Thank you to everyone who has sacrificed for our freedoms.
Marketing Mondays will resume next week.
Photo by Mike Sussman
Focusing your fiction
I recently read a friend’s manuscript and realized that she had good scenes and themes, but somehow I was still left feeling like the manuscript wasn’t very focused. That might’ve just been me, but it’s something I want to think about as I work on my current manuscript, where the “BIG” theme is something the narrator isn’t aware of consciously until the end, and a smaller theme is something she does notice and talk about.
Here are a couple things you can do to hone a book’s focus (shared with my friend’s permission, but all details changed to protect her):
- A scene chart, with special focus on scene goals. This makes sure that each scene drives the story forward. I always do this: make a spreadsheet of all the scenes in my book, whose POV they’re in, what information is conveyed, but most importantly what the POV character’s goal is going into the scene. Most of the time, the character will pretty much state the goal outright at the beginning of the scene.
- Tension check! This is something I have to do with every book, and I usually do it as part of the scene chart. One of the columns is dedicated to writing out the source of the tension in that scene. If I don’t know, I look for an antagonist or a disaster. Typically most scenes end in disaster, at least from the perspective of the POV character who came into the scene with a stated goal. Then, when I go through and edit the scene based on that, I make sure that tension is there in every page.
- Stakes check! Again, this can be done in the scene chart, or on a higher level, like chapter or section. Ask what is at stake–what happens if the character doesn’t achieve his or her goal? What are the consequences? Do they know that? Can we be reminded of that? (This can also be a subtype of the tension check.)
- Think long and hard about the theme (Note that this is post-first draft work most of the time!). I feel like there are two competing themes in the book: one of ignorance being bliss, and one of loving someone being a strength rather than a weakness. This makes it feel like we’re telling almost two different stories. Can you make the themes relate to one another? Make one subordinate to the other? Rephrase/rethink/reframe/re-present one so that they are corollaries? Or maybe pick one and focus on it, and make sure the other stays a subplot?
- Once you’ve pinned down the theme, look at each scene and each character and each character’s journey. How do they support the theme? (If you’re having trouble with the last point, maybe do this first, writing out what each character’s journey and purpose in the story are currently, and looking at trends before you decide which theme to go with or how to correlate them.) How does that character/scene/journey express or support the theme?Does it serve as a counterexample, and if so, is it presented in a negative light or with negative conclusions? (This is sort of inspired by Holly Lisle’s one-pass revision technique.)
- Look at the language itself. Is the language specific, concrete and vivid? Can we really see a vivid picture of people (visual and characterization) and settings and emotions and experiences?
What do you think? How else can you help to focus an unfocused theme or story?
Photo by Riccardo Bandiera
How to read while writing
I’ll admit it: I love to read, but when I’m writing, I don’t do a lot of reading. (Oh, crud, there’s a secondary confession in there: I typically don’t write [i.e. write brand new material in a first draft] every single day. Gasp.) There are a couple reasons for this. (The reading, not the writing. That’s another post.) When I am writing a book, it usually consumes every second of “free” (read: writing or reading time) time I have for those weeks. But don’t worry—I still get my (non)fiction fix in! Here’s how!
Research!
Occasionally, I can work in a little bit of reading while drafting. For me, nonfiction research reading can often feed my creative beast muse—very important when you push it as hard as I do (we’re talking 4-5000 
words/day while drafting).
I have to do a lot of research anyway (since I’m a little obsessive), and research reading is a great source of new ideas. I’m revising and editing right now, and I’m digging deep into my research reading at the same time—and the ideas I’m discovering are fantastic! Man, I wish I’d done this research sooner. Sigh.
Fiction, however, is another story for me. When I read fiction while writing, the voice or style of the book I read often bleeds into the book I’m writing. That usually isn’t so good. So let’s just assume that we’re not going to be reading fiction while drafting, but we definitely can’t take off all our time from reading. What’s a writer to do?
Take a reading break
One thing I try to do periodically, especially when trying to get necessary distance from my book, is to take a break from writing/revising/editing altogether and just read. It’s a good time to catch up in your genre, explore another, try something new or completely different, or just enjoy yourself. Reading breaks are also a great place to find ideas. Way back when I wrote three books in one year (before I did 4–5000-word days!), the thing that got me writing that third book (insanity!) was an idea I just couldn’t resist after reading a fantastic book.
Read carefully while editing
Reading while editing will vary from writer to writer, but for me, I think I actually benefit from reading writing that I . . . don’t care for, we’ll say. If you’ve been editing your own work long enough, you probably rewrite sentences in published novels at least occasionally. (Admit it, we all do!) When you feed your editing habit, you may look at your own writing with a more critical eye.
On the other hand, I’m sure some writers find it more helpful to read really, really good novels while editing, giving them a mark to shoot for. Me, I go for the petty alternative 😉 .
