Writing And Being -- What I Learned From Rushing Into A Story Contest:

In Fall of 2018, I decided to participate in Tapas’ annual writing contest.  The story I submitted is called Ascending Spires, and although I liked the idea of it, it probably won't get finished until I have more inspiration for it.  Meeting the contest deadline was a little stressful, but there were a lot of good things about participating that are worth reflecting on.

Participating opened me up to some opportunities that I wouldn’t have had otherwise.  Tapas offered everyone participating in the contest a chance to join the Tipping Program, even if they wouldn’t normally qualify based on the amount of subscribers they have.  If Tipping is activated on a Tapas author’s profile, it means that readers can tip them with Tapas Ink, which the author can then exchange for real money.

This was pretty awesome for someone like me that is just starting out and would like to begin implementing ways to make money off my work.  Furthermore, Inksgiving was going on during this time, which meant that I had a series that I could design an ad for and submit to the list of Inksgiving episodes asking for Tips.  Although I didn’t get many tips off of this, at the very least Tipping is now implemented on my profile and available for when I start posting comics more regularly.

This event also encouraged me to post more work online.  Sometimes it's hard to cross that line and put a story out there for the world to see.  I've already posted fanfictions on other sites, but outside of roleplaying, I haven't posted many of my original stories.  Entering the contest got me started with that.

The contest provided a way to test Tapas' author user interface and get an idea of potential click through rates.  Participating in the contest kind of brought home the fact that, for novels at least, a lot of people might bookmark a series that sounds interesting, and then completely forget about it until a much later date.  This really seemed to be the case when looking through the series' analytics day to day. Often, people would only read a chapter or two at most before moving on or bookmarking the series and forgetting about it.  

Of course it isn't impossible to make people read more consistently, but those posting on Tapas need to be aware that even when someone bookmarks a series, it can easily get lost in a sea of other free stories.  It takes time and planning to facilitate reader engagement, and participating in the contest helped me get a better idea of how that might work on this platform.

Also, I gained further proof that forcing myself to work on something I’m not truly inspired for under a short deadline is bad for me.   I already know I have a hard time forcing myself to write things I'm not inspired for.  Learning to write decently under pressure is an important trait to develop, but this contest served as an example of why those circumstances are not usually conducive to forming my best work.

Overall, this experience was both exciting and stressful.  But I did learn from it and so far don't regret it. Do you have any art/writing related experiences that were both stressful and educational?  Do you have any input as far as facilitating reader engagement or churning out better work even under pressure? Let me know in the comments!

Writing Tips -- Why To Avoid The Word 'The'

How many titles have you seen that start with ‘The’?  (The Grand Escape, The Greatest Showman, The Swiss Family Robinson, The Girl Who Owned A City, etc.)  How often and how easy is it to start our descriptive sentences with The?

Obviously, there are plenty of things that don’t start off with The, and it's fine to use The now and then. But growing up it sometimes felt like this word was everywhere, beginning so many titles and, as I began to notice, starting a lot of my written sentences.  

After a while, the overabundance of The started to get grating, primarily since it made many of my sentences sound repetitive.  So, here came the self imposed challenge: Use The when need be, but otherwise, try to avoid using it to start sentences and titles.  

Simply reducing the use of that one word had some interesting results.  My titles became more interesting and creative, my prose less repetitive, and ideas expressed in my stories started coming through more vividly.  Being unable to use The very often made it necessary to learn and adapt, or even completely rethink scene descriptions and sentence structures.

So, for those looking to improve their writing, avoiding The as often as possible may be a useful exercise.  Or, for those already using The only on rare occasions, they can consider finding one or two other words that are repeated a lot in their writing and try to avoid using them.  Ultimately, exercises like these encourage authors to dig deeper and find titles/prose that are more unique and meaningful to the story.

So yeah, just a little something that’s helped me.  

Have you tried something like this at some point?  What words do you repeat the most? Are there any writing quirks, mistakes, or too often used words that have become a pet peeve of yours?

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