Category Archives: writing

The trouble with writing parenting articles

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The thing about writing serious parenting posts is that nobody really wants to read them. You might happen to catch someone just there at the point where they’re either pregnant and reading everything they can get their hands on, or going through exactly that problem and wanting to learn about it. But mostly people just want to read things that support what they’re already doing. Nobody wants to read an article slapping them on the wrist about the way they’re parenting badly. They’ll just click away. They want to be validated. They want to be told that the kid is like this because they’re a kid, that’s all. And that they’re doing the right thing. And possibly that they should trust their instincts, because that’s the same as saying “You were right all along.”

I know this is true because it’s how I approach articles. I read them if they appear, by the headline, to be confirming what I already believe. If they fall into the category of “other”, I might skim them in order to see if I can ridicule them, but I’m more likely to just ignore. I don’t want you to tell me all the things I’m doing wrong. I probably know about them already anyway, and I don’t surf the internet because I’m not feeling guilty enough already.

In fact, the longer I go on reading parenting articles the more likely I am not to bother reading any new ones at all, because I know what they’re going to say. Even if I write them myself (my favourite kind, of course, because I agree with every word), it’s all getting pretty boring and samey at this stage of the game. So unless you have genuinely come up with a new angle that I haven’t thought of yet – and can convey that to me before I decide not to bother reading your piece – I’m probably not going to bother.

If you’re funny, mind you, I might stick around. If you have nice pictures, you might reel me in. If you make pop culture references that I understand but are just niche enough for me to know not everyone will, you will make me feel smart, and I will listen more closely to what you have to say, because you think I’m smart.

So I’m unlikely to change anyone’s mind with anything I write. My bubble of Internet is one big circle of self-validating parents, high-fiving each other for our good choices and making in-jokes about Republicans/Gina Ford/people who don’t watch Doctor Who.

Converting others, then, is a lost cause. We may as well all just flex our tolerance muscles and stick to entertaining each other as best we can.

Words beget words

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You know, here’s the thing: there are always more words.

I used to be afraid I’d use up all my words and there would be nothing left when it came time to write my magnum opus. That the infinite number of monkeys with the typewriters would have said it all first. That there must be a limit to the permutations and combinations, and that all mine would be used up too soon. I felt I needed to mete it out, gingerly.

(I once worked in a department of editors, who are funny, intelligent, witty people who happen to enjoy a good hyphenation discussion just as much as the next oddly obsessive person. One of them proposed that when we get a new recruit we hand them a page covered with punctuation marks and tell them that was their quota of commas and full stops for the month.)

But words beget words. If you run out of words, you go for a walk and you read a good book and you stop trying, and the words replenish themselves. They’re all there and they keep coming, and even if there are only seven stories in the world and however many possible combinations of the eight notes in the scale, people keep telling new stories and people keep writing new songs and our well of invention is deep and infinite.

There are also plenty of commas, if you need commas.

Where I am

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Something interesting is happening.

You may have noticed, maybe, if you keep tabs on me, but probably you don’t, that I’ve been posting less here lately. I was posting almost daily there for a while, filling this little space with words and words and words as if I’d explode with them. And then, poof! Not so much.

But you might know, or maybe you don’t, that it’s because at the moment I’m writing a lot for Parent.ie . If you flip over to there on any given day you’ll probably find something from me, and some other things from some other great and hilarious and thought-provoking and well-informed writers. (When I say “other” there, I’m not including myself in all those adjectives. I am just sometimes faintly some of those things.)

I’m pretty sure that in a while things will re-balance, and I won’t have quite so much stuff streaming out of me and onto the screen over there, and then I’ll probably come back here a bit more often again. For the moment, I’m going with it and really enjoying the new platform and the new challenge and the different angle.

The interesting thing is that something has flipped and I am thinking of myself more as a writer. It’s given me a legitimacy, maybe, in my own mind, that a personal blog just didn’t. And I’m hoping that the re-balancing will include my writing more of the other things I’m theoretically working on. Because that’s what writers do, and I’m one of those.

