Writing creative writing, story writing and other writings by Rob Hopcott

on December 13, 2008

in Christmas, Writing and online writing

. 0 Comments

Keywords for today suggest an interest in Christmas story writing and twists in the tale

In my article yesterday about online writing tips, I discussed the importance of keeping an eye on the keywords people are using to find your online writings.

Recently, I’ve noticed that a number of people have come to this site looking for Christmas story related information so I thought I would mention the short Christmas story that I wrote recently. It demonstrates both a twist in the tale (twist in the tail) and the idea that it is good for an author to write about matters of current interest to the reader.

All of us have common interests. The most powerful, constantly exploited by the advertising industry, is the relationship between men and women. However, there are many other themes that, at any particular time, will generally attract our interest.

Obviously a major theme currently is the economy, the Credit Crunch and the recession that seems to be growing worse daily.

Another theme high on many of our agendas is the environment, worry about climate change, recycling and green issues in general which is the theme of my latest Xmas story.

My Christmas story for Christmas 2008 is a flash fiction called Green Car for Christmas. It is a modest effort but seeks to attract interest by focusing on an actual event which happened when I was walking through town and saw a car draw away soundlessly - an example of using real life events to stimulate fiction. It then rounds off with a change of direction or a twist in the tale which has a Christmas flavour.

This Xmas short story has links to other Xmas stories I have written in previous years which you might find of interest.

My previous article Writing tips - how to write stories with a twist in the tale might also be helpful

More online writing tips soon.

Bye for now

Rob

Online writing visitors, their total numbers and the keywords they use for your online book or blog are vital information

Published

on December 12, 2008

in Writing, online writing, writing help and writing tips

. 2 Comments

Statcounter provides excellent and free visitor statistics for my online writing sites that I find very adequate

Statcounter.com provides excellent and free visitor statistics for my online writing sites that I find very adequate

Yesterday I discussed the importance of using online writing tools like Google’s Webmaster tools to help work with the search engines to improve the quality of your online writing site or blog for Web indexing purposes.

Today, I would like to talk more about monitoring your online writing site so you get a better understanding of your total visitor numbers and also what your online readers are looking for when they come to your site.

Online writers might live in a creative dream world all of their own as far as their friends are concerned but the one thing an online writer can’t be uncertain about is the number of visitors that are coming to read his or her online writing sites or blogs or the visitors keywords used.

Your webspace might come with a statistics package that is adequate or you might prefer to use one of the many free hit counters that are available on the Web. Personally, although I already have access to visitor statistics for most of my sites, I usually prefer in addition the free services of Statcounter.com. It enables me to see the website traffic to all my web sites and blogs on one page and provides very useful information about keywords people are currently typing in to find my sites. Signing up is free and it is usually easy to add the code to each page by including it as part of your blog template.

Of course, once you have started tracking the volume of readers that are visiting your online writing, you will be concerned with the trend which hopefully will be rising as the weeks pass and you put more writing online. Statcounter.com enables you to monitor this closely.

More online writing tips and help for the online writer tomorrow

Bye for now

Rob

Online writing help - use Webmaster tools to make a friend of the search engines

Published

on December 11, 2008

in Writing, online writing and online writing help

. 2 Comments

Online writing tools are just as important as real world tools - just different!

Online writing tools are just as important as real world tools - just a bit different!

In my online writing tips yesterday, I suggested that it was very helpful for online writers to think of their web site or blog as a book. Today, I will be suggesting that online writers should treat the search engines that index their web site or blog as if they were their publishers.

Search engines have many similarities with conventional publishers.

Search engines bring readers to online writer’s sites as do conventional publishers.
Search engines want the sites they recommend to be of as high quality as possible.
Without the help of search engines, you are unlikely to become a well known online writer unless you are famous already.

Just as you would want to work closely with a conventional publisher, you need to work closely with the search engines. They know their business and what they need. It is therefore in the interests of each online writer to make the search engines a friend.

The easiest way to start doing this is to sign up for a Webmasters Tools account with Google. It will give you access to the way Google sees your online book / blog and provide you with helpful suggestions as to how you can improve your online writing site from the search engine’s point of view. Best of all, as I write this, Google Webmaster Tools accounts are free so this helpful online writing tip must surely come in the category of ‘a no brainer’.

Armed with all the helpful advice and ongoing monitoring of your sites search engine positioning from Google Webmaster Tools, as your online writing grows, hopefully, you should see the sort of growth in your advertising revenues that will make all the effort worthwhile.

