Struggles of a Non-Visual Writer

I spent most of my life collecting images. I have boxes full of faded magazine clippings and expired calendars. I'd always been fascinated by color, shape and contrast. I even spent time as a studio-dwelling art major in university.

You can imagine my shock to learn that I'm not, in fact, a 'visual person'.

We have many senses - hearing, taste, smell, touch. Apparently, you can determine a person's predominant senses simply by the language they use. Just ask someone to describe their favorite holiday, and if you listen closely you'll begin to notice if they speak about it in terms of what they saw, what they heard, what they tasted, and so on. Key words relating to each of the senses will crop up every time.

Someone tried this exercise with me, and while I described the smell, and feel and sound of a village in the south of France, I used a surprisingly few number of visual cues. I know from photographs that the sky was blue, and the tree blossoms were pale pink and there were bright yellow dandelions everywhere, and an incredible natural waterfall in the middle of the town. But that's not what I talked about. I talked about birdsong, and the taste of the fresh goat's milk and the feel of the spring sunshine on my skin.

But how can an art major 'flunk' at being a visual person?!

Thinking back, I can see now that I never was able to draw anything straight out of my head. I always needed a model. It's the internal visual sense that I lack. And my continued attraction to external visual things is likely a way of compensating for my lack of 'inner eye'.

So what does this have to do with writing?

The writer is the eyes of the reader. The writer looks around that internal landscape and paints the reader a picture. That descriptive function is vital for building a sense of place, mood and context. So what happens if you're not all that hot on the visual stuff? How is your reader going to 'see' if you can't? Is all lost? Do I just quit now and go back to my scrapbooks?

Not necessarily.

Just because you're a non-visual writer, doesn't mean you'll be bad at description. Quite possibly the opposite, in fact.

Think of all the other senses you can activate in your writing! Instead of just relying on visual cues, you're giving your reader the tastes, smells, and sounds. When you do focus on what things look like, you will likely need to take your time and really force yourself to look around internally. All this makes the work richer and builds a deeper sense of setting and place

Like anything else, you can work on strengthening your visual sense. Visit locations and take photos and notes. What do you actually see if you look closely? Not what you think you see, but what is truly there.

Bonus!

Guess what? Not all readers are visual readers. Maybe they like to smell, taste, and touch their stories too! And if you're non-visual as a writer, your tendency to overcompensate and try harder to fill your descriptions with visual cues will thrill those less-visual readers too.

I should know. I'm one of them.



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Twitter Update - Four Months On (and Still Alive)

A mere four and half months ago, I dipped my toes into the 'twitterverse' for the first time. Has it only been that long? I blogged at the time about my first week survival story, and exactly a month later, my experience of the social-media implosion that resulted. More than three months later I am still on twitter (more than ever!), and thought I should post a little update.

The Numbers Game

Okay, so I know there are some out there with THOUSANDS of followers. That can be a little intimidating and depressing when you're still looking at mere hundreds on your profile. But really, is that a bad thing? I decided to take an organic approach to growing my tweep circle, and tend to follow people I find via...

• Guest bloggers on blogs I follow
• Interactions with people I already follow (yes, I am poaching YOUR wonderful friends!)
• Them following me*

*Let me just say right here that I do not auto-follow. No one should be so desperate as to follow every single twitter user/account/spammer that comes along. I always check a sample of their tweets before following. If it looks like spam but they don't bother me, I ignore them until they eventually go away. If they start messaging or tweeting rubbish at me, I block them.

Best Practice

"But you can do what you like on twitter...can't you?" NO. Goodness gracious, no. Like any other human interaction, twitter has etiquette all its own. But thanks to being a new platform that many writers seem to be thrust onto without a great deal of internet savvy, this is often forgotten. Okay, so I'm more than certain I've broken ALL the rules at some point or another, but there are a few obvious things I've observed which make all the difference.

