Try to begin a conversation with your intended audience. This isn’t a trick. It’s a way of thinking. When you write, you are intending to communicate a message to someone. But, some writers either forget that basic premise or they just never knew it in the first place.

A beginning writer or one who will never be any good forgets about the audience. Sometimes, they don’t even have an intended message. When writing’s sole purpose is to communicate a message to a certain audience, it astounds me that those two things can slip from a writer’s mind while… “writing.” But, it happens.

A great writer or one who intends to get better at it will actually consider audience and message first. Yes, the message is obviously most important. But, considering the audience offers the guidelines you will need in order to write effectively. The intended audience can be teenagers, women, minorities, the middle class, the rich or any other category you can imagine.

If you read any magazine, you will easily figure out who the intended audience is supposed to be. Without trying to offend anyone, here are a few examples. People is basically for homebodies who like gossip, Time is for the socially aware in about the mid-age range, YM is obviously for young girls (it is right in the name) and Cosmopolitan is for women. Notice how I mentioned who the intended audience is “supposed” to be? Anyone can read Cosmo, but it’s going to be written for the female population.

When you write, think of yourself as someone who is pulling an audience to you and attempting to tell them something very important. Yes, there are writers who write only for the purpose of hearing themselves talk basically. But, think of yourself as an authority on something. You are an authority on the message you intend to communicate.

No, that doesn’t make you the smartest person in the world. Being the “authority” doesn’t have to be some burdensome, all-empowering position. You have a message and that in itself is enough to give you some authority. You have some insight on a topic. You know how to do something. Your message could be as simple as how to bake a pie, but you are the expert at the moment and your purpose is to inform your readers your best practices in baking a pie.

What brings your writing to life is if you can engage your audience and this is where you begin a conversation with your readers. This isn’t a trick, I said it before. But, it is important. It’s a set of techniques. It’s not a secret or it’s not intended to be a secret, but the fact is that many writers don’t know how to engage an audience and draw them into your conversation.

Now that I have your attention…now that I have you expecting to learn a secret…this is to be continued…

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Writing professionally, you run into things you may not have seen in awhile. The world is getting so informal and unprofessional that some of the old things go flying out the window. It takes a minute to catch up on concepts you learned years ago and get ready to apply them today.

The difference between MLA and APA is just one of those things. In fact, you just might at this moment be thinking what in the world they even are. Some of you might have a faint memory that they are documentation guidelines. But, you might not be able to remember much more than that.

If you have any kind of document to present in whatever venue you need, whether your boss needs a research journal or your professor needs an essay, you have guidelines to follow. They may have given you some guidelines on their own. But, you also have a style that your paper needs to conform to upon presentation. That style could either be MLA or APA.

MLA Style

The Modern Language Association (MLA) was formed in the late eighteen hundreds as a forum for the study of literature. Lasting throughout the years, it has become the authority on the format for documents written in scholarly pursuit. College students writing English papers or professional writers making their contribution to literature would use the MLA style.

The MLA publishes the MLA Style Manual, which answers every question for how to format your paper. If you want to know how to set the margins, it has the answer. It will tell you how to space your document and create a cover page. It will tell you how to paginate your pages and where to put the appendices. But, I think the most important role the MLA Style Manual serves is how to cite the works of others when you use them in your paper.

Plagiarism isn’t just a blatant disrespect for the work of others. It continues into cases where a work wasn’t cited properly. If you mention an author’s name in the paragraph where you are discussing that author’s work, you only need to add that work of literature to the “Works Cited” page at the end of your document. But, the guidelines are technical regulations so that there are no confusions. Plagiarism can definitely come into play when you quote or paraphrase another writer’s words, but the source of those words is unclear to the reader.

It might be considered a small infraction to you when you miss a period or a comma in your listing of a work you cited. And authors could really care less about a small period in your “Reference” list even though it’s a significant part of the MLA Style of citation. They will make a note that you don’t know how to pay attention and don’t know what you’re doing, which takes away from your overall credibility. But, they really don’t care when you make a small mistake like that. What they get upset about is when you blur the lines and you don’t make it clear that you used their work to support your own. Of course, there is more to it. But, when you are writing a paper in the pursuit of Academia, it is my personal opinion that this is the main concern in the field of scholars.

APA Style

The American Psychological Association (APA) is an equally authoritative organization based out of Washington, D.C. USA. Among the many things APA does, it publishes what is profoundly looked upon as The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association. It offers guidance for writers too, but it governs an entirely different body of writers.

The Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association is an editorial style manual for writers in the fields of the social and behavioral sciences. Just as in MLA Style, APA Style will tell you how to punctuate your paper and how to add tables. It offers guidance for present statistics and select headings. But, its main thrust again is to help writers properly cite works they use to support their own papers.

A well-written paper is not one that stands alone. This is debatable, but I don’t think one novel thought exists anymore. If you have a thought that is insightful or groundbreaking, I’m sure others have thought along those lines before. It’s called cumulative thinking. But, that’s not a bad thing.

When you write a paper that contributes your thoughts to the scientific community, there has to be thousands of other works that support your groundbreaking work. In other words, you’ve reviewed their works and come to your own conclusions. That’s your contribution. So, learn how to give other writers credit and get it right.

There are other editorial styles for formatting your paper. They include Associated Press, Chicago and Oxford among others. It is in my distinguished experience that if you work in journalism, the Associated Press Stylebook is the one that governs you. If you belong to an organization or work in a field like anthropology that prefers The Chicago Manual of Style, then that’s your style guide. Likewise, the Oxford Style to Guide is the UK’s equivalent to US’s Chicago Manual.

But as far as the US is concerned, MLA or APA is the editorial style you’ll most likely use. You should know what is required of you. If you haven’t been told, then follow the guidelines I just gave you. MLA is in the field of Academia. APA governs social and behavioral sciences. I guess this blog entry implicitly welcomes a view from the UK, one I cannot provide since I am a US based writer.

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Being a successful writer isn’t that hard. You just have to be very creative, no pun intended. You have to see the opportunities that are available, but don’t always seem so obvious. That’s how you stand out and forge your own way in this world.

There are so many writers on the internet and they all go to the same job hunting sites. Guru is a major powerhouse for writing projects. Professional writers create profiles where they display their work and list their skills. But, a writer has to find a way to make a project proposal really stand out because they will be bidding against professional writers who are coming by the handful for any good project that is posted.

This of course means gaining experience. But, you can simply get away with creating a portfolio of your best work. In other words, just write. Write an article example. Write a book example. Write pieces that exemplify your skills and put them on display. If you are good enough, you can take a contract away from a high powered writing team with professional work on display. I do it all the time!

Other sites include GetaFreelancer.com, but you are mainly competing against English speaking writers who live in third world countries. While they might be able to produce 500 articles for $3, writers in wealthier nations can’t afford to make such outlandish promises. But, you can find good projects once in awhile. It’s like a needle in a haystack, but it’s worth it to keep looking every day.

Those are obvious places to find work as a writer. But, you need to think about other opportunities in order to get the good positions. Everything you see on the Internet is written. That’s obvious, but not many writers really think about that. Everything is written! If you’re looking at it, someone wrote it. There just might be a position available.

Look on every website you see for “careers,” “job opportunities,” or anything similar. There will be an application process and you just might find yourself being a contributor. If you look through a site and it’s hideous, get in touch with the owner and ask for a job as its editor. Show a few examples of the need for editing. I’ve got to be honest with you and say that some owners won’t like your criticism. Others will welcome it.

For every email you get from a form you filled out on someone’s website, there was a writer. They are called autoresponders or newsletters. There is a writer.

When you visit a publisher’s website, there are going to be submission guidelines. In fact, if you Google it, you can find plenty of publishing opportunities. Watch out for the scams! But, if you’re smart you can find the legitimate opportunities.

It’s unbelievable how many writing opportunities exist. There are employers hiring people to open up myspace account and advertise dating services. There are merchants who hire writers to write articles, newsletters and product descriptions for them. Writing jobs are everywhere. All you have to do is look right underneath your nose.

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As my time has become increasingly taken up with writing website content these past few weeks, I’ve decided to take the plunge and set my own website up to showcase my wares.

I purchased for the princely sum of $7.99 (about £4) the domain name www.ghostslair.com through GoDaddy.com, a domain name registrar and hosting company in the US. I now have a website design company putting together a rather simple website within which I can showcase my talent or lack thereof.

My budget for setting up GhostsLair.com is $200 or about £100 and this is certainly within everyone’s budget.

Here’s my “How to..” guide for creating your own web presence.

Step One : Choose and Buy a Domain Name

A domain name is simply the name given to your site, so www.supaproofread.com is the domain name for SupaProofRead and www.ghostslair.com is the domain name for GhostsLair. Domain names are unique and you should take some time in choosing a name that suits you and your services.

