Category: Technology

Blogging and twitter go hand in hand

22/11/2014

Here's the thing about blogging: I find it I have to work up some motivation to do it. Why do something I don't really enjoy? Because I think it's necessary. Mr Salesman explains why in this post. The real question is why don't I enjoy blogging? I love writing. I'm opinionated (my husband would say too opinionated). I could stand on a soapbox for hours. I could (and do) spend hours and hours on the internet just talking about stuff. When thinking about this, I realised that most of those hours are spent on forums, with a few on Facebook and twitter. The key here is talking to people. I don't enjoy blogging because I don't know who I'm sharing my opinions with or what they think about the matter. I'm inspired to blog when I read someone else's thoughts on a matter and want to share my own.

"Successful" blog posts get page views for two main reasons:
1) They use concise, clear language to say something that many people nod their head at and share with others.
2) They comment on something that is currently at the forefront of people's minds and contribute to a global conversation.

You may notice that this particular blog does neither of those things, but I'm going to write it anyway. This is a plug for twitter.

I used to scoff at twitter. I thought it was for the kind of people who update their Facebook status every 20 minutes and piss off all their friends. Then I joined twitter and quickly came to realise that a tweet is not a status update. That "followers" are not "friends". Tweets are conversation and 99% of my followers are people I've never met in real life. I don't know the names of their kids. And they don't know the names of mine (because, privacy yo).

Twitter helps with successful blog reason #1 by providing an avenue for people who don't know you to share what you have to say. It helps with successful blog reason #2 by showing you what people are thinking about and where the global conversation is. So, really, today I should have been posting about feminism because this week Julien Blanc got kicked out of my country, some X Factor judge released a song with misogynistic lyrics and Time magazine suggested we ban the word feminism. Sorry about that.

Long story short: if you have a blog, get on twitter. They go hand in hand.

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Where writing meets technology

3/11/2014

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The other night on twitter, I came across this post (shared by the Australian Writer’s Centre) about technology and its potential impacts on writing. As a teacher, technology is a constant challenge. Used well, it helps students to engage, collaborate and create; used poorly, it is an entertaining distraction. I teach English, so I’m no stranger to the intersection between technology, reading and writing.

What I found interesting about the article is that Scott Bourne seemed to see technology as that entertaining distraction - at best, a tool for enforcing discipline when it does not come from within. I had to wonder, had he only seen technology used poorly? Or is writing, fiction especially, something that can’t change much from decade to decade?

Reading has fallen under the influence of the tech bug much faster than writing. Data on ebook sales vs print is notoriously murky (perhaps because of all the indie publishers), but at the very least, we can say that e-books have made a significant contribution to the fiction market. This is perhaps partly due to reduced cost; readers are consumers, after all. A writer who refuses to publish a digital copy may miss out on a large portion of their readership and, as I am frequently reminded, “writing books is an art but selling them is always a business”.

I’ve recently finished reading David Foster Wallace’s excellent essay collection, Consider the Lobster. Thinking on how much I also enjoyed Umberto Eco’s essays, I tweeted a request for any good teaching resources or more accessible essays for younger students. As I was typing, I wondered if the creative non-fiction essay is becoming obsolete. Ask 99% of high school students what an essay is, and they’ll talk about academic essays, not something you read for enjoyment. The non-fiction they might read for enjoyment? The blog. I know there are teachers who explicitly teach the forms and conventions of blogging as a text type – what do you think? Are blogs the new “essay”?

The "Hemingwrite" e-ink typewriter that Josh Tyson mentioned in his article.

So if readers want ebooks, research is conducted with google, newspapers are read online and blogs might be the new creative essay, what does all of this mean for fiction writers? Technology has begun changing how we market and publish our work, and to an extent how we produce it (on laptops rather than paper), but so far it seems to have had little impact on our work itself. If the biggest change technology has made to us is the introduction of implements like the Hemingwrite or voice recognition software, then perhaps 21st Century literature will look much the same as 20th Century literature. I don’t share Josh Tyson’s belief that those tools will gouge the quality of writing; writing is about stories and the language used to tell them. Whether I’m holding the pen or not, I have to choose the right words and come up with the premise, the characters and the events.