MAKE A CONNECTION

Say hello when someone follows you. "But WHY?" you might ask. Because we're all essentially strangers. I still feel incredibly awkward the first time I try to jump into a twitter conversation. Saying 'Hi, thanks' right after a follow means you've opened up the communication channel (AND been polite. Mom will be proud). It also reminds them that you are a real person with an active feed, and lets them know that you noticed them as a human being too. 

I try to say a tweeted 'thanks' to everyone who follows me. I'm sure I get behind and miss people completely (sorry!), but I at least try. So as not to clutter up my twitter feed, I tend to combine the latest 5-8 followers in one tweet. No one seems to mind, and they also get exposure to other tweeps! Win-win. 

Best example: I once followed someone, and when they followed back they tweeted a thanks AND commented on one of my latest tweets. They got added to my 'Faves' list instantly. From one tweet.

PLEASE DON'T:

• ...Direct message (DM) me right after I've followed you - automatically or otherwise! It's a bit creepy. Why can't you say 'Hi' in public? And if it's an auto-reply, why would I want to talk to your answering machine?
• ...Try to sell me your book right away. I'm probably not even interested in the free download. Most definitely not interested in the free download SAMPLE. I'm following you because I'm interested in what you have to SAY. If I want to read your book, I'm sure I can find it. You have links to it all over the place.
• ...Hide your twitter information on your blog so I have to scroll and scroll and search and search. I actually want to FOLLOW YOU. Please make it easy for me?

BE REAL

The simple truth is: the people I love to follow on twitter are not the ones posting links to their book on Amazon every 3 minutes. The people I love to follow are the ones who talk about their lives in an honest and genuine way. Their joys and sorrows, their struggles and their success. And yes, it helps when they are incredibly hilarious just by being themselves.

Getting Organised

The reality is that there are two types of tweeps in the world

1. The kind you follow because you actually love reading their tweets.
2. The kind you follow to build your network.

Does that sound harsh?  But you all do know what I mean. How can anyone follow hundreds (or thousands?) of people, read ALL their tweets, and still have time for a life? You just don't. So the order of the day is prioritisation.

There are likely many more ways to stay organised with your tweets (please feel free to add any tips!), but two things have helped me wade through the ever-rising tide of tweets and tweeps: Twitter Lists and Tweet Deck.

• Twitter Lists are functionality native to the Twitter website, and are a handy way of organising the tweeps you follow into categories or groups. This allows you to view a feed of tweets from the members of that list only. For example, I have a 'Favourites' list for the tweets I really don't want to miss, a list for Romance Writers, and list for Publishers/Editors/Writing associations and so on. This way I can view a tailored slice of my twitter feed without getting overwhelmed. I create all my lists as 'private' lists, but you can also create 'public' lists which others can subscribe to.

• Tweet Deck is an app which you can use online or from your desktop. It allows you to create multiple columns from whatever criteria you like (such as your lists), and gives you a broader view of all the activity that's taking place at once. If you're having a chat or conversation, this is a great way to keep up and not lose the thread. Having all your lists visible at once also makes it much easier to keep tabs on all the tweets coming in. Think of it as central command with a lovely big console! It can be a little overwhelming, and brings back images of the bridge of the Starship Enterprise, but you get used it it pretty quickly.

There are new apps and software options emerging all the time, however, so try out a few and find out what suits you best. Some others (which I have yet to try):

• Slices for Twitter
• Hootsuite - Social Media Management
• And more...

Beatrice Recommends

Here are a few brilliant folks (in no particular order) I've been following and interacting with lately and are worth checking out. They tend to be knowledgeable, generous and all have the ability to make me laugh until I embarrass myself and others :

Ksenia Anske (@kseniaanske) - Young Adult author with an uncanny ability to articulate the fears and joys of writing your heart out. Her tweets and blog posts are pure sustenance.

Jennelle Holland (@authorjennelle) - Romance writer, sock-monkey adopter and regular blogger at Teatime Romance. Jennelle chats about amazing food inbetween reading and reviewing a mad number of books. A woman after my own heart!