It would be wrong of me, however, to claim that online writing is an easy road to instant wealth - although sadly many sites do. Online writing is an extremely competitive business, just like conventional writing. The only main difference is that online writing makes each book you write available to your public with a greater degree of certainty, whereas conventional publishers act as gatekeepers permitting readers only to see the work of a selected few.

Once you have a blog / online book that is world ranking in its written quality and perfectly in tune with the requirements of the search engines, there is still the challenge of getting known to the public and, for the unknown writer, even correctly indexed by the search engines, this can take a long time.

However, with time on your hands, you have an ideal opportunity to get on with your next book / blog. If you check out the traditional book list of many successful writers you will find they often have multiple books to their names so it makes sense for online writers to have many online books / blogs to their names too?

A further incentive is that, from the online writer’s point of view, each book / blog out there in cyberspace is an emissary that advertises all the other books you have ever written.

From the online readers point of view, if they find an online writer they like, they will be sure to look for more online writing by the same author and that brings online writers more readers independently of the search engines, which is always a good thing.

Good luck!

More free online writing help tomorrow

Bye for now

Online fiction writing and online publishing success through selection and positioning of appropriate keywords

Published

on December 9, 2008

in Writing and online writing

. 2 Comments

Online writing fiction can usually only be found if the keywords you have used accurately describe your short story or other work of fiction.

Your online writing stories can usually only be found if appropriate keywords are used to accurately describe your short story or other work of fiction.

In my article about earning online writing revenues yesterday, I talked about how fame is just as important for success in online writing as it is in traditional writing and publishing.

Today I’m moving on to talk about how to start the long journey towards achieving fame for the ordinary writer using online publishing techniques.

I assume you’ve obtained your blog and your advertisements are proudly displayed around your welcoming message saying something like:

This blog is to enable me to reach out to all my readers and to provide examples of my work and I hope you come back often.

The next step is to write something really interesting for your readers.

As a writer, you may well have a short story or flash fiction burning away in your mind and this is a good opportunity to give it an airing by posting it onto your blog for all to read and enjoy.

Once you have entered your short story, microfiction or flash fiction and are ready to press the ‘publish’ button, stop and ask yourself how are people going to find your short mystery, murder mystery or science fiction monologue?

The answer is, of course, that they will type keywords or keyword phrases into the search facility in their browsers; keywords like short story, flash fiction, science fiction (sc-fi?) or story with a twist in the tale.

Your story may be the best short story, romance or travel tale on the Internet but, unless it contains words and phrases that give it a description search engines can use, searchers will not be able to find it. The search engines are very clever these days but even they cannot read and understand a story as we humans can and interpret whether it is a murder mystery, travelogue or whatever. Currently your fiction story is probably unlikely to contain the word story, short story, postcard fiction or many of the other phrases that people might use to try to find it. For your fiction short story or short stories to be found, you need to spend some time adding keywords to your blog post that correctly describe what you are offering.

The best place to start putting words that describe your story is in the ‘Title’ part of your blog post. This can often be quite difficult because you would probably prefer to use your title as a hook to get people interested in your story. Unfortunately, your hook is more likely to be about your story than about the accurate categorisation of your story needed to bring readers to your blog. Furthermore, ideally, your categorisation should probably be included in the first few words of your title.

However, here’s an example of a title that might work:

Short story ‘Constantly Kissed’ by A N Online-Author is a flash fiction about teenage romance

People who are searching for a ’short story’, ‘flash fiction’, ‘fiction’ or ‘teenage romance’ are much more likely to find your blog story with this sort of title than if it just said ‘Constantly Kissed by A N Online-Author.

The next place to describe your story is in the ‘Body’ of your blog post. You could talk about your story in an introductory paragraph or perhaps at the end where you could put a statement about copyright and about the characters being fictional with your story description. (For an example of description at the end of a post, see my Christmas flash fiction story for Christmas 2008.)

The positioning of the description of your story offers similar dilemmas as with the title. Naturally, you would prefer to hook the reader into the story with a dramatic opening. Less exciting is a series of words or phrases people might use to try to find your story. However, with a little bit of ingenuity and some good writing, this approach can be made to work.

Writing your story description at the end of your short story might be preferable because the reader is permitted uninterrupted reading of your story however the disadvantage is that your description might not be given the same level of importance by the search engines as it would have received higher up your page copy, just after the title.

