Writing Articles

It’s almost 12 months since I first intentionally but nervously, put a few words down in a word processor; spell checked it and loaded it into a freebie, internet blog. I had no idea what I was doing, or what lay in store. The thought of other people reading my stuff, both excited and terrified me in equal measure.

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The blog in question was set up just to hold a few random thoughts, an exercise to see if I could convert those thoughts into something someone else wanted to read, maybe even get something that I had written, published.

I can’t say it has been a burning ambition, but it is something I have aspired to for many a year. Those first tentative blog posts, led me on a search of the internet, looking for sites that could help me in my quest.

I tried Helium.com, but found it far to Americanised. (Nothing wrong with that if you are an American,) but as my writing contained (what I thought to be) a lot of humour, it didn’t seem to translate into that particular market. All my articles on there were top ten rated at any one time, but I didn’t get any contact from other authors, received no comment or encouragement and certainly didn’t make any money out of it.

I then found ezine.com and wrote a few articles for them. I did get encouragement from that site by way of promotion of status. If your work is deemed good enough and you send enough of it in, you can move up the ranks quite rapidly. I sent in a dozen pieces of work on such diverse topics as lingerie, mobile phones and even my dogs. I was soon promoted to ‘Super Author.’ This rank may sound very grand, but is in fact quite easy to achieve. The good thing about Ezine is, all of your articles are read by other people before they are accepted. So if you do get it published on the site you know that your work has been approved by at least one other human.

After acceptance (which takes a few days) your work is then published on the Ezine site, where it can be taken up by website developers or newsletter publishers and sent out to thousands of people. Some of the sites I checked up on kept the article as it was written and left my name as the author. I did find one or two sites that omitted my name and presented it as though it was their own work, so I wouldn’t recommend sending in an article you value highly, or feel you could make money from.

Ezine is used mainly by people who want to promote their own websites, (you can place a link back to it from every article you write,) so if the idea is to generate traffic and extra links to your own personal site, it’s well worth trying. Google adds value to websites with lots of external links pointing back to them. So the more links you get, the higher up the search page you website will go.

I’d advise using Ezine.com as a practice area, somewhere to get used to the craft of writing short articles for publication. The minimum word count for articles is 400 words.

Soon after I began writing throwaway articles for ezine.com, I found Writelink.
Writelink seemed to me to be the perfect outlet for my new found but still embryonic, creative skills. Here was a website that contained work from other people who were at the same level as me, interspersed with work from more advanced writers and even published authors. I joined the same day I found it.
There were two levels of membership, as there is now. Reader and Writer. I thought about taking the free option for a while but discarded the idea; I had a need to see if my work was progressing and how far I had to go before I turned out something that was publishable. I knew I had a fair distance to travel, especially with my grammar and punctuation, but I figured that would only improve by getting work assessed, so I signed up for the writer membership, took a couple of days to find out how the site worked, then sat down to write a piece to send in.

Within a few hours I had a piece that I thought pretty much reflected the top end of the standard I was at, so taking a deep breath I hit the submit button and posted into the minefield that was Arena.

I logged in regularly with bated breath over those first few days. How would real writers react to my work, I wasn’t expecting to be told to give up, everyone had to start somewhere and anyway, the reviews I had read on here always looked for the positives in the stories and articles submitted.

As it turned out, people were very kind and gave me some excellent advice on editing, layout and good practice. Some of my errors were very basic and once they were pointed out, I found myself wondering how I could have been so stupid. As the old adage goes, you only learn by making mistakes. This only works of course, if those mistakes have been spotted, noted and commented on.

Within a few weeks I was entering competitions and posting regularly to Arena. My confidence grew to such a degree that I even started to write poetry, very badly at first, even poems have to be laid out and punctuated properly. I found help in every corner of Writelink. There are people here who will take an interest, and give their valuable time to help you raise your standards.

During the summer I opened a Writelink blog, where most of my work is now on show. The blog is free to writer members. The site itself is being transformed and Arena is being interlinked with the blog site. Exciting times lie ahead for the site members. The blog site may seem confusing at first but you soon get used to it. Writing a blog a day, or even one a week keeps your creative juices flowing, it doesn’t matter if you write about a shopping expedition or hoovering the cat, there is always someone here who will read it and add a friendly comment.

This summer I submitted a short poem into a competition and received a commended award for it. I have written several articles that are good enough for publication in mainstream magazines. I have written short stories that I now have full confidence in, they too have been sent in for appraisal by the glossy magazines. I am hopeful that at least two of them will be accepted.

If I can achieve this in such a short space of time then so can you.

I am sure that many of you can achieve this standard and more. You are obviously interested in writing or you wouldn’t have joined the site. To find out how much talent you have, you need to take the plunge. Sitting back wondering if the piece you wrote this morning has any literary merit at all won’t get you published. Friends and family will always tell you nice things about your work. What you really need is to have the piece assessed by your peers, people with more experience than you have in the craft.

We all have to start somewhere, without Writelink I would still be in the same position. I may even have given up completely, thinking that I would never reach the standard required. Had I done that I would have forever wondered what might have been. I’m no Ian Rankin, but I have some talent and I am determined to build on it. Writelink gave me the platform to do that. It may work for you too.

NB: If you're not all ready a member of Writelink you can try the site by signing up as a Reader. It's free! Just click the Join Us banner at the top of the right hand column.