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Is Social Media a Waste of Time for Writers?

Photo courtesy of Will Lion via Creative Commons

In response an article in Creative Nonfiction titled “Platforms” Are Overrated, SheWrites Press publisher Brooke Warner wrote a great post titled Your Author Platform is Not Your Social Media Following. The quick summary of Brooke’s post is that social media is just one piece of the […]

10 Reasons to Start Blogging

Every now and then you read a gloom and doom post about blogging like “Is blogging dead?” or “Where are all the bloggers?” Blogging is far from dead. Some people who were blogging five days a week four years ago may have slowed down or quit because they got burned out, and there’s no question […]

Is Your Writing Good Enough?

Do you ever wonder if your writing is good enough? Like, every day? Do you sometimes wonder whether it’s not the publishing industry but YOU that is the problem? That maybe you don’t have it in you to succeed as a writer? That maybe you should have gone to law school after all? You could, […]

Blogging Classes Start This Week!

If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area, I have two blogging classes starting in the next week at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. Blogging for Beginners starts this Wednesday, January 29, and I still have two openings. My Six-Week Blogging Workshop begins the following Monday, Feb. 3, and four spaces are available. […]

Social Media: How to Avoid Burnout

Happy 2013!

If you’re an astute Writerland reader, you noticed that I took a break from social media over the holidays. I didn’t blog, I didn’t tweet, I didn’t Facebook or Google+ or pin. I played Angry Birds (the board game, not the iPhone app), Rush Hour, and Munchkin, I solved the Perplexus Rookie […]

Constance Hale Has a Crush on Verbs

I am thrilled to welcome wordsmith Constance Hale, bestselling author of Sin and Syntax and the just-released Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch: Let Verbs Power Your Writing. Constance is here to talk about … you guessed it: VERBS.

My Crush on Verbs By Constance Hale

How can a person write a whole book, just on […]

Hashtags: How to Use Them Without Abusing Them

After @KristenLambTX decided to reclaim her hashtag, #myWANA, by announcing that she would block anyone who prescheduled tweets using it, I had to ask myself: Have I been abusing hashtags, too?

For those of you new to Twitter, a hashtag is a searchable keyword that you attach to a tweet using the pound sign. […]

Personal Essay vs Memoir

Constance Hale, author of the must-have guide to language Sin and Syntax and the forthcoming Vex, Hex, Smash, Smooch, sent this description of the difference between personal essay and memoir to everyone at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. I found it so insightful, I asked her if I could share with you:

“Personal essay is […]

Where to Get Photos For Your Blog

When I teach blogging and social media classes at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto, students frequently ask me, “Where can I get art for my blog? Can I just google images and use those?” The answer is yes, you can, but no, you may not. Because any image you find on the Internet may be […]

When Should We Limit Literary License?

An interesting discussion took place over lunch here at the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto last week. The topic: literary license. The talk was sparked by The Lifespan of a Fact, a book co-authored by essayist John D’Agata, who teaches at the University of Iowa, and his former fact checker, Jim Fingal, that was published by […]