Doing Battle with the Green-Eyed Monster of Wordcount Envy

Oh, Twitter. How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.

Let’s see…carry the one…adjust for inflation…taking the Kentucky windage into account…um…seventeen. No wait! Eighteen.

Twitter is a great thing for writers. And I’m not just talking about the whole, “build your platform and get your name out there” kind of thing (though that’s on the list). Twitter is host to a whole community of writers. And I’m not just talking about the big names here. I talking regular people like me and you, people who are still struggling to be published. Maybe they’re even still working on their first book.

When you’re feeling down, they’re there to encourage you. When you feel like no one in the world understands what you’re going through as a writer, chances are someone in your Twitter stream does.

But sometimes Twitter is a double-edged sword. At least it can be for me.

Lately I’ve been struggling a bit with my novel. Actually struggling is probably too strong a word. I know where I want to go with the story, but because of the fact that I’m doing research as I go, added on to the fact that I’m writing a slightly different voice than normal, things just haven’t been moving as fast as I’d like them to.

And then I log on to Twitter and I see Chuck Wendig and Adam Christopher and Kristen Lamb talking about the thousands of words they’re writing each day, and I start to get a little discouraged about my measly 700 words.

Maybe you’ve been there too. But I’m here to tell you not to worry about it.

Why? Because no two writers and no two stories are the same. It may be you just don’t have time to churn out daily word counts in the thousands. Or maybe you’re like me and the story you’re writing requires you to be more painstaking than usual.

The details don’t matter. What matters is you. If you let wordcount envy get you down, the next thing you know you’ll be saying to yourself, “Well, if I can’t write as much as those guys maybe I don’t have any business writing at all.”

Wrong, wrong, wrong, wrong, WRONG.

Wow. That word looks weird when you repeat like that. Kind of like when you say a word over and over again and it starts to sound like…no wait. I was going somewhere. Yeah okay. You can only write as much as you can write.

Profound huh? But it’s true.

Terry Pratchett only wrote four or five hundred words at a time when he first started. Chuck Palahnuik wrote Fight Club in fifteen minute increments on his breaks at work.

It’s less important that you write a lot, and more important that you write consistently.

If you can only manage a couple of hundred words a day then commit yourself to those couple hundred words. No, you won’t be finished in a month. You may not be finished in a year.

Possibly the most important key to your success as a writer is that you make writing your habit. It should be something you do day in and day out, rain or shine, muse or no muse.

And I think you’ll find that if you keep going you’ll find yourself stretching the limits of what you’re capable of further and further. You’ll look back at those early days of writing and say, “I can remember when I thought a thousand words was a really good day. What was I thinking?”

That’s what we call growth my friend. And growth is what it’s all about.

***

I haven’t done this in a while, but I’ve got a reading assignment for you all today.

First up is a fantastic post by Jody Hedlund about why it’s so hard to be objective about your own work.

Second, go check out Chuck Wendig’s post about the closing of Border’s. It’s powerful stuff.

The Gentle Art of Making Enemies

There are some people who pine for the glory days of high school. They look back in fondness on the experiences they had, the friendships they made, the carefree life they had to leave behind for drudgery of adulthood.

I am not one of these people. High school sucked for me in a big way. I can look back on that time of my life and say honestly that I can not think of one unequivocally good thing that happened to me during that entire four years of my life. I made far more enemies than friends, I fumbled my way through social interaction, and generally hated every minute of it.

And it was mostly my own fault. I didn’t think so at the time of course. I thought it was all those other people who were just plain mean and didn’t understand me because I was so much smarter than they were. Yeah, see what I mean? I was kind of a jerk back then.

And I’m still kind of a jerk now. Well, maybe jerk isn’t the best word for it. The point is, I love to argue. I don’t mean for it to be offensive, I just like to debate things. I like to think it keeps my mind sharp.

The problem is that people don’t usually take disagreement well. For most people arguments are always personal, and always emotional. They assume that if I attack their opinion I’m attacking them in some way.

So I’ve had to adapt. Specifically I’ve had to learn a little self control; I’ve had to make conscious decisions not to jump into arguments simply for the sake of argument. And I have to tell you it hasn’t been easy.

You know that rule about not talking politics on the internet? That rule was invented for me. Because I love politics, and I love arguments. I could jump into all the political chatter and start a debate in no time. But I could also seriously tick off some people who I consider to be friends.

I’ve only been on Twitter for a couple of months and in that short amount of time I cannot count the number of times I’ve had to tell myself, “It’s okay, Albert. Just back off and don’t say anything. You’ll be fine.”

The problem is no one is dispassionate about their political opinion. People on both sides of the aisle have woven their political philosophy into very fabric of their being, and attacking that philosophy is only going to lead to anger and distrust.

