I’m as open to change as the next person; in fact, I know that life is transient and the only thing that is permanent is change itself. But if there’s one thing I can never get used to or bring myself to use is what we now term “text lingo” – the fashionable language that allows you to delete the vowels from words to shorten them and mix them with numbers that sound that parts of words to form totally unrecognizable words, all of which are fully accepted by anyone who uses a cellphone or is familiar with instant messaging. Apparently, if you frown at this usage, if you’re so focused on grammar and spellings, you’re not current or living in the present.

But, even at the risk of sounding like an old fuddy-duddy, I beg to differ from this point of view. While I think it’s each to their own when sending personal messages on your cellphone or when chatting online, when it comes to email and writing for websites, there are certain rules that need to be followed, even if you think they’re not “hip” and “relevant” to the times. No one likes to read emails that are grammatically incorrect and riddled with spelling mistakes. And believe me, if you’re getting away with the same kind of usage on your blog, it’s only because you haven’t noticed the drop in your readership.

You may think that language is a form of communication and that as long as you’ve included all the relevant information and facts in your missive (be it a letter, a blog post or a website page), it doesn’t matter that it’s peppered with grammatical and spelling errors. But what you don’t realize is that even a simple mistake like the misplacement of a comma or the transposition of words can change the meaning of whatever you’re trying to say. So because your knowledge of the language is poor, you may end up misleading your readers.

Some mistakes are just plain annoying – like the wrong placement of an apostrophe (saying you’re when you actually mean your) and the usage of I instead of me and vice versa. But there are others that could end up confusing your audience – like the placement of the world “only” in a sentence. For example, the sentences “John was only trying to help Jane” and “Only John was trying to help Jane” have totally different meanings. The first sentence is a sort of explanation for what John did because he somehow messed up while trying to help Jane, while the second praises John as the only person trying to help her. As another example, consider these two sentences – “Only children are allowed to play here” and “Children are allowed to play only here”. The first one has the word “children” as the subject and restricts the playing to children while the second has the location as the subject and restricts the location where the children are allowed to play.

So if you don’t want to end up making such mistakes when writing for your blog or website, it’s best to brush up on your language skills by including your vowels, cutting out the numerals from your words, and reading through what you’ve written to ensure that the meaning is loud and clear.

By-line:

This guest post is contributed by Anna Miller, who writes on the topic of degree online . She welcomes your comments at her email id: anna.miller009@gmail.com

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This blog is about passion, not how great we are as writers. Being great comes with age—there has to be passion before there can be greatness. With that being said, there are people, who I consider top notch and leaders in their field of writing, tell me I’m a great writer; published writers even.

I don’t see it but everyone is entitled to his/her own opinion. Being great is not on top of my list. I have no desire to attain the status of a Hemingway or a Stephen King. Why? Because, {drumroll} I simply love to write. I’d write even if I totally sucked at it—and looking at some of my early writings, I pretty much did suck at it—but I kept writing. I had to. Not writing is like holding back flood waters; sand bags only work to a point. I’ve walked away on occasion, but the passion to write simply wouldn’t die.

So, if I don’t think I’m that great of a writer, how do I have the self-confidence to keep doing it? Well, a lot of the self-confidence comes from the fact that most things are like fine wine and improve with age. I keep writing so I will improve my skills and style. I have self-confidence because a few people actually enjoy my style of writing—and who am I to deprive them of that? Okay, that was a wee bit of self-gloat there. My apologies.

I write because I’m an information hog and I honestly enjoy sharing information. I have self-confidence because I don’t care what other people think of my writing. Oh, that sounds cocky doesn’t it? It’s not really. I have thick skin and can take constructive criticism—but in the end, what I think is more important than what anyone else thinks. People have the option to not read my writing. It’s their choice. My choice is to write—and write I will.

As a Course Presenter for Fear of Writing, I come in contact with many writers who are simply afraid to take that stand and let the words flow. Some don’t feel that their writing is worthy of being read or shared. Some fear criticism because that’s all they’ve experienced.

