Prompt 11: What can you learn from my experience?

This is our last true reflection week. After this we will focus on your projects and helping you polish your reports. So this week’s reflection activities are going to take more of a Q-and-A type approach. I’m going to tell you about my career as a professional writer and then encourage you to ask questions about the areas that interest you the most. I hope this will help you think about the variety of options available to you in terms of professional writing.

I graduated from SUNY College at Plattsburgh with a BA in English with a concentration in journalism. While still in college I worked for the campus newspaper as a reporter, layout editor, and editor-in-chief. In addition, I interned in the college public relations office and published my first magazine article in a regional publication.

My first job was with Wolfe Publications – a community newspaper chain in the Greater Rochester (NY) area. I was editor of The Webster Post and a staff writer for the chain. I had a small staff (a couple ladies who ran the Webster office and handled society items) and had access to the photographers and production staff of the main office. I was given great freedom as I worked in a satellite office far away from the powers-that-be. I worked for Wolfe for six years – right up until my husband and I moved to Kentucky.

While I was working for Wolfe I decided to pursue a dream of mine – writing a novel. I wrote a historical romance set in the 1600s in Holland and America. Then I found that was the easy part – trying to sell my novel would be much more difficult. In the end, I did publish it with a small publisher who also contracted to publish the sequel and then went belly-up after paying only one royalty check on the first book and before the second went to press. My search for a publisher did lead me to the Romance Writers of America and I attended a conference in Buffalo, NY, before moving to Kentucky and then in Kentucky I became very involved in the organization – eventually taking on a leadership role in the Kentucky chapter. This gave me contacts and mentors which eventually led to another two-book contract but this time with a major mass market publisher. Those books did get published (both set in Revolutionary War Kentucky territory).

My husband had a job when we moved to Kentucky but I did not and my first two years were marked by a slew of jobs. My first job was serving as editor for a start-up magazine called Lexington This Month which managed to put out three issues before closing up. However, that experience brought me contacts which led to additional freelance gigs including ACE Weekly, The Lane Report (I was on staff there for several years), Kentucky Living, and Kentucky Monthly as well as a short-term full-time contract at Lexington Philharmonic. In addition, I did some writing for a vocational publication. I think that covers most of my jobs.

However, working piece-meal like this is not a good way to get ahead so when the opportunity came to join the staff of the Jessamine Journal doing much the same work I had for The Webster Post I took the job. I worked there for less than a year (I didn’t really like the working situation there) before moving to the Mt. Sterling Advocate as a reporter. After a few years I was promoted to managing editor (which meant I was in charge of the newsroom staff and assigning stories as well as designing each issue).

After a few years of that I realized that there was no real career advancement left for me in newspapers and I was ready for a change.  I decided to go back to school and get a Master’s in English so I could teach at the college level. However, going to school full-time (even with a graduate assistantship) would be a challenge for us financially as it would mean giving up my income. I also suspected that I would miss writing, even though I still had some freelance gigs (The Lane Report plus occasional articles for Kentucky Living and Kentucky Monthly), so I decided to go into web publishing.

I started out publishing two weekly ezines (electronic magazines) – The QuizQueen (themed trivia quizzes) and JustFolks (featuring profiles of inspiring people) and eventually ended up with four weekly ezines and two daily ezines plus a monthly trivia contest. These were actually fairly profitable if time-consuming. Mainly I made money by selling advertising slots (I had a subscriber base in the thousands). I published my ezines right up to the point where I entered my Ph.D. program because they were a nice additional income even after I was teaching full-time. However, I knew the addition of graduate classes to my already full schedule (as a full-time MSU instructor and a mom) would make it impossible to keep up my ezine publishing schedule. However, I had a lot of trivia quizzes and articles written so I decided to switch up my web publishing business to a more flexible model that I could attend to when I had time and let earn passive income when I did not. This meant for a while I had more than 100 web sites with blogs and/or articles posted on theme in various themes – usually with affiliate programs posted on them but even that is time consuming as you need to work to drive traffic and keep up-to-date with affiliate programs so I have let those web sites go and now the only online income I have is through Squidoo because that is totally passive. However, I am still earning a couple of hundred bucks a month and sometimes more which is fine by me. I’m sure I could earn more (I know Squidoo folks earning more than a $1,000 a month) if I put the time into it but I just can’t. However, just to give you an example this lens: Inspirational Messages About Life has earned me $1100 in lifetime royalties ($30 to $50 a month).

