Everything You Always Wanted To Know About Writing Right: The Secrets of Writing: About Writing Right, #4

BOOK FOUR

From the Series

About Writing Right

D. J. Herda

Elektra Press, LLC

Salt Lake City

Copyright ©2021 D. J. Herda

ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage and retrieval system without permission in writing from the Publisher. Address requests for permissions to Elektra Press, LLC, Rights and Permissions Department, 929 W. Sunset Blvd., Ste. 21-285, St. George, UT 84770.

Printed in the United States of America

ISBN Number 978-1-63732-346-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available on file.

Table of Contents

ALSO by D. J. Herda

INTRODUCTION: What's Wrong with the Internet?

ONE: The Secrets of Writing

SIGN UP FOR: The Complete About Writing Right Series

ALSO by D. J. Herda

Here are just a few of the latest volumes of fiction by the author. You’ll find more fiction and nonfiction by D. J. Herda at his Website, www.djherda.org, or at book retailers everywhere.

Chi-Town Blues—A shady landlady with a half-dozen skips on her hands, a suburban contractor in the Mob's cross-hairs, a nearly frozen fisherman with a sloe-eyed, murderous blonde to heat things up—they're all here. From the well-healed Near North Side and the chimera of Rush Street to the city's plebeian suburbs, this is a cross-section of Chi-Town's most secretive, seductive, and seditious characters.

The Last Wild Orchid—When a mother-and-son research team gets too close to the grizzly truth, one of them must die. But which? With the cold-blooded murderer still on the loose, a young man sets out to avenge his mother's death. But how will he recognize the killer? And what will he do when he does?

Solid Stiehl: The Death and Life of Hymie Stiehl—When Hymie Stiehl learns that pal Jungle Jim Alavera has disappeared, he knows what he must do. Realizing that Alavera is still alive but in growing danger, Stiehl fakes his death only to reemerge in drag to try to locate his ball-player compadre. After Stiehl's snitch tracks Alavera to a small brownstone in New Town, Hymie decides to pay the jock a surprise visit. But when he walks into a ransacked apartment with the water still warm in the bathtub, he realizes things are getting serious.

INTRODUCTION: What's Wrong with the Internet?

The World Wide Web . The source of all good. And maybe just a touch of evil. But is it also the source of accurate information it presents itself to be? Don't count on it.

As long ago as medieval times, two former Facebook employees named Adam D'Angelo and Charlie Cheever joined forces to form a new company called Quora. It was in June 2009. By the following March, Wall Street evaluated the newly incorporated company at $86 million. By 2014, the site had evolved into a more organized Yahoo Answers, a classier Reddit, and a more opinionated Wikipedia, according to the cofounders. The corporation raised $80 million from Tiger Global Management, while its valuation zoomed to $900 million.

One part of Quora's attraction were the experts in their fields, which the corporation began soliciting from its inception. The concept of everyday Joe's asking bona fide experts serious questions caught fire. By late December 2010, the site had experienced spikes of visitors five to ten times its initial load—so much so that the Website had difficulties handling the increased traffic.

In June 2011, with a simplified navigation system installed, Quora co-founder D'Angelo compared the site to Wikipedia, saying that the changes were made based on what had worked and what had not after Quora had experienced such unprecedented growth.

I bring up all of this history for two reasons. First, Quora's success is phenomenal, but it's hardly unique. If you were to put under a magnifying glass similar social-media sites (Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, Bella Online, Pinterest, and more), you'd see similar meteoric explosions. Social media is vast, and it's here to stay. It's changing, of course, and it will continue to evolve so it can battle for the big numbers with the competition, but it's not going to disappear anytime soon.

Second, many sites promise a world of information to a considerable number of visitors and fail to deliver it. Either through lack of navigable terrain, a lack of on-site experts and authorities, or other reasons too complicated to explore here, they fail nearly as often as they succeed. Two of the primary reasons are that information is difficult to solicit or to decipher, and the information it does deliver is buggy to the point of being detrimental to the person asking for help.

I first stumbled upon social media when everybody else did decades ago. I didn't come across the sleeping giant known as Quora, though, until around 2015. When I did, I immediately became fascinated by the vast scope of the topics it covered. Like Bella Online and its universal appeal to women looking to expand their knowledge base while improving their useable skills, Quora seemed to be everything all of its social-media rivals weren't. Concise. Navigable. And authoritative. And then the inevitable happened.

