Make a Long List

Buy a set of 100 3 x5 cards. On each line of each card (both sides) list an item that you want to accomplish. Do not leave any blank space. No task should be considered to large or too small to list. If done properly, you should have approximately 2000 tasks that you need to accomplish. That should tide you over for the first month. Every time you feel yourself starting to relax, pick up one of the cards and do not rest until you have completed every task on the card.

Don’t Clean

A clean environment is a relaxing environment. Stress needs chaos to survive. Clutter your desk. Add a new junk drawer. Pile your dishes. All of these messes will make it almost impossible for you to relax, which will make for dynamite productivity.  Remember, a messy desk is a productive desk.

Avoid limits

Setting limits on your time just encourages you to become protective of your needs. Being protective of your needs means taking the occasional break. Breaks are for losers and orthopedic surgeons, and you sure don’t look like an orthopedic surgeon. Spend too much time on your email. Edit that paragraph another seven times. Common sense says that you need to move on, but common sense if for common people, not achievers.

Move faster

Walk fast. Drive fast. Eat fast. Read fast. Motion equals progress. If you stop to think, you may think of a reason to stop, so speed through tasks as quickly as possible. The more important a task is, the faster you should do it.

Multitude-task

Most people think that they have to multi-task in order to succeed. Those people are fools. Multi-tasking doesn’t come close to describing what you need to do. Multitude-tasking is far better. If you aren’t working on 20 tasks simultaneously, consider yourself to be a slacker. Up the ante. You never know how many things you can accomplish at once until you accomplish something.

Sleep as little as possible

Sleeping is not a productive use of your time. Try to avoid it.

Put Your Money Aside

A bad economy is not a good time to be spending money on non-essentials. I know the current philosophy is that you can spend your way out of a recession, but let the rest of the people do that for you.  Put aside as much money as possible. I know how difficult it can be, but do whatever you can do because any cushion you have will help keep you afloat if you lose your job.

Do Your Job Really Well

A down economy is not a good time to be a bad employee. Don’t give your company an excuse to let you go. Get your projects done on time or early if at all possible. Double-check your work to be sure everything was done properly. Be willing to help out another employee if they need it. Do what you can to promote as positive a reputation at work as you can muster. If the stress is getting to you, look for healthy ways to let off steam after work such as exercising or getting back to a hobby you enjoy.

Know Your Market

At least once a week, take the time to do a general online job search for writing positions in your area. Your goal is to get a sense of where the market is and what your options are. I recommend Indeed for this search because they aggregate multiple job sites and they allow you to include salary levels as a filter so that you can see where you stand when it comes to pay. If a job sounds interesting, you can apply, but the main goal is to stay informed.

Perfect Your Resume

Make sure your resume is complete and flexible. Create a single-page version for basic job search needs, and a longer, detailed version that discusses all of your past writing experiences in depth. The second resume is more of a reminder of what you have done in the past at each job so that you are ready to discuss those things if they come up. The in-depth resume should come complete with exact work dates and company addresses. This will come in handy if you find yourself filling out a job application.

You might also want to create some tailored single-page resumes. If you are capable of working in multiple fields (copywriting, technical writing, editing, proofreading, public relations, etc.) create a resume for each type of job. In a down economy, you may need to take a position you would otherwise not be interested in. It is best to be prepared for those openings before times get desperate.

Putting your resume online with a service such as Monster, Dice or Career Builder is a judgment call. If you are worried about your employer finding your resume, than either make it private/anonymous or fill out the resume but leave it inactive so that you can activate it the moment you know your job is in peril.

Update Your Portfolio

Often, when you are laid off, the notice comes quickly and there is no time to assemble current samples of your work. If you want to be ready, work on your portfolio before there is a crisis. Keep it updated. If you need to use unpublished company materials that may contain protected information, working on this in advance gives you the time to remove or rewrite any sensitive information that your company may object to your distributing.  Much like your resume, you will want to tailor your portfolio to different career paths. Samples of your copywriting work are not appropriate when applying for a technical writing job.