I believe that anyone who has an unwavering passion to write has the ability to become great. They key is to write—write every day—write, write, write. No one is great coming out of the gate (see? I could be a poet too). It takes practice, persistence and passion—we could call it the 3P’s to greatness.

So how do they get the self-confidence to write? They write. The only way to get over fear or self-doubt is to write. It’s not an easy task, but it is a must-do task.

My point is you don’t have to be great to write—just write. The self-confidence will build itself every time you write. It helps to have a support group too. I run a small writer’s support group where we check in daily, share in our passion and support one another. It’s not about how great our work is; it’s about encouraging each other to write.

Image courtesy: http://www.maion.com/photography/finland/winter_outdoors_p32.html

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Do you listen to music while you write? Not everyone can. It’s only been recently that I started playing music while I write. Now I can’t start my work day without it. I have very specific music I listen to, which I will share later and the reasons for my choices.

I want to start by sharing a few quotes from the movie Eddie and the Cruisers. If you aren’t familiar with the movie—Eddie Wilson wants to be remembered for great music and songs that mean something. The band meets a college guy majoring in English and Literature—he becomes the lyricist for the band. Eddie calls him Wordman.

What I want is songs that echo. The stuff we’re doing now is like somebody’s bedsheets; spread ‘em out, soil ‘em, ship ‘em out to laundry, you know? But our songs…I want us to be able to fold ourselves up in them forever…understand? That’s the most you’ll ever get out of me Wordman. Ever.

Wordman, we need each other.
Words and music, man- they need each other.
Words and music.

As writers, we want our words to mean something and be remembered. Music can inspire this. My husband is a musician who is deeply passionate about music. He can play thousands of great songs, but he can’t recite any of the lyrics unless they were written by certain people—one of which is on the list I’ll share later. He’s more moved by the complexity of the music itself. I, on the other hand, am more moved by the lyrics—of course, I’m a writer. In fact, I’m just learning how to hear the music and ignore the vocals; it’s not an easy task.

One of my favorite pieces of writing is one I wrote about Bruce Springsteen. It’s not a great work of art or anything, but I was “in the moment” and it’s very close to my heart. I wanted to quote some of it here, but discovered I’d probably end up quoting the whole thing. If you want to read it in its entirety, you can find it at Growing Up With Bruce Springsteen: Baby We Were Born to Run.

I used phrases such as:

“Bruce reaches down into the depths of your soul and leaves you with your emotions pounding in your chest and your heart on your sleeve. Bruce Springsteen touches the darkest recesses of the listener’s soul, the side they never let anyone get a glimpse of. Yet Bruce has a way to reach past that empty space they feel within.”

“Bruce Springsteen is one of those few artists that touch on real life with vivid surrealism. No matter what you’re going through in your own inner hell, Bruce is there to serenade you through it, assuring you that others feel just as deeply as you do.”

“Music has been the chosen outlet for Bruce but had he chosen to showcase his work in the literary field, he would be one of the great writers. He is a word master who has the knack to bring those words to life through his music.”

One of Kevin’s favorite lyricists is Ronnie James Dio. If you listen to anything he’s written, you know he’s a storyteller as well. Another musician in that category is Steve Harris of Iron Maiden, who writes a lot of medieval type tales.

If I need to write vivid scenes I enjoy listening to the words and music these guys have put together. Poetic stories told with captivating music are not only inspiring but magical in many ways.

It’s not always easy to transition yourself to work with music playing in the background—but it’s definitely worth giving it a try a few times. Who knows, you may just write the next literary masterpiece.

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If you arrived here through Blogging Tips to see how often I update this poor little blog. . .Welcome to my World.

Was it a ploy to get you here through trickery? Not really, it was more sinister than that. It was actually a ploy to make me update the thing.

If you arrived here by other means, Welcome to my World.

At the time of this writing, I have no title for this post or even a clue what this post will be about. A blog post should be specific and cover one topic—or so I’m told. I don’t always follow the rules though. I’m a writer; we’re also told we can break the rules—to a degree anyway.

I think I’ll cover a few thoughts I’ve had lately, a few blog posts I’ve read and why they may have sparked these thoughts, and I may even throw in something useful and meaningful. Don’t hold your breath, just read. . .or click away, you have that option too.

