COMM 337: Getting started ... blogging and free-lancing

COMM 337, if it works the way I hope it will, is designed to actually put money in your pocket. You'll open a blog, and we'll look at some blogs that professional writers use for their research notes, trying out ideas before committing them to print and, sometimes, communicating with their audiences.

But mostly you'll blog about four types of journalistic writing that are listed in the course description, and you'll write a publishable free-lance story. It's all in the syllabus, which I have posted to this blog at http://mackerelwrapper.blogspot.com/2010/08/comm-337-syllabus-fall-2010.html ...

So that's what I mean about putting money in your pockets. In COMM 337 you'll learn how to write and market a publishable free-lance story. You'll want to get started on it ASAPest, so be thinking what you'd like to write about and who you can interview for it. I follow the old newspaperman's rule: No interview, no story.

[Translation: "ASAP" means as soon as possible. "ASAPer" means sooner. And "ASAPest" means soonest of all, like really, really soon. Like now.]

Your textbooks are (1) Donald M. Murray, "Writing to Deadline" [ISBN 978-0325002255]; and (2) "The Writer's Digest Handbook of Magazine Article Writing" [ISBN 978-1582973340]. They're cheap, and you can get them from Amazon.com or any other online book sellers. They're not in the BenU bookstore.

Let's set up a couple of face-to-face meetings in the next week or two, so we can get started.

In the meantime, Amy has given me permission to excerpt (lightly edited, of course) from our email messages last week. It has some of my thoughts about free-lancing and about the course.

Amy wrote:

Hi Doc,

I was wanting to get the names of the books that we are going to need for this class, and a syllabus if you have one. I know that the last time we talked you said the class would be conducted mainly through email, but let me know if you want to meet up the first week or so to go over the work that we will be doing. Thank you. Oh, and how's the book coming?

And I replied (in part):

I'll get back to you with some of my thoughts on how to get started ... beyond the obvious, i.e. ordering the books ... but first I've got to *think* about it. Basically you'll be blogging and doing a free-lance article. ... send me a link to whatever blog you want to use for the course. And we can set up a time to meet.

And ... oh, yeah, the book. Thanks for asking.

No book in sight, but I'm juggling about three article ideas now, about halfway into writing one, and I've sold another which will tentatively come out in the winter issue of a dulcimer players' hobby magazine ... writing them all on spec but with specific markets in mind and planning to query them once I have a final draft I'm satisfied with. And making sure that I have more than one iron in the fire at all times, which is some of the best advice for free-lancers I've ever heard. In fact ... wow! ... I'm actually trying to do the stuff we'll be reading about.

A word about blogs.

This blog, The Mackerel Wrapper, is mostly a student blog. But my other blog, called "Hog-fiddle" at http://hogfiddle.blogspot.com/, has turned into a pretty fair example of a research blog since we stopped offering my cultural studies classes. I write mostly about traditional music, and I can do a lot of my research on line. So it's full of links to information about songs.

I'll link you to some better blogs later. One word of caution: If you're working on an article with a specific market in mind, don't post your drafts to a blog. That might be considered prior publication, and it might disqualify your article. It's best to use a blog sort of like a writer's journal. Try out short descriptive passages, notes to yourself, possible story ideas, links to other people's stories you might want to study for a "swipe file," etc.

I'll see what I can find on writer's journals and post them to the blog ASAP.