Set a reading goal
And make it public!. I pledged to read 50 books last year, and I thought that wouldn’t be too hard. I’d read 40 the year before (um, including a 6-week leave from all writing while I read [and had a baby]), and even very long books seldom take me a week to read. You know, except for the weeks I can’t, when I’m consumed by my own books (or, heaven forbid, the humans with whom I cohabit)(okay, or the frog)(and Randy makes his blog debut!).
That public pledge ended up pushing me pretty hard, especially since I did NaNoWriMo, too. It came down to the wire, but I got in my 50 books, even if a couple were rereads of some classics of writing craft.
What do you think? Can you read while you write? If not, when do you read?
Photo credits: reading a book—Kendra; glasses on book—Antonio Mantero
Tracking your blog: using the data
Oh my goodness, I almost forgot! Throughout May, you can win a 15-page critique from me just by commenting! Winner will be drawn at random; each comment from April 30 to May 31 counts as one entry; winner to be announced on the blog June 1. So come join in the conversation!
Whether you use Blogger’s stats or Google Analytics, you’re collecting information about your blog visitors, and that information can be put to good use for you. If you understand how and why people are using your site, you can try to target and appeal to your visitors better.
The first step is always to dig into the data (hooray!). First we’ll take a look at how people are finding your site, then at your most popular content.
Note: At the top of the page in both these programs, you can adjust your time frame. I like to use a month for my data, which is the default in Google Analytics (Blogger’s default is one week).
How people are finding your site
In Blogger, you’ll want to go to Stats > Traffic Sources. In Google Analytics, it’s Traffic Sources > Overview. The Blogger version lists only the URLs and sites sending traffic to yours, followed by the search engine keywords. Google Analytics sorts the incoming visit sources. If you click on Traffic Sources > Sources, you’ll see some of these categories: “direct” visits, i.e. when someone types in your URL; referral visits, when someone clicks on a link to visit your site; and search engine visits.
Dig into your referring sites. Are your guest posts generating traffic for you? Critique partners’ sites? Random people? One thing I like to do is to visit the referring sites, especially if they’re blog posts. I love finding people who’ve linked to my site and thanking them!
What do I do with this information? I really like Google Analytics’ information here: it shows the proportion of your visits from the various source categories. If you’re getting more referrals than search visits, you can decide whether you want to try to attract more search traffic, or pursue referral traffic even harder with guest posts, hunting for links, etc.
Searching the search engines
I hope some part of your traffic is coming from search engines! But more than just knowing that they’re coming from a search engine, you want to know why—you need to know what they were searching for. And that might be more complex than it sounds—we can’t always tell what someone who typed in “oneida” is looking for. (Google it; there are lots of options.)
Take a look at the Keywords report. In Blogger, it’s at the bottom of the Traffic Sources page. In Google Analytics, go to Traffic Sources > Sources > Search > Organic. [You might think it’s under Search Engine Optimization, but that’s for the integration with Webmaster Tools. We’ll come back to that—if I ever run out of other things to blog about!]
There you’ll find a list of the keywords people type into search engines and end up on your site. Note that just because people come to your site from that keyword, it does NOT mean you necessarily rank well (though one would hope there’d be a correlation between a lot of visits from a keyword and a high ranking).
What do I do with this information? Look for trends! On my website, I’ll tell you, nearly all of my top 10 keywords have to do with plotting methods. (It’s almost as if I did a month-long series on the subject or something!) What do you think I should write about? (Yeah, we’ll see.)
Of course, with Blogger, it can sometimes be a little tricky. I have a whole series on plotting, but how can I tell which post on the subject of the Snowflake Method my people are landing on? Google Analytics makes it easier—you can figure out what pages on your site people are landing on based on keyword. In the Organic report, find the line that says “Primary Dimension.” Keyword should be selected. Below that, there’s a pull down menu for a Secondary dimension. Under Traffic Sources, click on Landing Page.
(If you want to see it the other way around, you can make Landing Page the primary dimension and keyword the secondary, too.)
What people are doing on your site
This might be the most important part. No matter how they find your site, no matter what they typed into a search engine, once they’re on your site, you want to know where they go and how long they spend there.
The average time on site is on the Audience overview page in Google Analytics (Sorry, Blogger). It gives you a simple stat, in hours, minutes and seconds, to let you know how long people are spending on your site.
Also important is the New vs. Returning user report, under Audience > Behavior. (Again, sorry Blogger peeps.)
Finally (something we can all get on board with), you want to know what people are looking at. In Blogger, this is under Stats > Posts. In Google Analytics, the full report is under Content > Site Content > Pages.
Here you’ll find a list of the most visited posts or pages on your blog.
(Google Analytics has lots of other cool things, like letting you know how many pages on average your visitors visited—broken down by what page they first landed on when they came to your site—comparison to the average time on site, etc. etc.) (It’s really cool.)