Maisey Yates (@maiseyyates) - romance writer with a penchant for (very) rich sheikhs (in her BOOKS, silly), there is never a dull moment in this woman's twitter feed! I submit the fluffy purple unicorn as proof.

Karen Woodward (@woodwardkaren) - Urban Fantasy author who really knows how to blog! Whenever I'm feeling underqualified to do anything in this writing world (which is often), I'm off searching Karen's archives like a fiend.

Well...what are you waiting for?! Go follow them!

Falling Out of Love...?

Uh-oh.

I think we're all familiar with the age-old advice that you should probably only write in a genre you read and love? How often have you heard authors criticised for writing in a genre just because they think it might be 'easy' or lucrative and not because they read it themselves? If this is true, and if the basis of which genre you should write in can be gleaned from your current bedside-reading stack, then according to my current Goodreads To-Read bookshelf, I should be...wait for it...

...a Sci-Fi / Fantasy author.

Wups.

That's right. Wall-to-wall Stephen King, Robin McKinley, Charlaine Harris, J.K. Rowling...the list goes on. I've even made a separate bookshelf called 'Guilty Pleasure' on which to store these non-Romance sins, as if they were my junk-food addiction! It appears that I am a secret-reader. A sci-fi/fantasy binge-eater.

It has not escaped my notice that of late, I have not been particularly...enthusiastic, shall we say, about reading romance. As this is my genre of choice, this poses a little problem, as well as the question, "WHY?"

(Okay, not as in, "OH MY GOD, WHY?!?" Let's not get overly dramatic.)

So I've had a long, hard think about this (read: sipped a glass of wine and pondered during the commercials of the hot hot men of Chicago Fire). I've advised myself NOT to panic. But it begs the question... have I fallen out of love with Romance!? And if so, am I writing in the wrong genre?

After some deep soul-searching (or was that deep fridge-searching?...still watching Chicago Fire), I came to a semi-solid conclusion for myself.*

The reason I haven't read anything romance-y in a while is because I hadn't found anything really GREAT that is romance-y to read. Maybe I've been frequenting the 'free books' section of eBook sites too much. Maybe I haven't been actively pursuing the best authors out there. All I know is I have countless novels on my Kindle of which I've read the first page and then hit the HOME button in a hurry. I'm not reading them because I'm not enjoying them, and I'm not enjoying them because I DON'T LIKE THEM.

So this is obviously where I get on my (little white) high horse, right? No, not really. Okay, granted, some of these books were complete drivel and were painful from the first sentence, but some of them were just...not my style. Coming to this conclusion reminded me of something very important. It reminded me of why I started writing in the first place. That, "I could totally write something as good as this," moment. That, "I know what I LIKE and I want to read THAT," moment.

The reason I may not be someone else's 'Perfect Reader' (and run away after the first page) could be because I am MY OWN perfect reader. Okay, that sounds weird and pretentious, but really, it's why I write in the first place. I like to read about a particular kind of guy. I like to read about a particular kind of girl. I like a particular mix of mystery or suspense or psychology or whathaveyou.

So this got me thinking. Am I actually thinking carefully enough about what I like as a reader when I'm writing my stories? Because if I'm my own perfect reader, I better write something that is a) GOOD, and b) something I'm going to LIKE.

So what next...?

I'm going to try two things:

1. Find some romance I really love, and read/re-read it. Rekindle the spark. Remember what I loved about it and why.

2. Nail down what it is I REALLY, TRULY love to read about, and make sure I'm putting 100% of that into my writing.

So what drives you away from your genre? Is it true that you should read predominantly in your chosen section of the bookstore, or should one have a varied diet?

Write something to suit yourself and many people will like it; write something to suit everybody and scarcely anyone will care for it.    ~ Jesse Stuart

* Disclaimer: This may not be the same reason that YOU stop reading romance. You might have found a new hobby, for example, such as crocheting or reading Fullmetal Alchemist. Each to their own.

And then she went 'Kaboom'...

Tonight marks exactly a month since I dove in the deep end of Twitter (and several other social media sites).