Don’t get me wrong. I believe that there is a vital place for political debate in our society. But it isn’t here.

Here is a place about writing and life. Here is where I’m trying to build your loyalty and trust. So that one day when I’m published you’ll say to yourself, “Hey, I know that Albert Berg. He’s the guy who wrote that one blog post about the cockroach in the spaghetti noodles. Maybe I’ll check his stuff out.”

If I’m trying to sell you my book I really don’t care whether you’re a Republican or Democrat.

So go ahead. Post your political ramblings on Facebook and Twitter if you must. You won’t be getting a response from me. But if you like, you can imagine me clenching my teeth and quietly screaming to myself, begging my fingers not to type out a snarky reply. And if I die of a stress related heart attack at the tender age of thirty four, you’ll know the reason why.

How to Make Tweet Potato Casserole

I’ve been on Twitter for a total of something like two weeks at this point, which I believe makes me completely qualified to tell you what you’re doing wrong.  Just as soon as someone can explain to me what a hashtag is.

Okay, so maybe I’m not a social media expert, but in the short time I have been on Twitter I’ve noticed there are some people who should know better making some obvious mistakes.  Some of these could apply to any tweeter, but mostly I’m focusing on people like me, writers who hope to use social media to grow their support.  I can’t tell you the secrets to having a thousand followers, or how to tweet your way to riches, because I haven’t done either of those things.  But I can give you some common sense advice from the eyes of a beginner.

So here it is, the Albert Berg Definitive Guide to Tweeting Well.

1. Back Off

When I click on a Twitter user to check out their feed, I’m interested in one thing right off the bat: how often does this person tweet?  Because I don’t care if you’re the greatest thing since the invention of the hashtag, if you’re updating more than four or five times an hour on average, I’m not clicking that “Follow” button.  Why? Well, because I have to read all that stuff.  I mean, I don’t have to, but if I’m just going to ignore you, then what was the point in following you in the first place?  I am amazed by how many people don’t get this one.

I think it often happens because they think about themselves before they think about the people who are following them.  This may be fine for teenagers in high school, but as writers, we need to think about the readers of our tweets in the same way we might think of the readers of our books.  We’re doing them a service.  We owe it to them not to waste their time.

2. Balance

As authors we’re likely interested in social media as a way to connect with potential readers.  In a way, our twitter feed is one big sales pitch for ourselves.  However, that doesn’t mean that we can use our twitter feed as a constant advertisement for our stuff.  Well, okay, yes, we can. But who’s going to care?

When I first signed up with twitter, I looked up the author G. Wells Taylor’s feed.  Now let me preface what I am about to say with this:  I love G. Wells Taylor.  The man is an inspiration as an independently published writer, and I will take every chance I can to encourage people to read his stuff.  In fact you should go to manybooks.net right now and download his book When Graveyards Yawn.  It’s fantastic work and it’s totally free.  BUT.  The man does not understand Twitter.  Oh, sure he obviously comprehends the mechanics of the whole thing, but he has no idea how to connect with people.  His twitter stream is just a soulless stream of sales pitches for his work.  One tweet after another about, “This book is available here,” and “Go check out my latest and greatest” etcetera ad nauseam.  Consequently the man has an extremely small following compared to what his platform could be considering the quality of his books.

Sure, it’s fine to link to your stuff from time to time, but you need to remember to tell people that there’s a person behind the pitch, hopefully a person that they’ll like and connect with.

On the other hand, if you spend all your time talking about the funny thing your dog did, I’m not going to connect with that either.  This is where the balance comes in.  If you are a writer, I am following you because I am interested in you as a writer.  If you spend all your time talking about banalities, I’m going to be turned off fast.

3. Be a Friend

When I started Twitter, I thought it was a numbers game.  I thought if I didn’t have huge numbers of people following me I didn’t matter, so I did my best to be clever and interesting in the hopes of attracting new followers.  I still do my best to be clever and interesting, but now I’ve had a perspective shift.  I’ve realized that Twitter at its heart is about connecting to other people, engaging them in conversation.  This means give and take. Now sure, I’d still like to have a bunch of people following me, but the more important connections are the ones that I take time to develop and grow.  I’d rather have ten good twitter friends than a thousand casual followers.  Why?  Because those ten true friends are going to be far more likely to spread the word about what I’m doing to their followers, and if they’ve taken the time to make that human connection with some of their followers, then those people may talk about my work as well.  This is called word of mouth.  It’s the holy grail of advertising.  And you can do it through friendship.

That’s all I’ve got.  It’s all simple stuff that seems like commons sense to me, but maybe it can help you improve your tweeting game.  And hey, I really am new to all of this, so if you think I missed something or totally got it backward, let me know in the comments.  I’d love to hear what I’m doing wrong.