Increase Your Visibility

While a company may object to you sending out your resume, there are plenty of other ways to increase your visibility. You may want to start your own professional blog. Some companies do object to employee blogs, so make sure you aren’t in violation of any policies. If you cannot run your own blog, you can always write guest articles for other blogs or industry publications. Work on your networking. Join organizations in your career field and attend events such as conferences and seminars. Try to meet as many people as you can at these events and be sure to bring business cards. You can also join business networking sites such as LinkedIn or Xing. If you do join, try to be as active as possible. The more you interact, the more options you will have if you ever need to put your network into play.

Diversify Your Income

If you can develop a secondary income source, it will help lessen the blow of losing your primary income. You can take a second job, freelance or set up a small business such as an income producing blog. You know your own strengths so I can’t tell you which one will work best for you, but find a way to keep all your eggs from being in the same basket.

That’s it for my advice. I welcome advice from others. What do you recommend for a down economy?

The recession is starting to get painful

I know that there are some people out there who don’t think that we’re in a recession. Some of those same people believe that a 700 billion dollar bailout of the financial caretakers who made bad bets with our money is a good idea. What I know is that my 401k is down 18% over the past year and it wasn’t due to me taking a whole bunch of chances. I chose the most conservative portfolio my company offered. I know that my company’s stock value, despite the company making its financial projections, is down by half. There haven’t been any layoffs in the past year, but hiring at the company has become anemic. They aren’t replacing the people who leave unless the absolutely have to.

As a person who posts job openings across the writing industry on my site, I know that it is getting harder for me to find good jobs to post.  I know that at least one writing career path, newspaper reporting, is experiencing a record number of layoffs. Take all that together and we’ve got trouble. If you don’t want to call it a recession, or a “slowdown”, feel free to call it “that lack of jobs thing” or something else that makes you comfortable.

Whatever the case, it is time to look at where the jobs are and where they aren’t, at least from what I have observed so far. Let me clarify that I base my opinion on three things: articles I am reading, trends I have observed as someone who posts jobs, and conversations I have had with other writers. This is not a newspaper report, it is my view of the situation. Call me a pundit, if you will.

Newspapers are doing badly

Newspapers, of course, are the hardest hit employers of writers. Their industry-wide payrolls were declining even before the general economy went into the tank. Newspaper circulations have been down for years. People don’t read the newspapers as much as they used to, and when they do, they generally read them online where revenue is tough to come by. Poor circulation reduces both newsstand income and advertising revenue. Now that the economy is bad, advertising income is dropping even more sharply as companies cut their advertising budgets. In the United States, the election season is helping offset some of those losses, but after the first weekend in November, that income will dry up. This is a terrible time to be looking for a newspaper job, there’s no way around that. Other media outlets such as television and radio stations are also feeling the pinch, but to a lesser extent. Their markets aren’t on the ropes the way the newspaper market is, but they are experiencing the same downturn in advertising as the newspaper industry is.

Copywriting isn’t too strong either

The copywriting industry is experiencing the slowdown as well. When companies cut their advertising budgets, it hits the people who create the advertising. There are some layoffs and a significant reduction in hiring. I’ve noticed a definite drop in the number of positions being advertised in this field. The only area that seems unaffected so far is direct mail, which still seems to advertise for writers at about the same clip as they have for the past three or four years.

Technical writing is still holding up

Technical writing and information development positions have stayed relatively stable so far. While there are technology companies that have had to cut their budgets over the past year, I am still seeing plenty of new positions opening up and no reports of layoffs. If the recession gets worse, which I suspect it will, then you can expect that this field will dry up too. Most companies view documentation as a “nice to have” rather than a “must have”, so if the cuts start to get severe, you’ll see this job market go down as well. For now though, it is healthy.

Proofreaders and editors have their own problems

Proofreaders and editors are facing hiring slowdowns as well. Magazines have been failing frequently over the past year, due in equal parts to reductions in advertising and increases in both paper costs and mailing costs. On the plus side, many of them are converting to web publications, but that generally means lower paying jobs for writer, proofreaders and editors alike. Medical and legal proofreaders are still getting steady work because neither of these areas has been hit by the recession yet and there is no major expectation that they will be hit.