As a new / 'indie' / self-pub author you are bombarded with advice from all angles about blogging, guest-blogging, tweeting, book trailers, conferences, live tweet-chats, writing contest, flash fiction, tweet fiction, Facebook, Klout, Pinterest, Tumblr, Flickr and any other cute new site that ends with 'r' (and should REALLY have an 'e' because really...they're spelling it wrong). And published or unpublished you must push push PUSH your social media 'platform' so that you have a network or an audience or a 'sphere of influence'...

And you follow. You follow lots of other writers and join the 'community' and retweet and repin and reblog. And you allow yourself to be bombarded by the tweets and retweets and blogs and ads and #hash tags and @mentions and more blogs and more websites until your eyelid develops a nasty twitch and you read and you read and you READ.

Steve King says to 'shut the door' when you write. Shut the door? How can I shut the door when I've just woken up to the reality that I am no longer in a room that HAS a door? And there is no door because I'm sitting in the middle of a airplane-hangar size waiting room full of other people all shouting at the top of their lungs to be noticed and there IS NO DOOR.

And then you kind of go... kaboom.

In a small, quiet moment, your mind finally says...'Enough.' And it implodes. Slowly, gently.

And you remember something.

You used to write, once. Once upon a time...a month ago. You used to write. You used to sit, quietly with your laptop, and create characters and scenes and think about exactly which word to use to describe the light when the leaves move and you're with someone who's talking but you're only half listening because you can't stop watching the light as the leaves move...flickering back, and forth....back and forth.


So here's the lesson I teach myself today. The airplane-hangar will always be there. But sometimes...you have to shut the door.


Image credit: United States Department of Energy via Wiki Commons, 1952. Alterations by me.

Where do you start...?

credit: The Pen And Ink Blog (link below)

I'll be the first to say that I'm still pretty new to this whole 'writing' thing. I've observed from the outside, watched other people write, beta-read for them, etc etc. But until doing it for myself I didn't entirely appreciate how different everyone's creative process could be.

I expect there are some obvious and well-cataloged cognitive reasons for all our writerly differences, and maybe someday I'll get the time to study them fully. What I'm intrigued by at the moment is our starting points. How do we get that lil' toehold into a story and wrestle it until it tells us all its secrets?

I've read plenty of insightful blog posts and articles on how you need characters to build plot and plot to build character and somewhere in there you chuck a few pinches of setting and a few teaspoons of concept and hey presto you have your cake- I mean...story.

But why do we naturally start from different places? Why do some of us build extensive outlines and construct scale-model worlds out of mental-matchsticks and superglue, while others have whole entire people wandering around inside their skulls waiting to jump out into something...anything...they really don't mind what.

These differences were really made clear to me recently. I'd been beta-reading (okay, blatant sneak-peeking!) for a writer friend, and she finally came back to me and said 'Okay, I have to bite the bullet and get some structure into this thing - there's too much going on.' (Okay, my paraphrase, but that's basically it.) I had to sort of mentally blink at the idea that you could have characters wandering around, encountering each other, creating whole scenes...and not actually know exactly where they were headed in the long-run.

Now this is where I must make it very clear that this thought was not one of criticism. More one of revelation. See, here I'd been plotting my stories out from beginning to end, then dropping my half-formed characters into them and seeing how they reacted to the hoops I made them jump through. Yes, I'm one of the plot-structure-lovers. The logic-adoring, detail-oriented neat-freaks of the writerly universe (go on, I know we irritate you!). It had never even crossed my mind to just create a person, and walk around in their shoes for a few months. 

So I'm just getting to grips with this, when I read an interview with author Susan Spann on Chuck Wendig's blog, Terrible Minds. She says that for her, "...character building flows from world building. It’s much easier to write strong characters when I’m inserting them into a three-dimensional, fully developed environment. Knowing the layout of a character’s bedroom, house, and neighborhood makes it easier to understand what kind of person would inhabit that space."