So journal about what you would love to see happen in your own future career (write for a living, publish a novel, work for a nonprofit), ask questions in the discussion board about my experiences, and Tweet something key.

Prompt 10: What is good writing?

This is a question that writing teachers struggle to answer, but it is at the heart of what you are learning through your work with this class. If you can begin to answer that question then you are on your way to become a reflective writer which will in turn result in your continued growth and development as a writer after you leave this class. That continued growth and development is my goal for you because I can only hope to effect so much change in one semester – certainly not your complete transformation as a writer – and also because at some point you need to accept your own responsibility for your growth and development as a writer. I can give you advice and tools, but ultimately you are the one who determines your future as a writer.

So let’s reflect on what makes good writing as we consider what others have to say about the subject:

·         The Principles of Good Writing

·         What is Good Writing?

·         What is Good Writing?

Nothing too earth shattering here, right? Probably all ideas you’ve heard before and came up with as you considered the question yourself. It is not that these ideas are wrong BUT they are too limiting, in my opinion. Is all good writing the same? If you are a good creative writer does that automatically mean you will be a good journalist or technical writer? Once you’ve achieved the status of a “good writer” does that mean you will never struggle as a writer again?  OK, that question made me laugh out loud and if I addressed it to my friends who work as professional writers they would probably smack me on the back of the head.

So writing with purpose, organizing your ideas, and observing the conventions is not enough to be a good writer. It is true that organization and conventions play a role in all forms of writing, but simply having a clear purpose is not enough – your purpose has to serve the needs of the intended audience. It is not enough to know what you are writing, you also need to know whom you are writing for and what they need and want from your writing. Good writing achieves your purposes and serves the needs of your audience.

Organization and conventions are important in every piece of writing BUT without understanding the expectations of your intended audience and the conventions of your intended format and genre you still could generate “bad” writing even if it is well organized and grammatically correct. Most audiences/communities expect good writing to observe grammar, spelling, and punctuation conventions but they are more willing to forgive the occasional convention error than your misunderstanding of the essential function of your piece.

Too often school writing is all about form (the surface structure and appearance) but in reality good writing is much more about function. This is not to say that grammar, spelling, punctuation, organization etc. are not important – they are very important as they can distract from and even interfere with the function of your writing and certainly influence the reader’s judgment of the value of your writing. However, in my belief as a professional writer and a writing teacher, it is the function that ultimately determines what is good writing and what is not.

What I want you to think about now, after considering the implications of this is to think about what this means for the evaluation of your writing. I have not yet created the scoring guide for your formal report (the big assignment which will culminate your project) and thought it might be helpful for you to work with me to create it. This is in part so you can create your own checklists for future projects as well as take another step in your development as a writer by making you more self-regulating.

Your job for the reflection cycle is to think about what qualities we need to consider in terms of evaluating your reports. Look at the scoring guides I created for the proposal and literature review.  What I do first is to come up with a list of topics or qualities that I consider essential to a “good” proposal or literature review and then begin phrasing the question or statement that covers that quality and sets us up to assign an appropriate value on the scale (5 = definitely to 1 = not at all). I may decide that some qualities should be weighted more heavily than others. I’m not asking you to create the whole scoring guide – just a list. I hope through our discussion this week we will be able to combine and refine a list that helps us all learn a bit more about evaluating writing. Your reflective Tweet can touch on that lesson rather than your evaluation list.