Registering a domain name is very easy and is extremely cheap unless you go after a seriously popular domain name e.g. www.madonna.com. I personally use GoDaddy for my domain name purchases, but you can find many, many others simply by inputting “domain names” in google and I have even purchased domain names off eBay.

Step Two : Arrange Email, Hosting and any Extras

This is something that you will arrange with the same people you buy the domain through if you use one of the established companies such as GoDaddy, Enom or 123-Reg

You don’t need to purchase an email plan if you still wish to use your hotmail, gmail or yahoo webmail, however it is a sign of web professionalism that you have email using your own domain. So for instance, I have set up ghost@ghostslair.com as my email address for use with the rest of the world. This has cost me about $20 for the year with Godaddy and for that I get 5 email mailboxes so I can have sales@ , info@, service@, chiefchimp@ or whatever email address I wish to go along with the domain.

Hosting can be arranged with a very wide variety of service providers and once again, it’s very cheap but a word of caution here; you get what you pay for. Hosting deals with where your website actually resides on the web and you need to ensure that whoever hosts the website for you provides certain quality assurances that your website will be online when it is supposed to be i.e. all the time. Hosting for GhostsLair is going to cost me $10 per month (about £50.

There are additional extras that can be added to your website package such as traffic generators, adding a blog (like this one), and various other widgets and gadgets that frankly you need not be too concerned about here.

Step Three : Designing Your Site

I have mentioned GetAFreelancer, eLance and other freeelance websites in the past as potential sources of business for you as a budding writer for profit. Now you can use these sites to source a web designer wh0 can put your site together cheaply and to your specification.

A cautionary tale; I once awarded a project to a web design chap in the US and paid an advance on the project. I never heard from them again and needless to say, did not get my website either. Pay over money AFTER the project is completed and be very clear what you are asking them to set-up for you.

I highly recommend that you surf through various sites until you find some that you like the look of. You can take the style of one website and combine it with a colour scheme from another, while taking features such as a shopping cart from yet another site. Performing this research will eliminate a lot of time and confusion when you find a geek web designer to actually code up the site.

GhostsLair template design is budgeted to cost $90 (about £45) from James at NW Village Studios in the US and I’m hoping that this little plug for his work will encourage him to deliver the site so I can show it off to you for next week

En Fin

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I read The Fight by Norman Mailer in 1993, and quickly followed up with The Naked and the Dead and Deer Park.

I was hooked on his work from there on and moved on to other works of his and his peers, particularly Truman Capote and Tom Wolfe.

It was announced a little over an hour ago that Norman Mailer had died, aged 84.

I don’t feel anything personal for Norman, I never met him and never knew him so a feeling of loss is not something I can claim. However, as a practical example of how writing can reach out and touch someone, I can say I feel saddened that someone who wrote so eloquently and passionately on real topics of interest has indeed passed on.

Norman Kingsley Mailer, was born in New Jersey on 31 January, 1923 to Jewish parents. His father was a South African accountant and his mother ran a nursing agency and through the depths of The Depression, Norman had instilled within him a need to excel.

At 16, Norman was accepted to Harvard to study the then embryonic subject of aeronautics. He became interested in writing while at Harvard and this was intended as his path until World war 2 intervened and he was drafted , serving in the Phillippines.

After the war he enrolled at the Sorbonne and in 1948 published The Naked and the Dead, a book that described his war experiences and was to make him famous and establish him as a writer.

Norman Mailer is recognised as the principal proponent of the genre known as New Journalism and was an innovator of creative non-fiction. Much of modern reportage has its origins in New Journalism.

Mailer examined many facets of American life and politics including the Vietnam War, sex, politics, the McCarthyism hysteria, and violence. Mailer also was an activist who was not afraid to step onto platforms that were deeply unpopular, including running for Mayor of New York on a seccessionist platform (Rudy Guiliani take note) as well as campaigning (successfully) for parole for a convicted murderer.

Mailer also demonstrates that a writer need not confine themselves to lofty matters requiring weighty consideration in an Ivory Tower. Readers of my age group will remember Starsky and Hutch in the 1970’s and Mailer also produced a camp classic, Tough Guys Don’t Dance with Ryan O’Neal in the lead and based upon Mailer’s novel of the same name.

Mailer had six wives, and eight children from them plus an adopted child and resided for most of his life on Cape Cod, Massachussetts.

He died today, Saturday 10th November 2007 in New York City as a result of kidney failure following lung surgery complications.

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