There are some bright spots

If you are looking for some bright spots, resume writing is always a good place to find work during a recession. More and more people need good resumes as they look for work and if you know how to write resumes, you can be very helpful either as a freelancer or working for an employment agency.

In general, because it is such a low-paying industry, finding work writing for web sites isn’t difficult if you know what you are doing, it just doesn’t pay very well. Freelance copywriting is also still providing steady work as companies look to bypass agencies or internal writers and find lower-priced options for their copywriting needs. In general, freelancers tend to do well during a recession because many companies need things done but don’t want to hire someone permanently or go through a high-priced agency. The down side is that as people lose their jobs, more and more of them turn to freelancing so you competition increases.

Bad but not terrible, yet

So far, most of the writing fields are feeling the slowdown, but only newspaper writers are at a crisis point. The next year may lead to more widespread problems. The economy isn’t going to magically turn around any time soon. Next time, I’ll discuss some strategies for surviving as a writer in a down economy.

• PD30 Day 1: I Believe in Poetry
• PD30 Day 2: Generally Be Specific
• PD30 Day 3: A Review of Meter
• PD30 Day 4: Poetry — the Writer’s Bridge to Music
• PD30 Day 5: Poetry and Pain
• PD30 Day 6: Poets and Parables
• PD30 Day 7: Embrace The Person You Are
• PD30 Day 8: The Occasional Poem
• PD30 Day 9: How to Write in Meter If You Have Two Left Feet
• PD30 Day 10: The Mighty Mighty Pantoum
• PD30 Day 11: Poets as Storytellers
• PD30 Day 12: The Poetry Journal, From Notebooks to Blackberries
• PD30 Day 13: Writing a Tanka
• PD30 Day 14: Poetry Under Pressure
• PD30 Day 15: Found Poetry
• PD30 Day 16: Editing Your Poetry
• PD30 Day 17: Capturing the Quiet
• PD30 Day 18: Fun with Hyponymy
• PD30 Day 19: A Glossary of Rhyme
• PD30 Day 20: Rhyme, Sound and Repetition
• PD 30 Day 21: Moving Beyond Imitation
• PD30 Day 22: Travelogues
• PD30 Day 23: Ways to find Inspiration
• PD30 Day 24: Improving Your Imagery
• PD30 Day 25: Poets are Liars
• PD30 Day 26: Events and Emotion
• PD30 Day 27: Poetry and Prizes
• PD30 Day 28: The Basics of Poetry Submissions
• PD30 Day 29: Creating Your Own Chapbook
• PD30 Day 30: My Final Say
• PD30 Wrap Up And Other Thoughts

I hope that those of you who played along enjoyed yourself, learned a little something, and wrote a few poems that you can be proud of. If I can sum up the knowledge I hope you gained from this month, it would be this way…

Be honest and be specific. If you can’t be honest, lie as boldly and imaginatively as you can. Lie with pride. Embrace meter, it can do great things for you, but discard it frequently and without regret.

Let poetry help you relieve your pain and work through your emotions. Everybody gets the blues, but expressing it well is an art. Description trumps evaluation. Stories may not lead to wisdom but they tour the neighborhood once in a while.

Write poems to celebrate, commemorate and eulogize the moments of your life.   Keep a journal. Listen to the way other people speak but write in your own voice. Poetry can be found almost anywhere if you just look hard enough and edit sharply enough. There is more to sound than rhyme. Patterns can come from anywhere.

Pressure builds poetry but quiet helps you create. Travel often, and imitate only when you need to. Inspiration can be found anywhere for those who look. Send your poems out into the world. Victory comes from the satisfaction of knowing you wrote well, but a little outside validation is always nice.

When all is said and done, write a book.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Start your poem with a piece of advice.

A chapbook is a book that created by folding standard 8 1/2 x 11 (The size varies outside of the United States) paper in half so that you create a shape close to that of a common paperback book. By folding the sheets of paper, a single sheet yields four pages of a chapbook. These pages are well suited to the length of a fifteen to twenty-five line poem. Once the pages are printed and folded, you bind the multiple pages together by stapling along the crease of the sheets of paper. Using this method, eight sheets of paper can create a thirty-two page chapbook. Because of the limitations of the stapling and folding process, chapbooks tend to run about thirty-two pages and rarely more than sixty-four pages. In addition to standard sheets of paper, you may wish to create a cover using thicker (and perhaps glossy) cover-stock paper.