The "Novel in a Day" project asks 24 authors to write a book together in 24 hours - but no one knows what anyone else is writing.

But what if I didn’t? What if technology could change the fundamentals of writing, so that it is, for instance, collaborative or changed by the reader? The wonderful PurpleZeus uses google docs in his classroom for collaborative technology projects; one could do the same with writing projects. While NaNoWriMo pumps out thousands of first drafts this month, a few days beforehand the Novel in a Day project asked writers to create, edit and polish content for a book they have limited control over. There are writers using social media to ask their readers what they would like to see in a sequel. In the 1960s, Julio Cortázar wrote the novel Hopscotch, where the chapters can be read in different orders or by leaving some out entirely. For a long time, I’ve been contemplating a similar project utilising the non-linear reading style of the internet, with hyperlinks allowing the reader to dictate the sequence of events. What would it do to character arc? To a sense of climax and resolution? I don’t know, but I’d be interested to find out.

If we think of technology as something that is designed to help us shut off from the world and write in solitary confinement, we’re missing the point. If we think of it as a tool to make the writing, rewriting and editing process more convenient as we move from place to place, we might be getting closer. But the tech revolution wasn’t just about making life easier. It was about the very question writers love so much:

What if?

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Privacy and Pseudonyms

25/10/2014

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If you're a writer, or a book blogger, you've probably heard about the Katherine Hale/Blythe Harris debacle. I'm not going to add to the plethora of posts about who was right or wrong, mostly because I think it should be blindingly obvious (if not, I recommend this blog's summary). Instead, I thought I'd take this opportunity to think about how writers - and others who want to put their work into the public sphere - can maintain privacy without compromising their interactions with interested readers.

The internet is a fantastic tool for connecting with your audience, there's no doubt about that. Only one of my small collection of twitter "followers" (I still find that term amusing) has ever met me in real life. To stay away from social media altogether, or worse, have no internet presence at all, would mean missing out on the opportunity to collaborate with other writers, teachers and parents. And although there's no real data to support this idea yet, it's certainly been suggested by more than one agent that a web presence is important in building an audience of readers.

There is some information that I deliberately avoid giving out. It's the common sense stuff that police come and talk to school students about. As a parent, this is as much a matter of my children's privacy as it is my own - after all, my location is also their location. I talk about them, probably more often than some people would like, but I don't use their names or photographs. You might notice on my bio page, there's no picture of me and my town is not referred to by name. Does this hurt my sense of authenticity? Do readers feel distanced from me? Perhaps they do, and perhaps that's why Harris included a false photograph on her pseudonymous account. On the other hand, I don't believe that my picture or my location communicate anything important about the books I write or the ideas and people I care about. I'm not opposed to a photograph being included in any book that gets published, but in the meantime I'm happy for this to be a blind date.

If you're following me on twitter, you'll notice that I use the same account to post about writing, parenting and teaching. Even if you're not, you might notice that I've written about teaching before on this blog - without mentioning the name of the school I teach at, of course. I don't try to split up my identity or approach writing in a vacuum. My writing is impacted by things I've learnt from studying language and literature day in and day out at work. It's also influenced by the other people I interact with in my capacity as a parent, teacher, and even as a soccer fan.

For me, then, a false name (and I do use pseudonyms in different places on the internet) is not synonymous with a false identity. I think the most important thing about interacting with others on the web is being genuine in those interactions. Don't pretend to share their politics if you don't. Don't make up interests; someone might want to talk to you about them someday. Some writers may prefer not to share their career, especially if they're in a more private field like law enforcement, and that's fine. But I don't think it's wise to make up a false career; just don't talk about it. Be who you are, and sooner or later you'll build connections with the same kinds of people you might be friends with in real life.