Of course, the best approach to making your story search engine friendly would be to include both a description of your story at the beginning just after the title and a summary of your keyword included description at the end. However, always write for your readers and never just for search engines. Ultimately, the best way a search engine can evaluate the quality of your stories is to note how long visitors stay on your site happily reading. Once you have attracted some readers to your story blog, keep them happy and there is a good chance the search engines will be happy too and continue sending you even more readers.

Whatever your approach, by now, you should have a pretty good idea of what your story is about. The next step is to break down your description into a short list of keywords or key search phrases. These can be placed in the ‘Tags’ part of your blog post and will further help people find your story through the search engines. It’s a good idea to ensure that any words or phrases you use in your tags are definitely included in the body of your post.

If your blog system permits the allocation of a ‘Category’, find the keyword or keywords in your description that best describes your story in one or two words and use that.

Now you’ve written your short story, flash fiction, murder story, science fiction short or sudden romance, entered a compelling blog title that hooks the reader, added your keywords into the blog body of your post and into the collection of blog tags for your post, what’s next?

The answer is that you need to write another one, and another one after that until you have a collection of short stories, flash fictions or whatever that would grace any bookshelf and which people will recommend to each other. Spread your posts over a period of time, perhaps daily, to help encourage the search engines to re-index your latest story quickly.

Over time, hopefully, your readers too will get into the habit of coming back regularly for more. As your fame grows, so should the traffic to your blog and your advertising revenues that will, one day, perhaps enable you to call yourself a successful published writer.

That’s the theory but I must acknowledge it is a hard road and many online fiction writers fall by the wayside. However, it is a road to follow and publishing online means your writing gets read instead of just gathering dust at the bottom of a drawer with a pile of rejection slips. Getting read is a great feeling and, in some ways arguably, the advertising revenues are a bonus!

More tips about how to get readers for your short fiction stories and articles soon

Good luck

Bye for now.

Rob

Online writing revenues through advertising, like conventional publishing, ultimately depend on getting well known

Published

on December 8, 2008

in Writing and online writing

. 1 Comment

A champagne lifestyle from advertisements around your online writing depends on getting very well known just as in conventional publishing.

A champagne lifestyle from advertisements around your online writing probably depends on getting very well known just as in conventional publishing.

To begin online writing is easy and even to earn very small amounts of money is also relatively straightforward but to earn a decent income is very difficult and involves solving problems of marketing which are very similar to those faced by writers seeking to earn a living by more conventional publishing means.

Perhaps the easiest way to start online writing is to get a Blogger blog which is free and also comes with an invitation from the providers of your blog to put advertisements on your blog from which you can earn revenues based on the number of times the advertisement is seen and the level of interest from your visitors in the advertisement.

The moment that you start putting articles or stories on your blog, usually called posts, you are potentially earning money but you will quickly find that bringing people to your site instead of them going to the many millions of other competing blog owners is very difficult.

Also, the advertising return from each visitor to your site is usually very low. Typically, to earn significant sums of money in terms of Western standards of living, thousands of visitors are needed each day and the subject matter which your blog discusses must be commercial with advertisers wanting to sell to the type of visitors that come to your blog.

As an online writer, the more stories or articles you write and put on your site, the more likely you are to increase your readership but unless your articles or stories are of high standard, you are unlikely to get people returning to your blog and your readership is unlikely to grow to the levels where you will be earning a significant income. Matching quality to quantity is a constant dilemma for the online writer.

Fortunately these days, or perhaps unfortunately for less popular writers, the search systems that index the web are growing sophisticated enough to be able to gauge people’s reactions to your sites and articles. Sites that entertain and keep their visitors engaged and page turning are probably much more likely to be sent more traffic by the search engines than other sites where visitors leave at the first opportunity. The quality of your articles of stories is therefore hugely important.

Perhaps equally important in the early days of your online writing career is to accurately describe your writing web site or blog in your content. For example, if people are searching for articles about beekeeping, you need to mention the phrase beekeeping on your site. This is particularly important, if you are writing fiction where the content might not make it obvious that your writing is a short story or flash fiction.

Ultimately, however, the secret of your success in the business of online writing, where income is derived purely from advertising, similarly to conventional publishing, is to build up your reputation and fame. If people are pleased with what they find on your site and want to return, they will remember your name and your web site traffic will grow. If visitors to your site see nothing that is not already provided equally by many other sites or blogs, they are far less likely to want to visit you again.