Chapbooks can be created cheaply using a computer, a word processing or desktop publishing program and a printer. Once the pages are set up properly, you can produce as many or as few books as you want. You can give them to friends or even sell them at poetry readings, open mike nights or through your web site. Poetry chapbooks are accepted in the poetry community and many book-length poetry competitions accept chapbooks as entries. Because of the low cost, you can afford to charge very little or even to give the chapbooks away.

The primary disadvantage of a chapbook is that most retail bookstores will not sell it. Because chapbooks do not have spine wide enough to print a title on, they cannot easily be found on the bookshelf. Also, if you wish to produce a chapbook, you will have to write, edit, design, print, and bind the book yourself. Many people lack the skill or the motivation to do these things themselves. It is possible to have a professional print shop produce the chapbook for you, but that will add to the expense and you will have to order a set run of books. You are better off finding a friend with more desktop publishing knowledge than you.

A poetry chapbook should follow the basic design rules of any book of poetry. You can pick up just about any published book of poetry and follow the example. Include a title page, a copyright page, a table of contents and your poems. Your poetry pages should have wide margins (At least an inch and a half) and include a page number in either the bottom or top outside corner. Copyrights, by the way, can be self assigned. You don’t have to file it anywhere. Just use the date of publication (month and year) and your name and city. If your poetry has appeared anywhere else (such as the comments on this site) you might want to make note of those publication dates as well. If they were in a formal publication, you should make sure you have the right to reprint. If they appeared here, don’t worry about it, your poems are your poems. I make no claim to their rights.

I hope you give chapbooks a try. It is a nice way to keep a record of your poems and to share them with others.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Include the word right or rights in your poem.

In general the submissions guidelines will tell you:

• What subjects are reasonable or expected
• What styles are reasonable or expected
• Geographic or other limitations on the submissions pool
• Any length limitations
• Who to send your submission to
• Where to send your submission to
• Whether or not email submissions are acceptable and what file formats you should use

Their submission rules may also be different than the guidelines I offer below. Whatever their rules are, those are the rules you want to follow. Whenever possible, read the publication you are submitting to in order to get a feel for the poems they tend to publish and determine if they are compatible with your subjects and style.

The guidelines I offer below are unique to poetry submissions. Fiction and non-fiction have their own sets of rules and generally rely on a “query” process in which you first send them your idea. In poetry, unless you are sending a book proposal, you almost always just send your poems.  The guidelines below are aimed at the submission of one, two or several poems.

General Guidelines

• Include one poem per page
• Use single space, not double space
• Try not to split stanzas across pages
• Include your name in the upper right-hand corner of each page of poetry
• Proofread and spell check everything thoroughly
• Format your poem to look exactly as you would want it to appear in the publication
• Do not submit the same poem to multiple publications/contests at the same time. You may submit a poem elsewhere only it has been rejected by the previous publisher.
• Unless otherwise specified, limit yourself to three to five poems per submission.

Cover Letter Guidelines

• Include your name and contact information
• Include the titles of the poems you are submitting
• Briefly discuss your previous poetry publications (optional)
• Include a positive sentence or two about the publication/contest (optional)
• Do not include assessments or explanations about your work or reasons why you should be published. The poems should stand on their own merit.

Rules for standard mail submissions

• Use standard sized (for your country) white paper for your submissions
• Use an envelope large enough for the poetry to lie flat rather than be folded.
• Use standard postage
• Include a self-addressed stamped envelope for return of your poetry. This envelope can be smaller.

Rules for email submissions

• Your email can serve as your cover letter
• Use standard file formats such as .txt, .rtf or .doc for your poems

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem as if it were a letter to a friend

Before I discuss the good side of entering poetry contests, I want to get the basic warnings out of the way:

• Contests offering big money for poems ARE too good to be true
• Any “prize” that requires payment by you is not a prize
• Any gathering of “finalists” is a glorified vacation package
• Contests with “reading” or “entry” fees use that money for the prizes (and keep what’s left over)
• Beware of any contests that “suggests” you use one of their editors or teachers

Most legitimate poetry contests are sponsored by newspapers, magazines, colleges and the occasional corporation. Some foundations also hold contests, but the prize money in any of these contests rarely exceeds a thousand dollars.  Poet’s Market has a good list of contests, but a listing there does not guarantee legitimacy; always keep the five points from above in mind. A good online source is C. Hope Clark, but the same rules apply.

