Writers in the Storm

In last month's post, I shared social media strategies that support your brand and let you have a life. I don't know about you, but I like having social media be something I fit into MY life, rather than the other way around. The big question everyone wants to know is: "How do I get my post to go viral?"

First, we need to understand what kinds of posts get shared extensively and why.

There are many many schools of thought on what gets others to share your content, but I decided to go with science because we want results that can be duplicated. Scientific American published a fascinating article that concluded the following:

"..content that elicits an emotional reaction tends to be more widely shared. In addition, stories stimulating positive emotions are more widely shared than those eliciting negative feelings, and content that produces greater emotional arousal (making your heart race) is more likely to go viral. This means that content that makes readers or viewers feel a positive emotion like awe or wonder is more likely to take off online than content that makes people feel sad or angry, though causing some emotion is far better than inspiring none at all."

For max impact, I'd recommend focusing on the following types of content:

1. Lots of photos and branded graphics.

Whether it's photo platforms like Instagram and Pinterest, or more chat-based media like Twitter and Facebook, photos are more likely to grab attention and get shared. In fact, Facebook algorithms always show a photo before a link. That means, even if you're going to include a link, be sure to put your photo in first. Better yet, add the link in the comments so the Facebook status update is all about your gorgeous photo.

Make your photos awesome! I recommend Laura Drake's Canva post for help with this. Also, here's a good social media rule set to live by from Sendible.

2. Short videos provide traction.

This can be achieved by a Facebook Live, a quick Snapchat video, or just some vid you shoot on your phone. The key word here is short. NO more than five minutes. Preferably, no more than three minutes. Get in, say what you want to say, and get out.

Don't be afraid to edit your video! You don't have to learn a program like Camtasia to do this. YouTube has tons of editing tools that are free with your YouTube account. Plus, it's owned by Google, which means your videos here will show up higher in the search rankings. Score!

Mary Castillo, an author and marketing specialist, offers this sage input about videos:

If you're using a scheduling tool like HootSuite, that's great. It is a huge time saver. But Facebook is choosy. I schedule my Facebook uploads directly in Facebook. Those posts are more likely to show up in your followers' news feeds.

Live Facebook videos with live Instagram videos are very popular and again, make Facebook like you. When you go live, your followers on both platforms receive a push notification to their device.

3. GIFs can be cool.

But...GIFs can get old quickly if that's all you do. The key to "giving good GIF" is eye-catching graphics or snippets paired with easy language. You are graphically trying to enhance the mood of a concept and get across a message.

Here are GIF tips from actual designers who say, "Don't be afraid of Photoshop." But if that is way too high tech for you, GIPHY has a GIF Maker you can use to share your own GIFs. (Here's how you share them to Instagram.)

4. Other resources for creating shareable social updates.

Creating "quote graphics" is a great way to get your content shared. This can be a quote from a recognizable historical figure or a quote from one of your characters. You decide!

• Social Engine Journal published a great post on sharing quotes to build engagement.
• Another article on finding free quotes and graphics from GrowingSocialBiz.com.

As I said in my last post, you want your time online to be fun and productive. How much MORE fun will it be if all your hard work pays off with content that gets shared widely?

It won't happen overnight. It might not even happen the first several months. Social media is a tool requiring perseverance and a steady drip-drip-drip of content. If you build that content, share it and interact with the people who share it further, at some point you will have your content take off, which builds name recognition and sells books.

Now it's your turn! What are your thoughts on great online content? Do you mix things up with video, photos and GIFs? What do you do to maintain your work/life balance?

About Jenny Hansen

By day, Jenny provides training and social media marketing for an accounting firm. By night she writes humor, memoir, women’s fiction and short stories. After 18+ years as a corporate software trainer, she’s delighted to sit down while she works.

When she’s not at her personal blog, More Cowbell, Jenny can be found on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or here at Writers In The Storm.

Kathryn Craft

I love to go hear other authors speak. What a kick that Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout sounds like my favorite quirky aunt, or that bestselling author Margot Livesey’s lush prose begins with characters who, like mine, nod and shrug their way through her first drafts.