The Powers that Be at Quora decided to monetize the site to entice more user participation by encouraging its members to ask questions. In fact, they not only encouraged additional questions but also placed a bounty on them. By signing up to a simple program, users asking questions could earn anywhere from a few dollars a month to thousands, and it proved to be more of an enticement than many casual Internet users could resist. Quora members signed onto the program by the tens of thousands. Many couldn't speak intelligible English; some couldn't communicate at all. Of those who did ask lucid questions, many were so banal as to border on the absurd.

The results were predictable—if not to the Quora management team then, at least, to serious observers. The quantity of the questions exploded while the quality of the questions fizzled. Still, the number of member questioners continued to grow, with more people than ever signing up to participate in the monetization plan—generating quick, easy money for doing what came naturally: asking questions.

Just as predictably, the accuracy of the answers by people interested more in building a name than providing valuable information plummeted. Instead of experts, many answerers proved to be money-making machines. For every authoritative answer, Quora visitors had to wade through ten times that many nonsense responses. And those were for the questions that made sense. Many members who were ill-equipped or not equipped at all to ask questions began doing so, anyway, and a growing number of those questions weren't even decipherable.

It didn't take more than a few months from the program's inauguration before I noticed just how far afield some of the answers were becoming—particularly in the areas devoted to writing, publishing, and editing, understandably fields close to my own heart. The number of appropriate or even accurate responses rose as the questions became more ludicrous. Worse, many of the answers were so poorly thought-out that following their advice could work to the readers' detriment—not to mention any thoughts of literary careers those readers may have harbored!

The same fate, not surprisingly, fell upon other social-media giants, including Facebook and Twitter. Today, while Quora, Facebook, Twitter, Yahoo Answers, and other social-media sites boast more than billions of combined, unique monthly visitors, the genuineness of the questions and the answers' reliability hover at an all-time low.

Unfortunately, this negative pattern of meaningless questions and incongruous responses comes when the number of people working at home continues to escalate. And many of these people want to know about the general field of writing, both as a worthy avocation and as a potential career move. As Amazon's Kindle Direct, Ingram's Spark, and others push to gain market share in the field of Print on Demand, the need for accurate and informed information has never been greater. Despite that need, a growing dearth of honest, accurate, educated, and complete answers to questions related to all areas of writing and publishing remains. This ranges from how to get motivated to write and how to consruct a dynamite first line for that new book you've been planning for years to how to become a published author, how to market your work, how to find a reliable agent, and how to pitch a book or script to Hollywood.

Toward that end—and virtually all others even remotely associated with the writing and publishing process—I am fortunate to be able to bring a unique and wide-ranging set of experiences to the table. Having written my first book at the age of 15 and worked as a book, magazine, and newspaper editor on numerous occasions, I have also been fortunate enough to have taught everything from analytic grammar to Creative Writing Workshop. I have served time as a ghostwriter and book doctor for other writers who have become successful authors as well as for luminaries such as Art Linkletter, Lawrence Welk, Sammy Davis Jr., and some of the largest names in corporate America. Having written more than 90 conventionally published books of my own, I come across few questions to which I don't have authoritative answers. And, in those rare instances where even I'm stumped, my experience as a factfinder and a researcher has helped me gain insight into the truth.

So, with that in mind, here are my answers to my selections for the best, most frequently asked, most pressing questions plaguing writers throughout the world over. Culled from numerous Internet and other sources over the past four decades, they are both illuminating and revealing. I hope you enjoy reading what your compatriots are thinking, saying, and pondering, and I hope that, if you have a question to which you've been unable to find a reliable response, you'll give me a shout. I'm here to help guide you and every other writer who has ever struggled to become a published author and fought his way through the mass of rhetoric, red tape, and roadblocks in your path.

So, let's get started!

ONE: The Secrets of Writing

As we draw down to the final book in the About Writing Right series, one of the least tapped and largest sources of information remains: my personal experience. If anyone sets out to be an author at the age of 14 or 15 and makes a go of it for the next half-century and then