A note about queries: when it comes to querying agents, do it with your real name. It's a private piece of communication (letter or email) sent to an individual, not the public. And hopefully it's the first step in a business transaction that will involve your real life bank account. If you want to publish under a pseudonym, your agent and publisher will need to be in on the secret.

Sadly, Blythe Harris did take precautions. She didn't post her location online; it was handed over without her consent. Unfortunately there isn't much you can do to avoid that kind of thing, besides having a PO Box. It would amount to never trusting anybody. But at least I know that if someone ever does track me down and turn up at my house, there'll be a trail somewhere of the amount of effort it took them to do so.

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In the future, will people cease to own books?

14/10/2014

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I wrote this a while back for the NUHA blogging prize, but it seemed relevant to a writer's blog so I'm re-posting it. The topic was "in the future, people will cease to own books". Here are (were?) my thoughts.

In the future people will cease to own books. Or they'll own fewer books than they do now. Or they'll own just as many as they do now. I don't know, and I don't think it matters. That might seem surprising - I am, after all, an English teacher and an aspiring writer - but I believe that I can still be those things in a world without books. A musician can still be valuable and popular in a world where vinyl records are collector's items, where cassettes are laughable and even CDs have been overtaken by mp3 files. In the future, perhaps there won't be books, but there will still be literature.

There exists in our society a kind of dichotomy when it comes to technology: both a fevered acceptance of the new and nostalgia for the old. I recently received an internet meme sent from my husband's ipad that commented how "kids these days" don't recognise what the "save" icon on Microsoft Word is supposed to represent. In the staffroom, teachers trawl the internet for their next lesson plan and upload topic quizzes to moodle and edmodo, simultaneously blaming the internet for their students' lack of interest in the classics.

So if there won't be books, what will there be? Obviously ebooks are the first alternative that comes to mind. But just as print newspapers are slowly being replaced by online equivalents, updated hourly and with space for reader comments, the future of writing is not simply a change in physical format. There is a demand for greater interactivity, where the "death of the author" is made explicit by visible reader involvement. There is a demand for user-control, where readers can decide what to read in what order and what to skip over altogether. There is a demand for instant gratification, where readers can have new information (or new stories) in their hands within seconds of it being written. There is a demand for evolution.

Naturally, the expectation is that much of this evolution will occur on the internet. Blogs, wikis and interactive novels are already stepping into those spaces, just as web series are taking up a place in the world of film. However there are also forms of publication that are not permanently linked to the internet, such as interactive ebooks, ipad and android applications, that have a place in the growing alternatives to traditional books. As with internet publication, these models offer an opportunity for cheap, sometimes free, self-publication and mass marketability.

The idea is not without its pitfalls. Internet publication means more opportunity for copyright fraud, less recognition (and usually money) for the author, less regulation and a greater abundance of poor quality fiction to sift through. Sometimes well written gems hide on a blog page while a piece of fan fiction skyrockets to stardom, makes it to print and cashes in millions. It seems desperately unfair, especially to those who have spent several years with editors and agents attempting to get a first novel onto the desk of a publisher. But it also offers a platform for that new novelist to try to make a name for themselves. It offers the reader a chance to sample works that might interest them without having to part with their money or return to the library if they are disappointed. And for the fan or amateur critic, it offers an opportunity to be involved in the editing process or the creation of a sequel.

For the traditional reader or writer, these ideas may seem confronting, almost a violation of an art form. Like digital photography and Photoshop, there will be those who argue that interactive literature is not true literature. Likewise there will probably always be purists who enjoy old media for what it is. But for educators, perhaps rather than seeing this as the demise of books, we should see this as an opportunity for a new era of literature. We are, after all, growing the next generation of writers. Instead of grooming them to be the audience we want, perhaps we should be asking them how they can meet the demands of an audience made up of their peers. The existence of Virginia Woolf did not throw Jane Austen into oblivion. Likewise, if we want the future to be filled with good writing, let's teach people how to write well in the new formats and purposes that they're drawn to.

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Blogging and twitter go hand in hand

Where writing meets technology

Privacy and Pseudonyms

In the future, will people cease to own books?

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