I’ve walked away from dozens of such interactions thinking, “She was just so real.”

Now, isn’t that a funny thing to say about someone who makes things up for a living?

Or perhaps writing engaging fiction is one of the most emotionally truthful pursuits in which we will ever engage. A novelist can spend years crafting a story that will illustrate an emotional truth. Why? Because the point she is making is vital to her worldview. That’s pretty darned personal—it’s laid bare.

Fear of such exposure is why reaching for emotional honesty can be a significant source of writer’s block. Accomplished writers grow in authenticity the same way we all must: one step at a time.

Speaking your truth

Because my family of origin did not create a safe place for being real, my first stabs at raw emotional honestly didn’t occur until I was 34, on the pages of my journal. Even that writing felt dangerous, at first. But in time, the explorations on those pages stoked the fire of who I am and what I believe.

Once I was honest with myself there, the next step felt more doable: I spoke my truth aloud. To only one person, true, but considering I was married to him, an important one. And when over time he continued to express no interest in my little personal growth project, I grew even bolder and told him our marriage was over. The courage I’d gained from speaking my truth was a crucial foundation when, a month later, I had to find a way past his suicide.

A year and a half later, my first public statement of what I believe changed my life.

I was meeting with a small support group of people whose marriages had recently ended. The discussion leader said, “If you were to start a new relationship, what is the most important lesson from the first that you would carry forward?”

The first guy set the tone. He complained that after his wife had gone back for a master’s degree, he wasn’t good enough anymore. Next time, he’d want someone who didn’t want to change, since “I’m the same man I was in the 1960s.” Which was clear enough, since he was wearing a leisure suit.

We continued around the circle, with closely guarded participants deflecting with one ridiculous answer after another. Seriously, I could write a sit-com.

But as my turn to answer grew closer, I recognized an opportunity to speak my truth. And I thought, why not? If I couldn’t do this in a room of strangers, when would I ever? Plus, that first fellow had me incensed. I will enthusiastically defend anyone’s right to self-actualize. I felt a moral imperative to be real.

I sat on my hands, to stop the shaking, and began.

“It seems that by the time you’re my age, you’ve given some thought as to the meaning of your life. That will lead you to think about your relationship to a larger creative force—God, the Universe, a Higher Power—and how you are being called to use your life to offer something to the world. Figuring this out should be our first priority. The second priority should be our relationship to self, through nurturing all other aspects of health.”

My heart was beating so loudly I wondered if anyone could hear my words. But what the hell, I’d gotten this far.

“My first husband put me on a pedestal. I never want to be anyone’s number one again. In my next relationship, I want my partner to think of his relationship to God first, and himself second. I never want to be more than a solid third.”

There was some eye-rolling, I’ll admit. But I had spoken my truth and lived! I could take it.

That was reward enough. But, unknown to me, my words had shifted fate. A couple weeks later, the discussion leader, who’d been with the group four years, called to say he thought I was someone he could talk to. After several months of lunches and casual dates, he felt it was time to share a piece of paper with me—his personal mission statement, written after taking a Stephen Covey class years earlier at work.

I don’t think I breathed while I was reading. The words were almost the same as those I had shared in that support group. I looked up, the yellowing onion skin paper shaking in my hand, knowing we had truly seen each other.

We’ve now been married for 17 years.

There is such power in speaking your truth. It released me from an ineffective marriage, drew to me my second husband, and unlocked the stories that are my chosen way of sharing that truth. The emotional resonance in my work is why I got published and what brings my readers back for more. Now, after I speak in public venues, people say online, “She’s just so real.”

Speak your truth on the pages of your journal. Speak it out loud to a friend. Infuse your stories with it. Then repeat, repeat, repeat. Your bold acts will be rewarded.

This is our emotional preparation for becoming “real.” Your readers will thank you.

Has journaling helped you as a writer? How? What do you believe? If you want to practice stating it in a safe place, share it in the comments.