Parent.ie

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I love the Internet.

About a year and a half ago, I stumbled across an Irish parenting blog called “And My Baby” (now defunct). It led me to a Facebook group, quite newly formed, called the Irish Parenting Bloggers . After a little hesitation, I joined the group, happy that they’d have me, considering the way I’m not entirely an Irish blogger (except when I am).

Anyway. That was then. Over the past week, I’ve found myself frantically messaging and writing and editing and giggling and logging in and checking and updating and discussing, and generally marvelling at how amazing the Internet is. Here I was, working, collaborating, with a group of women I’d barely or in some cases never met, on something we hoped could be really big.

We launched it on Tuesday. It’s called Parent.ie . It comes from a team with a dizzying breadth of professional and personal experience, and I’m very proud to call myself one of them. We hope it will be topical, relevant, local, global, intelligent, entertaining, irreverent, thought-provoking, and informative. I’d love to see you over there too.

I write for Parent.ie

Conversation with my chiropractor

Plans

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I have plans. Audacious plans.

I want to audition for Listen To Your Mother this year. I don’t have to get in, I just want to get as far as auditioning. I don’t have any clue what to read, but I’ll figure that out later.

I want to finish this thing (not this thing – it’s longer than a blog post) I’m trying to write, and then I want to do something with it. Something more than sitting on it or leaving it under the bed or not actually finishing it.

I am seriously – seriously, I say – considering moving this whole blog to WordPress and actually going self-hosted, like a grownup blogger.

Is that enough for you? What are you planning for 2014?

A little flight of fancy

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My grandmother met George Bernard Shaw once. This is not how it happened, but this is what I imagined before I knew more of the story.

———————

The young woman with the thick chestnut hair wore a long skirt and a high-necked blouse with big sleeves. It may have been fastened at the neck with a cameo brooch. She stood behind the long wooden counter of the bookshop, coming around the front from time to time to re-shelve a hardback or reorganize the display on the table. I don’t know what bookshops looked like then, so I may be taking some liberties here. There may have been a ladder on wheels attached to the shelves lining the walls, but perhaps her boss didn’t let her scale it. She was only 19 or 20, still unmarried. Perhaps she had already met her fiance, the handsome Tom Doran, also a Londoner of Irish descent.

She looked up as the bell on the door rang, smiling to see one of her regular customers enter. He was accompanied by a bearded gentleman who looked distinguished and carried a cane. It was raining; they were happy to come into the warm shop. Their heavy coats steamed a little and smelled of wet wool.

“Good afternoon, Mr Russell,” the shopgirl said. “Lovely weather for ducks.”

“Indeed, indeed, Miss Wall,” he replied. They were on second-name terms, though she wore no name badge. He was always happy to see her friendly smile and suspected she had a dry wit, though that was not an appropriate trait for a young lady to display.

“My friend, Mr Shaw, is looking for a particular volume, Miss Wall. I wonder would you be able to assist him?”

“Yes, of course,” she replied, looking at Mr Shaw and wondering if she’d seen him before somewhere. His impressive beard seemed more and more familiar, now that he’d taken off his top hat and unwound his thick scarf in the warmth of the room.

Mr Shaw, with a cultured accent that had more than a hint of Irish to it, began to describe the book he needed; he wasn’t quite sure of the title, or the author, but had a definite feeling for the content and was almost certain the binding had been red. Miss Wall did her best, looking at her shelves and mentally cataloguing their contents until she had its probable location narrowed down to one particular section. She made a suggestion; it was shot down. She tried again. Mr Shaw paused, reflected, laughed a short “Hah!” and agreed. The binding was blue, but the contents were as he had remembered. He was grateful.

“Miss Wall, you will go far,” he announced.

Syndicated!