On the other hand, if you are a technical guru in some field providing information that people value greatly or you write stories that are riveting and make compulsive reading day after day and as long as the advertisements that are placed on your pages are of interest to your visitors, you might join the small number of people who are making a living from advertising revenues and online writing.

More soon about online writing.

Bye for now

Rob

Ideas for writing and new romantic relationships, love and marriage in your work place

Published

on December 7, 2008

. 0 Comments

Our workplaces are good for getting ideas for writing as well as popular for romantic liaisons.

Many of us spend most of our lives in our work place and it can be a rich seam of ideas for writing.

In surveys, our workplace has also been shown to be one of the most popular sources of new romantic relationships, love and marriage.

Since romance stories are enjoyed by almost everybody to some degree, it is therefore not surprising that your workplace is very useful for finding new writing ideas.

The biggest barrier, though, is familiarity and perhaps your desire not to look too deeply into the lives of your colleagues.

Just as in a crowded bus, we tried to maintain a distance between ourselves and the people around us, a degree of separation can be even more necessary when we are close to people for long periods of time such as in the workplace.

However, if you are in accountancy, office ideas for writing may be plentiful because you have had that raw material circulating in your head for years.

If you work in marketing, you may already have memories of marketing promotions that went wrong and, hopefully, some that went brilliantly. In your working life, you have probably met many people from many different companies, backgrounds and careers. Setting your story, amongst this great variety of people can make your writing very real and much more likely to be successful.

If you work in human resources, or personnel as it used to be called, you have probably had experience of relationships, work aspirations and career challenges of, potentially, hundreds or thousands of people to give you writing ideas.

Naturally, your workplace must only be the start for your thinking about ideas for writing. Simply transcribing real-life stories you have come across, perhaps just with altered names, is not only arguably unethical but could also potentially lead to legal complications.

However, if you’re looking for ideas for writing, your workplace can provide you with a wonderful fund of ideas for writing, suitably altered and then manipulated and enhanced using the exploratory story tool ‘ what if?’ and that is when, if you are like me, the enjoyment from your creative writing really starts

Bye for now

Rob

Ideas for writing from just gossiping with your friends

Published

on December 6, 2008

. 0 Comments

Hearing the stories we all tell when with friends can be a wonderful source of writing ideas for our writer's notebooks.

Hearing the stories people tell when with friends can be a wonderful source of writing ideas for our writer

Each one of your friends carries a basket full of stories and ideas for writing everywhere they go and, if you can find the right button to press, they might be persuaded to release some of their stories to you.

Each friend probably needs to be approached slightly differently but the one thing they all have in common is a need for a friendly ear. We all appreciate somebody to talk to at times. Given the right approach, a bucket full of stories can come your way. Used tactfully and responsibly, they can give you ideas for writing that will keep you busy for many hours.

Of course, you will constantly need to ask yourself the question ’so what if?’ and elaborate on the material you have gathered. It is a starting point from which you can weave your storyline, discover characters and spring surprises on your reader to thrill and intrigue.

A truly Machiavellian writing researcher can sometimes achieve remarkable results by persuading their friends to speculate extensions to what they actually know thus surreptitiously involving them in creatively writing the story themselves. Getting your friends to talk about their family, grandparents, parents and their friends can put their story at arm’s length. It enables them to speculate more easily which, sometimes, through the process of Chinese whispers, creates inventive twists and turns.

Ideas for writing come from people’s relationships. Your relationships with the people around you and with your family and friends are fertile fields for discovering ideas for writing. Once you have an idea or a thought to follow, it is up to you to devise twists, turns, mysteries and a thrilling plot to make them more than just a simple narration.

Ideas for writing don’t have to be sensational, they can be quite commonplace but written very well with feeling and still be extremely successful. Often the most important thing about an idea for writing is that you have come across something to which you are drawn and which inspires you to put pen to paper and your fingers on your keyboard.

I once saw two doves on a flat roof near to where I was writing then got into a conversation about their migration habits with a friend. This was enough to stimulate my short flash fiction story Turtle Dove Winter Love.

When ideas for writing come to you in the process of chatting with your friends, or gossiping, do not be afraid to make a note at the time in your writer’s notebook. By allowing the other person to be complicit in the writing idea, worthwhile writing idea extensions can also then be generated.