Have you written a story about that? If not, what’s stopping you?

About Kathryn

Kathryn Craft  is the award-winning author of two novels from Sourcebooks, The Art of Falling and The Far End of Happy, and a developmental editor at Writing-Partner.com, specializing in storytelling structure and writing craft. Her chapter “A Drop of Imitation: Learn from the Masters” was included in the writing guide Author in Progress, from Writers Digest Books. Janice Gable Bashman’s interview with her, “How Structure Supports Meaning,” originally published in the 2017 Novel & Short Story Writer’s Market, has been reprinted in The Complete Handbook of Novel Writing, both from Writer’s Digest Books.

Cathy Lamb

When I was about eight, my parents took my sisters, my brother, and me on a six week camping trip in a tent.

Yes, I said six weeks.

No, my parents had not lost their ever lovin’ minds. My father had a sabbatical, they were sick of the city, and they wanted out.

We all piled into our long black Ford. The Ford had an uncanny and somewhat creepy resemblance to a hearse, but we ignored that part.

We tossed in our dogs, Frisky and Alphy. Frisky bit people, Alphy bit dogs. They were both bad, odd dogs. The Ford, immediately, was in total chaos.

We left Huntington Beach, California and camped up and down California and Oregon in a big, sagging blue tent which we later learned was not waterproof, as advertised.

My mother got a scary case of hypothermia, all three of my siblings threw their guts up because they drank the lake water in Lake of the Woods, the dogs got sick in the middle of the night, and we constantly had to drop by local hospitals so I could get my regular allergy shots so I wouldn’t start wheezing like a freight train.

A lantern dropped on my sister’s head, and she had to be rushed to the hospital for a bunch of stitches. Two days later she fell head first into a pond and soaked the stitches. My father had to dive into a river in Jedediah Smith State Park to rescue my brother who would have drowned had my father not been so quick.

Alphy tried to get in fights with other dogs, and Frisky tried to bite people.

The chaos continued. We persevered.

The result? Overall, we had a fantastic time camping in that saggy blue tent. It was a pivotal moment in my life as I saw the value, and beauty, of nature.

We saw mountain ranges and beaches. Elk and raccoons. Campfires and bears. Sparkling lakes and rushing rivers. For city kids, it started a lifelong love of nature for all of us.

All we had to do was go and play outside.

If I could offer you one piece of writing advice for 2018, I would tell you to go and play outside.

I wish my advice was more profound. I wish it sounded wiser, more knowledgeable. I wish it was more craft or skill oriented.

It isn’t.

Friends, head into the woods.

Camp. Hike. Stick your toes in the sand, run in the ocean. Go sledding. Grab time for yourself under the trees. Do not get hypothermia, and don’t drink lake water or bring bad dogs with you.

Be quiet. Be still. Listen. Notice colors and the weather, birds and ducks, the wind and the silence.

Bring chocolate chip cookies. Everyone knows that they’re nutritious and help brain power. Or wine. Wine will do.

I know your life is busy and traipsing into nature can be hard to do. I so get it, but try.

It’s on your hikes in a state park that you’ll find the theme of your story.

It’s in those serene moments beside a waterfall that a tricky sub plot or a mischievous character or a slippery storyline will germinate or solve itself.

It’s in your sleeping bag listening to crickets that you’ll know exactly what your next writing project should be.

Nature gives your soul time to relax. If you want to write well, you must relax and relieve and replenish your soul. Nature, and solitude, also forces us to be honest with ourselves, about our lives, our relationships, and our writing. If for nothing else, go play outside for the honesty.

In 2018 I am wishing you time by a trickling stream, time to lay on your back and admire the stars, time to get up early to catch a sunrise, and time to stand on a mountain and admire a snowy, blue view that goes on forever and ever.

Cheers and happy writing.

Have you ever gotten an idea for a book, while out in nature? Has the break helped your writing?

About Cathy

Cathy Lamb recently finished her twelfth novel. She is tired and is headed out to walk through the woods.

Website: http://cathylamb.org

Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/cathy.lamb.9