories are all about change

Neera

Phillip Berry Osborne said:

Ultimately, the key to personal-experience stories is change. Where our personal lives are concerned, in fact, change is probably the biggest single challenge we all face and share.

That’s why the best personal stories explore our transition in life—if only to encourage us to accept ourselves in some new context or as we’re becoming.

Such transition or change is vital to storytelling since it’s bound up with the overall message that underscores any good story – and yet, too often, writers fail in this one key area of change and, especially the message that comes out of it.

Without a message, a story is like an egg without a shell.

Many of us, as writers, neglect this fundamental requirement.

Evoke the senses with your writing

Neera

E. L. Doctorow once noted, “Good writing is supposed to evoke a sensation in the reader—not the fact that it’s raining but the feeling of being rained upon.”

Like the one below by Jean Georges, a New York writer, and a master of sensory writing.

After a winter storm several years ago, Jean was asked to check a friend’s Long Island beach house while the friend was away.

Jean expected to find a ‘dreary scene—an abandoned cottage set among pines, stirred by mournful winds.’

But the instant she climbed from her car, she found a world of harsh beauty, discovery, and sensory delight.

The air smelled clean as I looked at a brilliant landscape. The sea was a violet blue, the sky turquoise, and the beach, which the last summer had sloped gently, was not steep, scooped out luminous. Crabs scurried for burrows and gulls spiraled down on them, like paper airplanes against the sky. At the water’s edge, empty shells that whisper when summer waves turn them now made shrill, whistling sounds.

She saw a couple walking hand-in-hand. The man leaned down and wrote something in the sand. She smiles at his age-old act, the epitome of transience: romantic declarations written and so quickly erased by the sea. Not so.

When she came upon his sand message—one word only, his companion’s name—the erosive winter waves were sweeping it, etching the letters more sharply and deeply until they fairly shouted their permanence.

They will be there forever, she thought… or at least until the next high tide.

What a beautiful story and how beautifully and simply it is written.

10 Strategies for continuous flow of blog posts

Neera

No matter what they say in thousands of blog posts and YouTube videos, blogging is a massive undertaking, especially if you have a day job and a family to look after. Many bloggers don’t last beyond ten posts. Having done that so myself on two previous occasions, this time I am prepared.

Some strategies I am using are:

  1. Make a list of 52 topics to give you a whole year’s worth of blogs. Topics that have interested you in the past. Topics that you want to explore. Topics about which you have some opinion. Just a simple list of topics at this stage, no need to go into detail. If stuck, try Top 35 Blogging Ideas.
  2. Plan how many times you are going to post. Posting daily could be very intimidating for beginners. Anywhere between 3 to 4 times a week is great, 2 to 3 times a week might work. Determine how often you need to blog, find a sweet spot, and stick with it until you are ready to grow your blog.
  3. Each week, take a topic from your list and explore it from a different perspective. That way, you can generate four to five posts from a single topic. You can use Hubspot or Portent to give you different angles on your topic.
  4. I find mind mapping a great tool to get initial ideas on the page. There are some cool sites to Create a Mind Map and bring your thoughts to life and Visual Blog Content with Mindmaps.
  5. Speed-write a week’s or a month’s worth of topics in advance. That will give you time to polish them before posting.
  6. Once you have written the posts, you are going to need images to make them look inviting. I have written many text-only blogs and after a while, they are too much for the eye. Everything you need to know about images and How to find images for your blog are good links to start your learning about images. The best sites I have found so far for free images are Pexels and Unsplash.
  7. Sketching is a good way to make your own images. They are more personal and relevant. Another good source is the photos from your collection. They not only bring back memories but finally get seen. If nothing else works, gather a few objects together at home and take a photo with your mobile phone.
  8. I think that the ability to schedule the publishing of blogs is the single greatest invention in blogging. Schedule a week’s worth of posts and relax. They will be posted right on time on the days you have selected in the calendar.
  9. Do not worry if things are not looking that great on your blog. You have time on your side No one is going to find your blog for months. So keep learning and keep improving.
  10. If you really get stuck, find help as I did. While searching for web developers, I found WebTree a web-design site. I dropped an email to Jenny Power who responded even though she was on holiday and helped me find the right theme. She has a free tutorial on her site to Build Your Own Website. Check it out, it is pretty amazing.