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I am delighted to have a post syndicated at BlogHer today. You may have read it here already, but click on over and see it in situ – it’ll look totally different, honest.

I think this is actually the first time I’ve been paid real money for something I’ve written.

I’m hoping it won’t be the last.

BlogHer ’13: But Maud, how did you FEEL about it all?

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View from my room on the 21st floor

Can I squeeze one more post out of the BlogHer experience before you’re all sick to death of the subject? It’s just that I have more things to say about it. I’m still processing the whole weekend, but I also want to write it all down before I forget.

When people in Chicago heard it was my first BlogHer conference, they would say, sympathetically, “It’s all a bit overwhelming, isn’t it?” But honestly, I didn’t feel overwhelmed. It was exhausting, but I didn’t realise that till I came home. I did burn out a bit on sessions, but I could cope with that by simply not attending the last one I’d tentatively put on my schedule for the day.

When I went to University College Dublin (17,000 students) from my high school of 300 (which is a normal/medium size in Ireland but tiny by American standards) the same thing should have happened: I should have been intimidated and overwhelmed by the size of the place and all those people. But I wasn’t. I found my place and I slotted in, and it felt right straight away.

Maybe it’s because I like big cities or maybe it’s because I’m halfway between intro- and extravert, or maybe it’s because as an only child you’re often plonked into situations among many adults you don’t know and expected to just entertain yourself quietly until everyone’s ready to go… or maybe it’s just me. I’m generally content to quietly put myself somewhere and watch what’s going on, even if what’s going on is positively enormous.

Day one: Not overwhelmed

And BlogHer is pretty enormous. There were about six thousand attendees this year, I was told. The giant hall at the conference center in Chicago full of round tables did elicit a small gasp when I saw it on the first morning, while juggling breakfast plate and coffee cup and quasimodoed by my laptop in my shoulder bag. Imagine your debs (if you’re Irish), or a sit-down dinner at a wedding, and then multiply by a couple of hundred, and you have some idea of the scale.

But after breakfast and the keynote speeches, we all broke off to go to our sessions, as if after an English lecture in Theatre L you went to a Spanish tutorial (if I may continue with my UCD reminiscences), and then you were in a room with only fifty or a hundred or maybe ten other people, depending on what you chose to attend. In fact, the whole experience was a little like university, distilled and then concentrated and then scrunched up into two very fast days.

—————

I may have arrived with some notion that all the business cards I handed out would translate instantly into new loyal readers, perhaps catapulting me into fame and fortune; but the sad truth is that the “big” bloggers, even the ones who might have my card now, are too busy tending to their own empires, and their own real lives, to take the time to read and love and then blogroll little ol’ me.

That’s okay. I can’t please all the people all the time, so I’d better just please myself. That’s why I went to the session called The UnMarketing Manifesto, why I went to the writing panels. My blog’s purpose is to make me a better writer; that’s why I started it, and I don’t want to lose sight of that in all this friend-making kerfuffle.

The truth is that I probably won’t end up adding all the cards I got to my blog reader, even though I’m following everyone I met on Twitter. And they won’t all add mine. And while it’s nice to be told that I’m a nice person, or that I’m fun to hang out with, what I really want is to hear that someone enjoys reading my blog.

Am I weird? Is that not, um, normal? Oh well. Thanks for being one of the ones who’s reading.

Agnes, elsewhere

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I wrote a teeny piece of flash fiction, once upon a time, and then I sent it to the lovely Carmel Harrington, who just happens to be running a competition for such things right now.

Agnes

My basket held a packet of pasta shells and a jar of pesto along with the bottle of red, only because it’s polite to keep up the appearance of dinner when you invite a friend over to gossip for the evening. I was about to make an offhand comment to the woman in front of me, but somehow the words changed in my mouth.

‘Holy f*ck, it’s Agnes the Bearded Lady!’

Go here to read the rest , and if you like it, I’ll remind you to vote after June 1st.

Awfully Chipper

Optimists think they have more fun