If you are looking to make a lot of money, poetry contests aren’t going to do it for you. Winning even a small poetry contest is no easy task, and winning a major contest is only slightly easier than winning the lottery, even for truly great poets. Poetry is subjective. Two sets of equally qualified judges could look at 1000 poems and come up with a completely different group of finalists.

The benefits of poetry contests are:

• They give you a reason to send your best work out into the world. Too many people who write poetry never get around to sending it out. They keep their poems in their desk or on their computer and never share. Contests are a way of interacting with the larger world of poetry.
• Publishers do notice winners. If you win a contest that has a good reputation, the people who publish poetry will probably see your work. Again, poetry is no roadmap to riches, but having a publisher show enough faith in you to put out a book is quite an honor. Just remember that there are as many scam publishers as there are scam poetry contests.
• Even second or third prize can offer a lot of encouragement to a poet. The grand prize might be nice, but it feels good to be mentioned at all.
• If you do happen to win some money, that’s always nice too.

Don’t stake all of your hopes and dreams on winning a poetry contest. I encourage you to enter them, but don’t take any losses personally. Just send your poetry out into the world and see what comes back.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem about a contest, a win, or a loss.

I am not advocating a cold approach to poetry. Poetry should be emotional and it should evoke strong feelings. If I get to the end I should have a pretty good idea of how the poet felt. I just want to make up my mind for myself about that, not have the emotion simply identified for me. This goes back to my discussion about descriptive versus evaluative modifiers. Description informs and guides the reader. Evaluation leads the reader around by the nose. Readers want to go on the journey with you, but they don’t want to be lead.

There are no hard rules in poetry. You can write about what you want. If you want to say you are sad, happy or angry, it isn’t wrong to do so. The risk though, is that you will leave no room for the reader to think and interpret what you wrote. If the reader has nothing left to think about when your poem is over, your poem will soon be forgotten.  Description and imagery are what stick with people.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write a poem that demonstrates strong emotion without ever stating what that emotion is.

Joan Didion – The White Album

I used to write persona poems fairly frequently, back when I was in my late teens and early twenties and everyone’s life seemed interesting but mine. Now that I am in my forties, I don’t really have the desire to write poems in character. There are too many things that have happened to me. Nothing imaginary that I come up with rings as true as my own. It is easier in fiction than in poetry In fiction the length of the form allows me to develop a whole world for my character’s to reside in. Fiction is meant to be a beautiful lie. For me poetry is more personal than that. I want my poetry to reflect my life and my thoughts, so I no longer feel the urge to write the persona poems that I once wrote.

This doesn’t mean that I don’t tell stories. It also doesn’t mean that every word I write is true. I have tremendous sympathy for James Frey and his somewhat fictional autobiography. I don’t think that anyone can write a completely true autobiography. The mind doesn’t work like that. It fills in the blanks. It remembers things the way it wants to. I am absolutely positive that some of the key events in my life seem completely different to the other people involved. Everyone has a perspective and no one has all the information.

As a storyteller, I am perfectly happy to combine two different events in my life into one. If they live together in my mind, they should be allowed to live together on the page. The truth of the story is not necessarily the facts of the event, especially in the world of poetry. We are given poetic license for a reason. To me, poetry is about interpretation and distillation. In poetry, you strip away the things that don’t matter and you say what has the most importance, especially if you choose to write about yourself. That means that, sometimes, you don’t explain that there were four good reasons why you showed up late to the party, you just stick to the one that matters in the poem — unless your poem is about the four reasons.

I don’t encourage people to tell outright lies about themselves, even in poetry. If you are going to do it, though, be upfront about it. Tell the most apparent and glorious lie you can tell. Commit to the lie. Otherwise, make do with the truth.

Today’s Poetry Prompt

Write about the first time you did something.