Why simple words are the best?

Neera

Everyday stories should be written in the simple everyday language that we all use. As Philip Berry Osborne puts it:

“Among most writers, there’s a natural tendency to get too exquisite and ornamental in their prose. Such writers spend all their time trying to pound the pig iron of language into the bright toys and gleaming blades of literature. They ignore the fact that the best stories deal with the small corners and verities of life—and you don’t need fancy words for that.”

Think more in terms of creating a small, delicate watercolor, rather than a giant oil painting.

You want sentiments that stop short of sentimentality—simple words and simple construction for what should basically be a simple theme.

You want the reader to taste, touch, smell, and feel the very experience you’re sharing.”

Ernest Hemingway, once replying to criticism by William Faulkner that his word choice was limited, wrote,:

“Poor Faulkner. Does he really think big emotions come from big words? He thinks I don’t know the ten-dollar words. I know them all right. But there are older and simpler and better words, and those are the ones I use.”

Everyday Stories

Neera

In the last few posts, I have been sharing everyday stories with you. Ordinary stories from ordinary lives.

Yet they are compelling and stay with us forever.

Some of the best writing—the kind that the readers readily identify with—comes out of all the little happenings in our daily lives.

How little snippets from our daily lives get stored in our memories, percolate there, and then turn into stories, have fascinated me.

A few weeks ago, when I sat down to write my father’s eulogy, the first thing that came to my mind was his hands.

My father had big, soft, and caring hands. The kind of hands a father should have. I started writing about them and out came to a story that I didn’t know existed in my memory vaults.

When I was a little girl, on one hot summer day while playing in a park, I got thirsty. My father led me to a water tap where I tried to drink water with my hand. My tiny hands couldn’t hold much water. Watching me struggle, he cupped his hands, filled them with water, and let me drink from it. My thirst was quenched with just one handful.

Out of millions of such snippets, I was surprised that this one surfaced.

I wondered why. Why didn’t I recall so many other things we did together? Why was nostalgia didn’t take me to the jokes he cracked or the poetry he recited?

Following that, another snippet of memory surfaced. This time he was putting five-years-old-me to sleep by patting my forehead.

Then another one. A photo from my wedding day. He had his hand over my head in the form of a blessing.

It made sense. My father was the symbolic protective hand over me all my life.

But that was not the reason for these memories to come flooding on the morning of his cremation.

It was because he held my hand briefly when he took his last breath, as if reassuring me one last time that everything was fine. He was fine. I will be fine.

The memory of his touch conjured other similar memories.

That is perhaps how everyday stories are formed. One memory recalls another one until they all get interconnected.

Stories are all around us. The trick is developing an active curiosity about them – the way a child does.

“Long before I wrote stories, I listened for stories. Listening for them is something more acute than listening to them. I suppose it’s an early form of participation in what goes on. Listening children know stories are there. When their elders sit and begin, children are just waiting and hoping for one to come out, like a mouse from its hole.”- Eudora Welty in One Writer’s Beginning.

Better than anything else, that probably summarizes what these personal stories are all about and what they tell us about the diversity and story worthiness of ordinary people.

They speak to our sense of closeness.

Columnist George Will once put it so succinctly:

“It is extraordinary how extraordinary an ordinary person is.”

And even more extraordinary is the number of stories they’re carrying around—waiting to be written.

10 Tips on Blogging

Neera

So you want to blog.

So do I. In fact, I wanted it for a long time and I did start. Twice. But both times my passion couldn’t withstand the commitment and planning a successful and sustainable blog needs.

