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

on December 11, 2008

in Writing, online writing and online writing help

. 1 Comment

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

Published

on December 8, 2008

in Writing and online writing

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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

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on December 7, 2008

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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

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on December 6, 2008

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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 from observing relationships at your school or college

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on December 4, 2008

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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

Ideas for writing listening to classical music - a personal viewpoint from Rob Hopcott

Published

on November 28, 2008

. 2 Comments

Watching evening performances of classical music symphonies on television stimulates ideas for writing.

Many of my best ideas for writing fiction, articles, short stories, flash fictions, novels and novellas come to me while I am listening to music in the evenings.

When I have finished my day’s writing at about five or six o’clock, after I have eaten my evening meal, I like to listen to classical music.

As I listen to the music, my mind drifts over the things I have done during the day. Ideas and thoughts are mixed together and mulled over and, often, I find myself making notes about these new ideas for writing in my ideas notebook.

In comparison, if I watch a film, whether it is a thriller or a romance, it seems to take my attention to a much greater degree. It rarely stimulates me to creative thought about new ideas, concepts and plans.

Of course, you may be different. Watching a symphony performed on television might be completely alien to what you like to do. Perhaps, for you, a thrilling film allows your mind to wander in the same way music does for me.

However, I suspect there is something about music that puts us into a more contemplative mood than watching or listening to a story. I am not saying that I don’t like watching films but merely that they don’t put me into a creative frame of mind and help me generate ideas for writing or anything else.

Strangely, watching a factual film does allow my mind to wander. Watching a documentary is also useful because it provides new fuel for my thoughts. It feeds my mind with new situations, new possibilities and new facts. When I watch a documentary about building the longest bridge across the widest river, I’m thinking about the lives of the people that achieved this amazing project. What tensions did they suffer? What were their hopes and fears? Did some of them fail? Were any of them fired? How did their work experience in building the bridge affect their family lives?

So, for me, listening to music and watching television documentaries is a great way to let my mind wander and help generate ideas for writing. Perhaps it might work for you.

If listening to music or watching a documentary doesn’t help, here is another idea for writing inspiration.

Try to remember those moments in your life when you did have a great idea for writing? What were you doing at the time? Could you put yourself back in that situation so that it might inspire you again?

Reading about what inspires other people is useful but what is most important is what inspires you.

If you would like to read more about writing ideas, you may like to check out my other article Ideas for writing - ambitions, dreams and the power of ‘What if?’

Bye for now

Rob

A new writing desk helped me reach my creative writing zone again

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Rob Hopcott - online author

on November 24, 2008

in Writing, writing accessories and writing desk

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My new writing desk and work station in my lovely new sunny room has really helped my writng productivity.

My new writing desk and work station in my lovely new sunny room has really helped my writing productivity.

Getting a new writing desk might help you get into that all important creative writing zone that is so enjoyable and productive for the professional writer. It isn’t a foregone conclusion but it may be part of your individual creative needs.

For many years I worked as a creative writer in a small North-facing bedroom amongst several whirring computers. In the end, it almost drove me crazy (my family might suggest there was no ‘almost’).

I needed a break from working seven days a week and 14 hours a day to meet my writing deadlines. I needed to see the sun. I needed a change of work environment.

When I decided to make a change of direction because the source of work I had previously been tapping dried up, I had to start again but found it was completely impossible to break new ground in the small bedroom that had previously been my office. I needed a new writing environment, a new writing desk, a new writing chair, a new computer to write with and, above all, I needed a sunny room in which to work.

The solution was straightforward. My kids had now flown and my wife eventually allowed me to move downstairs into a beautifully sunny room which our kids had been using as their play room while they had been growing up.

It worked and I am now back to full writing productivity again. I have a new writing desk, a new writing computer, new systems for organising my notes and researches, new writing website software and even a new camera to take pictures which I am now adding to all my articles.

Without doubt, as I have found, writers need to be able to reach their writing zone and being unhappy with their work environment may be a big barrier to feeling relaxed and creative. However, sometimes getting away from the writing desk can also help and sometimes I exchange my large sunny office for my small camper-van table because it helps my productive creative processes to get out in the real world.

Of course, writers must constantly be aware that worrying about their writing environment may just be an excuse for not focusing on their writing challenges. It may be that, when progress is made on the latest writing project, a writer’s writing environment becomes far less important. In my case, there was a genuine need for a better and changed work environment which then enabled me to move on and deal with my own writing challenges.