Good luck with your ideas for writing - and enjoy your gossiping

Bye for now

Rob

Ideas for writing often come from sleeping and dreams but a notebook by the bed is vital

Published

on December 5, 2008

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Sleeping and preparing for sleep is a wonderful opportunity to get ideas for writing but a notebook by the bed is vital.

A powerful weapon to help sleep come and to ensure that bedtime creative dream-state ideas for writing are remembered - is the writer’s notebook.

The process of sleeping often involves going over the daily events and reorganising them in the mind’s eye. It is an almost unconscious activity and probably part of the way our sleeping processes keep our minds healthy.

For myself as a writer, it is a playground for generating new ideas for writing and for rearranging writing ideas I am already working on.

If I do not write down my ideas in a notebook, it is almost guaranteed that I will have forgotten them by the morning; however good they were, however obvious or powerful. The processes of sleep efficiently mend the tensions of the day but also sweep away good creative writing ideas too.

Sometimes, of course, the ideas we generate for writing as we are falling asleep are total rubbish, even though they seemed brilliant at the time. It matters not because sometimes we will wake up to gems that can be taken, elaborated and developed into wonderful new works of fiction or nonfiction.

Furthermore, sometimes the only way to get to sleep is to write down the ideas that are racing through our minds. Once the ideas have been written down, they will be there for the morning or another day. Sleep seems to come because, by the act of writing down our thoughts, we have given ourselves permission to put the persistent thoughts out of our minds for the time being.

Indeed such notes recording writing ideas are often vitally important to keep professional writers writing on days when otherwise not a single idea for writing can be cudgeled from our minds.

Not everybody can remember dreams but if you can then your dreams can be a wonderful source of ideas for writing too. Of course, you can’t record the ideas for writing while you’re dreaming but, if they are still with you when you wake up, jot them down in your note book before you get started on your day.

If you don’t record the idea as soon as you awake, it will probably be gone before you have finished breakfast. As your mind starts to process the difficulties and challenges of your day, the interesting idea for writing disappears.

Sleeping and dreaming are a wonderful source of ideas for writing and are beneficial to our health. Recording thoughts that occur to you around your sleeping times or in your dreams is likely to produce many great ideas for writing your next flash fiction or novella.

Bye for now

Rob

Rob Hopcott - online author

Ideas for writing from observing relationships at your school or college

Published

on December 4, 2008

. 0 Comments

Writing through the ages has been aplace of high emotion presenting many great writing opportunities.

Schools and colleges through the ages has been places of high emotion presenting many great writing opportunities.

School or college are fantastic places to get ideas for writing because they are places of high emotion where all sorts of people meet and interact and, above all, good story writing is about people. Places, although often full of atmosphere, are just the context in which people react to each other.

A big advantage of setting your stories in a school or college is the ready readership who share an interest in this immensely rich community of people.

Whether your relationship with your school or college is as a student or as an adult, through teaching, administration or being a Governor, spending some time passing your writers eye over the huge story writing opportunities will probably be time well spent.

Each of the people in your school or college have their own dreams and ambitions, loves and challenges and the interaction between all these people form a web of relationships that are often exploited by many television soaps and other writers for writing ideas.

However, just observing the people and stories around you is not enough to produce a great writing idea. It is vital that your creative mind is applied to all the situations, smells, people and places you come across to weave your own personal story.

And the most powerful tool in a writer’s armoury is to ask ‘what if?’

What if so and so formed a relationship with so and so? How would their group of friends respond? What if that person became the most popular person in the school or college? What if they became the most unpopular? What if they became the most successful or the greatest failure? What if teachers became students and students became teachers? What if aliens were running the school or college and programming the minds of the students to help the aliens take over the world? What if one of the students ran amok shooting everybody in sight? What if there was an epidemic and the school or college was sealed off to prevent the epidemic infecting people outside the school or college?

Emotions run high in schools and colleges. There is fear of failure in exams. Fear of getting dumped by one’s boyfriend or girlfriend. Even teachers can sometimes fear a difficult class or the next teaching inspection. All these are areas of feelings that your readers may want to explore and which therefore could produce a good idea for writing.

My short story about bullying ‘Classmate from Hell‘, has received a steady stream of readers ever since it was written and put online. In this story, painful childhood memories persuade the otherwise successful female character to meet her childhood bully again.

Whatever your standpoint, observing and reflecting on your memories or current experiences of life in your school or college are very likely to provide you with a great spring of ideas for writing your next short story or novel.

Bye for now

Rob

Story writing for a creative writer is like surfing the waves and going with the flow

Published