My Life as a Writer:

Once upon a time—is that too cliché? Well, once upon a time there was a writer who loved to write fiction. She had stories, scenes, characters, plots—you know all the stuff a writer is supposed to have.

One day as she was traveling along the writing highway, she came across a blog post, an ad, or maybe it was a hobo with a sign, but whatever it was it said something like, “Make Money Writing.” What a concept, huh? So she clicked (which means it must have been an ad or a blog post and not the hobo with the sign) and she discovered she could make money now—not down the road after writing her great novel, going through the edits, revisions and submissions, she could make money now.

What was the catch? It was all non-fiction. Hey no problem. She can write during the day and make money, and write her great novel at night. It only takes balance and a good juggling act.

Well it turned into all non-fiction writing. The muse didn’t mind at first, she needed a break. She didn’t have to plot, scheme, or come up with a fancy way to describe a decadent hot caramel, chocolate latte. This was cool.

But one day, while taking a nap in a tree, the poor muse fell out and broke both her arms, her legs, and cracked her skull. This infuriated the muse because she had to take more time off to recover.

Years later, which wasn’t that long ago, the writer realized how much she missed the muse, but the muse was still recovering—a very slow process.

Once the muse discovered that she was needed, she started making progress towards recovery. Some days, just for amusement though, she would torture the writer and not give her anything to say.

The moral of the story? There really isn’t one. It’s taken much longer to heal the muse than it should have. Enter NaNoWriMo.

My First NaNaWriMo:

This is my first year to participate. I knew something dramatic would have to happen to fully recover the muse and get my butt planted in the seat with some good old fashioned fiction.

Before NaNo, I didn’t really have a clue what I would write for my novel. I had a character idea in my head from a writing prompt I did over the summer and that little lady has bugged the crap out of me.

All of the blogs I get time to read is done through email—it’s like magic—they come in the middle of the night—or early morning and go directly to their specific folder. This way, if the headline catches my attention, I can read it. If it doesn’t grab me—well I get to it eventually. One catching headline appeared in my email. I had to read it immediately; it was related to NaNo, which would start soon.

As I was reading through it, I thought I was screwed. The advice was solid and made perfect sense, but I hadn’t planned for any of it. But, as always, Larry has a solution. Of course I sort of botched his solution and came up with something I could do. (I’ll link to the post in a minute—patience grasshopper.)

Larry believes in having a plan, as opposed to organic writing (and you’ll get his feelings on both if you read his blog enough). I was going in organically—it worked before my muse got broken, why won’t it work now? Well, because the muse also matured as she healed. She liked the idea of a plan. Okay, great! I’m screwed now because I’ve never written an outline or planned a story out. I’ve let it flow—organically.

Well, with barely two days left to plan for NaNo, I made a simple outline—it contained a beginning, a middle and an end; no juicy stuff in between. I was thrilled with it. I’m still thrilled with it. The first few days I was just happy to be writing my passion again. As yesterday dawned (Day Four) I started having a small panic attack. I needed a scene change, a direction or something and it wasn’t planned. I was doing timed sprints with two other writers. We were going to write for twenty minutes this time—and I had nothing.

What did I do? I decided to just wing it—or go organic as Larry calls it. Well something amazing happened. At the end of 20 minutes I had written 1640 words. I have no idea where they came from, but one thing I did notice as I was writing and I couldn’t stop it—my character took over and changed my plan.

The moral of this story? I really like the idea of a plan and using an outline. I will learn to do this better. But at the same time, you have to let your characters go where they’re going too. Don’t beat yourself up if he/she does something you didn’t have planned out.

The link? Oh, you’re waiting for the link. You have no patience do you?

Okay, I’ll give it to you, but you have to promise that you’ll read other posts at Larry’s blog. Why? Because I said so!  And the fact that he gives really solid advice is a plus too.

About NaNoWriMo – Three Ways to Thrive, One Sure Way to Suck

I promised links to a few blog posts didn’t I? Well, this one became such an epic tale, I should hold off sharing the others. Hey, it gives me another reason to update this thing in the near future—you can’t blame a writer for that. J

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