Monica Valentinelli

narrative & visual storyteller

Tag: Books & Stories

December Writing Marathon

Who’s Up for a December Writing Marathon? Some Proposed Rules.

Running Shoes | By Photo.Bugz on FlickrI know that many of you might be writing for National Novel Writing Month, and if you are – I hope that it’s going really well for you. Writing 50,000 words in a month is not an easy task, and it can be very exhausting. I knew that my schedule for November wasn’t going to allow for NaNoWriMo, so I wasn’t able to participate. Admittedly, I feel a little guilty about not making a concerted effort on my writing this month, even though I’m waiting to hear back on several projects.

So, in the interest of “getting back into it” I propose a December Writing Marathon for 20,000 words minimum.

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Blog

Writer’s Block? Check out this Horror Plot Generator

It’s often funny how I get ideas from the weirdest places. Last month at a writer’s meet-up, we were presented with some word lists to help foster our creativity for character types. Before I went to the meeting, I was having a terrible week. (I’m sure you all know what I’m talking about.) I was […]

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Consulting and Marketing

How to Make Your Voice Heard in a Sea of Content

fishing-boatEarlier I talked about the concept of content saturation, which spelled out the sheer volume of content added every month and how it’s affecting your writing. Do you have any ideas as to how you can navigate through this sea of content?

First, the cold hard truth is that no amount of yelling, screaming or crying is going to get your content read. Think about the amount of content added every day as an actual “ocean” of words and your potential visitors are akin to “fish” that you want to catch. If you’re on a boat, screaming your head off, are you going to catch a fish? If you tell your potential visitors that “This is the best article I’ve read in a long time. By the way, I wrote it!” will they come to your site? Probably not.

Instead, ask yourself why you are writing your content to figure out what kinds of fish you want to catch.

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Freelance Writing

Content Saturation and its Effects on Your Writing

According to this article about amazing web stats from January 2009, there are an average of 900,000 blog posts published within a twenty-four hour period. Even if the average reader would skim through each post at a rate of one per minute, it would take approximately 1.75 years to read every one.

With this amount of content added on a daily basis, the web is rapidly approaching a point where content is becoming heavily saturated. Content aggregators that point to other people’s content are increasing in popularity, even though the demand for original content is not slowing down.

Content saturation is a challenge that every content creator (i.e. writer) must face sooner or later. There are a few effects of content saturation that are becoming more and more apparent each day, and I’d like to point these out to you:

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NaNoWriMo

My Number One Distraction from Writing is the Internet

The internet. Filled with webcomics, social media and news, its plethora of mini-games and interactive tools can sometimes distract me from getting a large word count out the door. I find that as part of “creating my workspace” to get a lot of writing done, I can’t shut it off completely because I really like […]

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