So you mean you can create a world, right down to the furniture and the wallpaper, and your character comes walking right out of the type of carpet you chose for them?! Mind = blown.

Now, I've encountered some of these sorts of differences in people with regards to how they learn. It's pretty common knowledge that there are different 'learning styles' and that everyone has a slightly different combination of cognitive jigsaw pieces that make up how they process their interactions with the world around them. So buried in there somewhere must be some parallels to how we naturally choose to dive into our story-writing, right? I've now read a few...left brain vs right brain, etc, but the jury is still out.

My next thought is that with learning styles, it's advised to try and cater towards people's natural preferences, but that they should also work on 'exercising' those other underused cognitive 'muscles' so as to have a more well-rounded learning experience. So does this mean I should spend time bulking up on other methods of story-writing? Should I try out a character-driven method or a world-building method as a way to jump-start me into a story? Or maybe I just need to start including a few writing exercises for these areas into my initial story-process.

So where do you start? Do you think you should stick to what comes naturally, or push yourself to do something that doesn't? 

[Picture credit: The Pen And Ink Blog ]

My first week on Twitter - A survival story

I did it. After resisting for years, I am finally on Twitter. I now tweet. I now retweet. I @mention. I do #followfridays. I am now completely and utterly addicted. Oh dear.

Okay, so I only have 26 followers (Oh...make that 27!) so far, but it's a start! And it is just...so cool...to have the up-to-the-minute thoughts from heads like Stephen Fry. I get it now. I totally get it.

So why did I stay away for so long? My list of excuses went something like this:

"I don't have a smartphone...it's just so difficult to check them on a computer."

"I don't get how it works! Who's tweets am I looking at? Why are someone else's showing up in that feed!? Help!"

"Only people with constant, interesting thoughts use Twitter."

"Only people with constant, boring, irritating thoughts use Twitter."

"Who wants to hear about what I had for breakfast anyway?!"

"I don't know anyone on Twitter! Who will follow me? I'll look like such a loser..."

You get the idea. But in the end, of course it didn't take long to figure out how it worked. I just got started, and it went from there.

1. Set up account. Uploaded picture. Pretty simple. Phew.
2. Found one person I knew, clicked 'follow' and held on for dear life. Nothing bad happened.
3. Looked at people I was a fan of and found out who they followed and/or followed them. Stole them.

And then...someone I didn't know started following me. And then someone else. So I followed them (after checking to make sure they weren't some crazy sex-ad spam bot of course). And then some of their followers followed me. Wow. REAL LIVE TWITTER FOLLOWERS. And I was hooked.

A few things I've learned so far...

@ Mentions

• They seem to work like links, i.e. you can click on them to see that person's profile
• They work as a sort of tweet delivery system if put right at the front of the tweet, e.g. @YourName Hi there!
• They make a tweet visible to others if you're following the person @mentioned. I think. Still puzzling that one out.

#ff #FF #followfriday
I found this fascinating (okay, enough 'f''s!). A totally viral way of doing a 'shoutout' to others to recommend they follow someone you're following. Apparently it's expanding from just Fridays to Thursday nights and Saturday mornings. Human beings really are attracted to ritual, and this is steadily becoming a Twitter tradition.

What NOT to do

• Have every tweet be yet another ad for your book/blog/facebook page. Please...please just stop. Are you a real person? Is anyone actually in there? Are you so, so important that all you can do is spam me?
• Schedule tweets with a tweet service. Again, I want to feel I'm following a human being, and when you tweet every 15 min right through the night I know you're off having a great time doing something other than paying attention to your followers! Shame on you.
• Only ever talk about yourself in real time and never share anything of your own or of others. I have my own stream of consciousness to contend with let alone adding yours thank you!

There are some really cool people on Twitter!
I had no idea there were so many other writers out there. All reading, all writing, all talking to each other. It's fantastic, and I am meeting people already I would never have stumbled across on any other network.

So if you aren't already, why not follow me? I promise not to spam you. I promise to be a human being. I will do my very best to not be completely and utterly boring.

x @BeatriceHolley