What do I do with this information? Again, look for trends. What makes these posts your most popular? The subject? The tone? The search engine presence? Was it informative? Social? Fun? Funny? Personal? Then do that again!
If you have the additional data you find in Google Analytics, take a look at how many of your visitors are “hit-and-runs,” or never return. Granted, a good proportion of your visitors might not need your content, or might get all they need by simply reading a single page and then navigate away. There will never be a 0% bounce rate or a 100% return rate.
But if you see that certain posts turn away visitors significantly more than average, take a look at those posts. You don’t necessarily have to change them, but you might think twice about using such a negative tone or writing about that subject again.
We’ve barely scratched the surface of what Google Analytics can do, but there’s something useful here for everyone!
What do you think? How do you use your site analytics?
Book review: Class 11 by TJ Waters
As I’ve mentioned before, I’ve been doing a bit of research on the US Central Intelligence Agency for a book. Okay, maybe more than a bit:
Thank you, libraries!
Class 11 was actually not on my list to check out from the library, but like a good little researcher, I looked at all the books with similar call numbers to the ones I’d researched. Voila. By chance, I picked up Class 11 because I figured there might be some relevant info, and it was probably one of the most recent looks at CIA training.
On that same logic, I cracked this book first when I got home—and I only stopped reading for a quick dinner break before I finished the whole book.
As with the last CIA memoir I reviewed, several reviewers found Waters’s self-description and overall attitude grating. I honestly didn’t notice, but I was kind of mining the book for information as I read, so my focus could have been very different than those readers’. (Plus I’m kinda of the opinion that pretty much all autobiographies tread a fine line between self-congratulatory and totally depressing.)
Having studied a few other CIA memoirs now, I think this is probably one of the most recent, in-depth reviews of several of the tradecraft techniques taught at the Agency. That alone made it worth reading for me. I was disappointed to not get to see the tradecraft in action in the field (and like the author I was sad they didn’t get to do the paramilitary course, which seems to be far shorter than it was in decades past), but it seemed that Waters didn’t serve as a case officer in the field, and frankly, the subject of the book was the CIA class’s training, not their time on the ground.
What do you think? How do you research?
Dream. Big.
Once upon a time, I went to college. (Hooray!) I studied humanities. (Hooray!) In case you’re not aware, this isn’t exactly a lead-in to a six-figure job.
I looooved college, and studied as many things as I could. This resulted in several trips to the college advisement center to change or add another major or minor. (It wasn’t that many, I guess: I majored briefly in communications studies, in a different college, and then I changed to a linguistics major, then added an American studies major, and a Spanish minor, and an English minor. Four years, why?)
On one of these trips to add one of these humanities programs to my already full Major Academic Plan, the advisor who had to okay my plan was very hesitant. I was in a hurry—I needed to get to class and expected this to be a simple “Okeedokey!” Instead, the advisor eyed me and my academic records (which were pretty dang good, thank you very much).
“And what do you want to do with your degree?” she finally sneered.
It was a little hard not to laugh in her face. I mean, the woman was an academic advisor in the college of humanities. What did any of the students of English or Classics or Italian Studies plan to do with their degrees?? Why should I, in keeping my options wide open (and without prolonging my time to graduation), be denigrated?
Figuring I probably had little to lose in the office of a woman whose name I hadn’t even bothered to read, I told her the truth: “I want to be a writer.”
It was a little bold, considering I’d abandoned my first and only attempt at a novel two years before, and wouldn’t seriously come back to writing again for four and a half years.
The advisor looked at me over the rims of her glasses. Obviously I’d made a mistake: this woman who had never seen me before and would never see me again sized me up, then held out a hot pink pamphlet. “You might want to take this.”
The trifold advertised a career development class. The message was clear: even in this department of subjects you studied for the love of it, being a writer was not a viable career option.
But I got my second major/minor/whatever it was, and never again darkened the door of the advisement center or the recommended class. I ended up getting a job in writing for marketing for several years, but eventually came back to my first love: writing fiction. And while that’s definitely a crap-shoot and by no means is my success assured, I’ve gotten at least a couple votes of confidence.
Booyah, lady.
I thought of this recently while doing research for yet another novel. I had to dig into my character’s alma mater’s website to figure out what she could’ve majored/minored in. When I visited their version of the college of humanities, the College of Language and Letters, I found this at the top of the page:
Keep away from people who try to belittle your ambitions. Small people always do that, but the really great make you feel that you, too, can become great. —Mark Twain
(A smaller person would probably comment here about the career ambitions of a College of Humanities Academic Advisor, but I’m above that. And also I can’t think of anything particularly clever and concise.)
Who has belittled your ambitions? Feel free to vent here!