However, whether it’s a new writing desk, new writing software or a new writing approach that stimulates you to writing productivity, I wish you good fortune and look forward to hearing your writing desk experiences in the comments section below.

Bye for now

Rob

Writing services by Stone Age brains using speed of light technology

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Rob Hopcott - online (Stone Age) author

on November 19, 2008

in Writing and writing services

. 0 Comments

My writer's desk

Writing services are the growth industry of the 21st century. The Internet is organised by the written word. Films and video have expanded massively but film and video cannot be interpreted by computers, human beings are needed to explain their content which can only be done through the provision of writing services.

Writing services are therefore fundamental to the growth and development of the Internet which, in its turn, is arguably one of the most important industries today in our world. Since writing services must be provided by human beings, writing services is inevitably a hugely vital employment provider.

However, it is ironic that writing remains in the Stone Age in terms of efficiency when the system it services can handle the written word at the speed of light. Writing an article, short story or flash fiction takes a significant length of time because the process of thinking through creative projects is determined by the speed of our brains. Unfortunately, the speed of our brains has not been fundamentally enhanced since human beings first walked on planet Earth.

As an online writer, my income is very much geared to the volume and quality of my writings. The more I provide my writing services to the Internet community, the more money I am bound to make from the readers who are attracted to my site. But the quantity of articles and stories is quite simply limited to the number I can get out in one day which is currently about seven articles, at best, and, at worst, perhaps only two. If I could write ten times more articles and stories, I would earn ten times as much. Sadly, my brain would probably become superheated if I tried and the result would be gibberish - hardly a good writing service for my readers

Speech recognition is perhaps a way forward but I have found all it does is speed up the process of typing. It introduces efficiencies into the writing process of first drafts without any doubt but editing and re-editing can be increased where the speech recognition software has got my meaning disasterously wrong.

Culturally, Westerners like myself are hugely challenged by people from the hitherto poorer countries, with their lower cost base, who have been rightly underbidding us and taking our job opportunities in many industries. Fortunately, for us, we Westerners have a strong advantage in the provision of writing services because of the subtleties required in the creative writing process.

So, whether you are thinking of becoming a writer and providing writing services or perhaps you are a small business that needs your hotel or other small business blog ghost written to attract more visitors to your web site, writing services is an industry that will remain important and probably grow massively over the next decade.

If you would like to read more about writing and writing services, check out my other articles referred to on this page or search this site using the search box at the top of this page.

Good luck!

Bye for now

Rob

Novel writing - a scary emotional roller-coaster but success wins you a friend for life

Published

Rob Hopcott - online author

on November 14, 2008

in Writing, novel writing, writer's block and writing tips

. 2 Comments

Novel writing is fun but scary. With several novels / novellas under my belt, I know and still bear the scars. If you are interested, check them out at my Free Online Novels and Novellas blog where I also discuss free online novels by other authors too.

Novel writing is completely exhausting but wonderfully absorbing. It draws you in and gives you somewhere else to live. The characters, with whom you are spending so much time, become really important in your life like new friends. As you go about your day-to-day life, you start wondering how they would respond to that bit of news or this particular event. You re-live a scene and feel the fear, love, hatred or joy your character felt. Your characters are you but, as your novel progresses, you may also find that you are becoming your characters.

I love novel writing. It is the ultimate form of escape. It is a full-time job. It is indulgent. It rocks like no other writing experience I know. Writing a flash fiction or short story has a special pleasure of its own but there is no greater joy than in finishing a novel. You lovingly flick through the pages with all their memories, revealed or kept secretly in the background. The novel has become a living entity and will thereafter be important in your life. Like a child, it has been born, it lives on and will never go away. It is a friend or burden for life.

But novel writing is a big gamble. It is a one shot gun. You need to be very certain that the novel is going to achieve your objectives. These objectives may be personal, as in writing your life’s story to work out some feelings, or aimed at making money through conventional publishing. Whatever your reasons, the decision to write a novel is so huge that it cannot be undertaken lightly.

However, if you decide to embark on this roller-coaster emotional ride of your lifetime and write a novel, I wish you all the luck, good fortune and stamina you will need. Like a friend who has accompanied you to the station, I feel envy that I will not be travelling with you to all those exciting places but my own personal path lies amid the short stories, articles and flash fictions of my small home town - at least for now.

Bye for now

Rob

Writing software that provides speech recognition assists my writing productivity by Rob Hopcott

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