In any form of expression driven by public participation and desire for an audience, trends will develop. Whether you're talking fashion, artwork, music, slang, marketing, social media, scientific inquiry, or any number of other dynamic human forces, popularity and the desire for approval will affect what direction expression takes. One of the biggest areas of social life where trends can and do take over is in storytelling.
purpose
Cultivating Your Writing Process
Again, my weekend was not as productive as I had hoped it would be. After fighting with sinus headaches for most of Saturday and Sunday, I ran into a scene during my editing sessions which reads clunky and rough compared to previous scenes. I know this is the type of writing I produce when following the advice of "just get it written and fix it later," and now I am stuck in a position I hate when it comes to writing. I find myself asking if the current text is worth salvaging or if I should simply start over from scratch. Which will be easier? Which will be more time efficient? Which will get me to a point of being happy with the quality of the scene? This dilemma is why I prefer to address quality during my drafting process. Why write something I know will never make the final cut?
Know Your Audience
Over the weekend, I had planned to go on a day trip to one of my favorite natural areas with my camera and the dog. Unfortunately, those plans were derailed but forces beyond my control, and so I spent my time catching up on some TV series that had been recommended to me. While watching pilot episodes through streaming websites, I became quite aware of differences in writing and presentation and the nuances of what I find to be enjoyable storytelling. A great deal of credit goes to actors and directors when it comes to film-based production, but I find that when it comes to my own preferences, it's the writers' work that either makes or breaks a show or movie.
Social Media: What Works for You?
There is a lot of advice floating around out there concerning growing your social media followers and how to promote yourself (something every writer wanting an audience needs to do), but the marketing gurus I watch don't seem to receive much interaction from their tens or hundreds of thousands of followers. Maybe their analytics show that their posts are getting a lot of views, but I can't help but notice that they aren't getting very many likes or retweets... So how effective is their advice if their followers don't seem to believe it's worth sharing?
A Case of Too Many Details…
Today I was reading an article on the indictment of several coal mine supervisors for manipulating equipment and data meant to keep miners safe. Several of the miners who worked under them have developed black lung disease as a result of years of exposure to elevated levels of coal dust, levels that their equipment should have shown to be unsafe had the supervisors not told those miners to interfere with the equipment's ability to collect accurate data. So basically, the focus of the article was black lung disease and the regulations put in place by the US federal government to help protect miners from this disease as well as other mining hazards. However...
HLHumbert 