Following two failed attempts (and lessons learned, research, and a lot of soul-searching) I am better prepared this time to make it work. I am more structured, more organized, and much more determined to succeed.

This time, I also promised myself that I am going to share what I learn with my readers. Both my successes and failures, as they happen.

I am going to do it through this weekly newsletter. If you choose to subscribe to it, it will come to your mailbox once a week with useful links along with my comments, recommendation, and spectacular failures.

Through this newsletter, I will share my journey with you not only as a blogger but also as a reader, writer, and student of creativity hoping it might help you with your journey.

Here are my ten tips for this week.

  1. Business plan for your blog. You need one. Believe me on this one. But you don’t need a very elaborate one. It took me just a couple of days to write mine and it brought a lot of clarity in my mind about what I wanted to achieve with my blog and where I want to go with it.

You can read a number of blog posts on the topic by experienced bloggers but here are four I recommend Blogging Business Plans 101 – ProBlogger,  Business Plan: How to Create a Business Plan for Your Blog, How To Write A Blog Business Plan (Free Template!), How to Create a Bangin’ Blog Business Plan (Workbook Included …

Check them out and use whatever you find is relevant to your blogging goals. Keep it simple. My business plan has only 5 sections.

  1. Choose a portal from where you are going to speak. Without a portal, you are soon going to be lost. You can’t write your blog as you write in your diary or journal. In your diary, you can write whatever comes to your mind, but in blogs, you write what you want to share with others. For me, it is reading, writing, and creativity.
  2. Decide whether you are going to be a hobby blogger or a professional blogger. A professional blogger is someone who is making her living from blogging. If you like, you can read non-stop, for the next ten days, on how to make money from blogging or you can do what I did. Just settle for hobby blogging while you learn the ropes. Besides, every professional blogger was a hobby blogger first.
  3. Decide what you are going to register as your domain name. Your name or a name that applies to what your blog is going to be about. You can read How To Choose a Blog Name You Won’t Regret to help you decide. How to Choose the Best Domain Name will give you tips and tools to construct one. Having both my previous blogs named relevant to the contents of the blog, this time I registered my name as the domain name.
  4. Decide which blogging platform you are going to choose. Although there are several free and paid platforms and How to Choose the Best Blogging Platform in 2018 compares several of them the choice for free platforms is really between WordPress and Blogger. Having tried both of them for my previous blogs I had no hesitation to choose WordPress again.
  5. Decide which hosting service you are going to choose to register your domain name. 10 Best Domain Hosting and Registration Services (2018) compares the main ones. BlueHost won hands down for me.
  6. Learn to host your blog on your hosting service. This is relatively simple. You log in through your hosting service and click on the link. And Voila! You are on the blogging platform. If you want to learn more, read 15 FAQs on Starting a Self-hosted Blog.
  7. Construct your blog. This is a fun time. Frustrating and rewarding at the same time. You first need to choose which (WordPress or Blogger) theme you want. Learning about the themes can take up a lot of your time, so be kind to yourself if you don’t pick the right one in the first instance. Choose one of the popular ones to start with and you can change it later. There are thousands of YouTube videos to guide you through the process.
  8. Write your bio. This could be a separate “About” page in your blog or just a few lines on your blog page to start with. You can build it up later.
  9. Write your first post. Keep it simple, even experimental. You can delete it later if you are not happy with it.

All of the above is a lot of work, even though various blogs and podcasts let you believe you can start your blog in half an hour. You can, provided you have done all the background reading and planning beforehand.

But let me not dissuade you from starting. Every hour I have spent learning all of this has been most rewarding. I do not mind that I have been staying awake past midnight and thinking through things while doing mundane work around the house (washing dishes and vacuuming have never been so enjoyable).

I can bet you too will find the experience equally gratifying. Your journey might differ from mine, and you will learn different things during the process. Share them here and we all can benefit from it.

Happy Blogging!

PS: Next week I will share how to write and plan blog posts.

Photo by Kaboompics.com from Pexels