Writers Unbound

In my last entry, I whined about scheduling issues. Some of you were kind enough to leave comments- - thank you!

In an attempt to realign my priorities and deal with these types of issues more pro-actively, I did a little research. Sue LaPointe of Working Writer, Happy Writer wrote a great ebook which I recently reviewed, and it had a few great tips. I think that Freelance Switch may have also touched upon this solution.

Time for some realignment.

What do you think of the practice of letting some of your lower-paying clients go as your business booms?

Do you have any other tips for aligning/scheduling your work?

I am having  hard time making some scheduling decisions this month. I have a client who could potentially take up all of March, which is fine, as the pay also meets my March income goals. However, it is most likely that that pay won’t come until April, leaving my March income very skimpy.

That’s difficult. Do I look for additional March projects in order to round out my March income, even though, in reality, this client should take most of my March time to meet the deadline? Or, do I go ahead and devote March to this client, meet the deadline easily, but not meet my March income goals.

It’s very likely going to be choice three: do both, therefore working myself into a jello heap, imposing on my family time and  burning myself out.

Good times.

I’d say that pieces of my young life were craptastic enough for a memoir, but probably not craptastic enough for a bestselling memoir. Recently, though, all you need to do to fix that is” embellish” a little. “Embellishing” your published works are all over the news.

• A couple weeks ago I posted about a mother and child who embellished an essay to win Hanna Montana tickets.
• Of course, we all know about the James Frey mess that happened a couple years ago.
• Turns out that Misha Defonseca’s memoir  ”Misha: A Memoire of the Holocaust Years” was totally fabricated. You can read about it here, in an article that the Boston Globe appropriately entitled “Den of Lies.”
• …And today’s news of the fake: Penguin-published author Margaret P. Jones admitted that “Love and Consequences” was pretty much made up.

So, what’s with all the fakery?

First of all, the James Frey debacle should have raised some red flags for other memoir-fabricators. Obviously, that’s not the case.

So why all the fake memoirs? Possible reasons, simply off the top of my head here…

• Memoirs are “in,” fiction is much harder to crack.
• Fiction is not as respectable. ?
• Naive new authors don’t know any better.
• This version is much cooler than what really happened.
•  Mo’ money, mo’ money, mo’ money.

 Sidenote: Parts of the book “A Long Way Gone, Memoirs of a Boy Soldier” have been called into question, however the publisher and author stick by this book and no claim has been made that it is totally fabricated.

Such issues are nothing new. In the 90s, Mayan Rigoberta Menchu was accused of falsifying portions of her autobiography.

So, what’s the deal here?

I was recently blessed to come into contact with Leo Babauta, who runs a very successful blog, Zen Habits. He started up a new writers blog, Write to Done, and allowed me a guest post. I also interviewed him for About Freelance Writing.

In a recent post at Write To Done, Babauta suggests that one copy the style of other freelancers. He advocates reading great copy (stories, whatever) and then making it your own.

I was also able to get a review copy of Christina Katz’s Writer Mama, which I will also cover at About Freelance Writing shortly (I’m on the last chapter). Christina echoes Leo’s suggestion. She advises those who are looking to get into magazine print to break down the articles of your target publications. For example: how many subheads are standard? Does the author use humour or is the copy completely serious? Does the word count seems standardized across issues, features and departments, or is there some give and take? You are then to use your investigation in crafting your submission.

Finally, I’m thrown back to my undergraduate years, when one of my favorite professors lectured on Ben Franklin and assigned his autobiography. It happens that Franklin taught himself to write by carefully dissecting great works, studying their pieces, and then attempting to reconstruct the text as the original author had. Talk about self taught! Sure enough, Franklin’s autobiography is a piece of precise writing that accomplishes its purpose without self-aggrandizement.

Study the masters. Choose a muse and find out what it is that draws you to that muse. Take the pieces that you will from them, and make those pieces into your own work and styling. Now, go write!