Photo credit: soooo not the actual lady described in this post! by Judy Baxter
Tracking your blog: Using Google Analytics
If you’re serious about blogging, it’s important to focus on your visitors. How much do you really know about your visitors? Do you know where they come from? Why they came to your site? How long they stayed? How many pages they looked at? How many came and immediately left?
Last week we looked at a very basic solution for finding this web analytic information: Blogger or WordPress.com’s built-in stats packages. There are many free web analytics packages out there. In my opinion, Google Analytics offers the most comprehensive solution. It may be a little overwhelming for someone just starting out, but it’s really not hard to find the most important numbers you need to be keeping track of. Click on the picture at right to enlarge it to see a sample of some of the important, but easy to read, reports that Google Analytics generates.
Before you say, “Oh, numbers; I can’t deal with numbers!” or “Oh, coding; I can’t deal with coding!”, let me tell you that these numbers are good to know—and very useful in growing your blog readership. And let me tell you that these numbers are easy to find, use and understand with a free web analytics package (software installed on your site that tracks what visitors do on your site)—no coding, just cut and paste.
Here’s some of the information you can see in a single report, from one of my actual sites (not this one, though):
This report is the dashboard, a customizable overview of several reports. There are dozens of more in-depth reports available in Google Analytics, and even I only scratch the surface of this awesome web analytics program. I have a basic overview of how to install Google Analytics in my free PDF The Quick Guide to Google Analytics for Bloggers. I originally wrote it in 2007, but updated it with newer, easier installation procedures today. Check it out!
Next week, we’ll take a look at some of my favorite reports, and how to put all this data to use.
Tracking your blog: using Blogger or WordPress.com stats
One of the most important things you can do with your blog or website is to track it. You need to understand where your blog or site visitors are going on your site, what they’re reading, and what they like if you’re going to keep them coming back for more.
Free blog platforms like Blogger and WordPress.com include some basic blog stats, and that’s a good place to start. Next week we’ll look at a more thorough and flexible way of tracking your site, and then we’ll move on to what we should do with all this information.
Blogger
In Blogger, go to your blog and find “Stats” in the left-hand navigation. In the Overview, you’ll find info on your pageviews, audience map, top posts and referring sites. (Click on any image for a closer look!)
What are pageviews? Pageviews indicate the number of times a single page on your site—your About page, your main page, a blog post, etc.—is loaded on someone’s computer (including your own, unless you click on “Don’t track your own pageviews”; always a good idea). Your pageviews are probably higher than your visitor numbers, because most visitors will view more than one page on your site (we hope, anyway!).
Below the pageview information, you can find the Posts list, showing your post popular posts and how many views they have. Traffic Sources tells you what websites are sending you visitors, and Audience shows you where those visitors life. Each of these reports have their own pages, as well.
The Posts page gives you a longer list of your most popular posts, listed by most pageviews. This also includes the date and number of comments for your information, too. This is one of the two most important report pages you’ll want to focus on.
The other page to keep an eye on, the Traffic Sources page, shows you where your traffic is coming from. The Referring URLs report shows what exact web addresses are sending visitors to your blog. (If you see a blog post in there, click through and say thank you!) The Referring Sites report aggregates the data from the URLs report. For example, the URLs report will show each individual Google search URL, but the Sites report adds all the Google searches together to show how influential Google really is in people finding your site.
Scroll down further to find the Search Keywords report. This report tells you what words people are typing into search engines and ending up on your site. (It’s important to note that this report does not necessarily mean you rank well for those words, but tells you how many people arrive on your site after typing them in.)
Finally, you have the Audience page. This page gives you a little information about your visitors—what countries they come from, what web browser they use and what operating system their computer/phone runs on. This information is largely fun, but it’s important to remember to check your blog in the top browsers to be sure it displays well.
WordPress.com
Self-hosted WordPress doesn’t come with a stats package onboard (though you can certainly add one with a plugin), but WordPress.com features a stats report under the My Stats tab. The reports are largely the same kind: the top chart shows your traffic. Views by Country is like the audience report above. Top Posts & Pages is like the Posts report for Blogger. Referrers show sites that sent visitors to your site.
The Clicks report shows what links to pages off your blog visitors click from your site. Search Engine Terms is the Search Keywords report from above. Tags & Categories shows you what tags or categories on your posts are most popular with your visitors. It’s like the Top Posts & Pages report, but it aggregates those posts by their tag or category.
Finally, the Totals, Followers and Shares report shows you how many posts, comments, categories and tags you have, as well as your followers. The Shares sub-tab gives you a count of how many times your posts have been shared.
I wish I could give you more information and better examples here, but I don’t really use WordPress.com much (obviously) so I have no data to dig into.
What do you think? What do you see here you can use? We’ll talk more about a more in-depth tracking package next week, and then we’ll follow up with how to use this information!
