Make a Nerdy Living

by Alex Langley

  CHOOSE A SOLID HOSTING SERVICE

  You, lucky reader, have countless blog platforms at your fingertips. Some people run their blogs through free sites such as Tumblr®, which sacrifices customization power for ease of access and low cost, or with blog tools like WordPress®, which meet a happy medium between user-friendliness and adaptability.† Subscription-based monthly services vary in quality while generally offering more bang for your buck (since you’re actually spending some bucks). You’ll want a service that won’t severely limit your data or throttle your site if and when traffic gets too high—there’s nothing worse than having your first big viral post lose momentum because your stupid provider is throttling your traffic to slow down the tide and keep their costs low.

  MAKE AN E-MAIL ADDRESS FOR BLOGGING AND GET ON SOME PRESS LISTS

  Whatever it is you’re going to talk about, you’ll need some fodder for discussion. Press lists are direct connections to studios and other news sources, offering press releases and review copies for journalists. Subscribing to the right press list helps you get on the front line of the hottest news, so whether you’re gabbing ’bout games, chatting ’bout cats, or talking ’bout tanks, subscribe to as much press-related stuff as you can. Plus being on press lists ups the odds that you can go to conventions with gratis press passes.

  THE NEXT STEP: BLOGGING

  The early days of blogging are unfettered and carefree. You spend your moments blissfully spilling your thoughts onto the Internet, unconcerned about pesky things like grammar and audience. As you continue blogging, however, you’ll want to hone your professional edge. You’ll need to stop treating blogging as a hobby and start treating it as a job. A job you’re not getting paid for yet, but a job nonetheless.

  REDECORATE OCCASIONALLY

  Website layout is a constantly evolving beast, sprouting wings and gills and laser eyes as needed. In the late ’90s, blogs’ front pages had numerous links containing tons of sub-areas to scour and explore. Back then, readers liked that sort of thing; the Internet was so new to most of us, we relished exploring it like a D&D party scouring every nook and cranny of a dungeon.

  In the mid-2000s, it became en vogue for websites to splatter every single thing you could possibly need on the front page, minimizing the number of clicks you needed but also increasing information overload. Around 2010, sites began shifting to a more vertical layout to fit the confines of a phone screen. Despite its early successes, Harry Knowles’s Ain’t It Cool began to languish in part due to the site’s refusal to evolve its layout beyond an early-2000s information vomit.

  So how should you lay out your blog? Your best bet is to analyze the layouts of your favorite sites and think about what you do and don’t like about them and why they made the choices they did. Ask your friends and family to test out your site and give you feedback.* Whatever you choose, you’re not locked in, so change it up as needed.

  FOCUS YOUR VOICE

  Newbie fiction and nonfiction writers will often make the mistake of thinking readers will be interested in their main character because they’re the main character. Nope. Readers will only be interested in a main character if they can find some way to connect to them. As the primary voice behind your blog, you’re the main character, which means you need to interest the audience. Banal stories of everyday occurrences aren’t going to cut it. If you want to keep people interested, you’ll need to find a way to set your blog—your voice—apart from the rest of the Internet.

  For some bloggers, they’re different because their writing is laser-focused on something niche and specific. For others, it’s not so much the subject that will draw people in as the unique perspective of the author, so whether you’re a myopic English major or a black lesbian anime fan or a professional-chef-turned-real-estate-mogul-turned-vampire, employ that to enrich your writing. If all else fails, let the quality of your wordcraft be the thing differentiating you from the competition.

  FLOW

  We pursue these nerdy careers, as ethereal as they may feel sometimes, because they’re what grant us flow, the state of being one with an activity, of losing yourself to the stimulating work before you, becoming unconcerned with everything except the sheer pleasure of creating.

  In their article “Flow Theory and Research” in The Oxford Handbook of Positive Psychology, psychologists Nakamura and Csíkszentmihályi9 break flow down into its constituent factors. Flow provides an intense concentration on the present moment, a merging of action and self-awareness, a loss of hindering self-consciousness, a sense of control, a sense of reward, and a loss of awareness of the world outside your task. To put it scientifically, flow is a really rad feeling of getting shit done that leaves you super-satisfied.

  The question is: How do you achieve flow?

  DETACH YOURSELF FROM THE PHYSICAL AND ELECTRONIC WORLDS. This may sound a bit zen-buddha-Jedi, but we live in a far more distracted world than the creatives of decades past. Andy Warhol didn’t have to worry about texts and social media notifications pinging his phone while he was working because they didn’t exist in his heyday. If you really want to flow, put your phone into DO NOT DISTURB mode and let the people in your life know to leave you alone for a few hours.

  Doing this also requires you to give yourself permission to detach from everything else and immerse yourself in the present moment. This means getting your mind in a state where you’re comfortable not answering messages or dealing with daily problems. This can be achieved through force of will, but it also helps if you deal with the little things before you get started so they don’t nag at you while you’re trying to dive into your work.

  TAKE SMART BREAKS WHEN NEEDED. getting up and walking around/stretching the muscles every hour or so is a good idea, as it keeps the blood flowing and will prevent you from dying from a blood clot—a death more common amongst nerdy types than you might think! Whether you’re pausing to stretch your legs, get a drink, or go to the bathroom, do not bring your phone with you. Lots of people like to quickly check Facebook or get in a round of their favorite time-killing game when taking a breather, which is a bad idea. Such distractions crack your flow open and leave its flow-blood flowing everywhere. Just because your fingers aren’t working doesn’t mean your mind isn’t, so let your brain keep doing its thing while you stretch out those muscle fibers.

  SET GOALS. Whether it’s a specific word count, a specific page colored in your comic, or a specific piece of your Tyrion Lannister statue whittled into shape, some people work best with a finish line in mind. Of course, other creatives will do great work yet slow themselves down with worries about not getting “enough” done for the time spent. Good work is good work; there’s no pre-determined amount of progress you should be making for the amount of time spent on your project. Figure out whether you prefer set goals or if you’re the type to sweat these sorts of things, and adjust your work style accordingly.

  FLOW WILL BE ELUSIVE AT FIRST. As you’re first starting out, achieving flow will be difficult, and, at times, impossible, because the actions you need to take aren’t yet automatic. Be patient. Continue practicing, and eventually you’ll realize you’ve been flowing without realizing it.

  BE MOTIVATED BY THE RIGHT THINGS. As Yoda said in The Empire Strikes Back, “Adventure. Excitement. A Jedi craves not these things.” Motivation, our reason for doing the things we do, comes in two flavors: extrinsic and intrinsic. Extrinsic motivation refers to being motivated by external rewards like fame and fortune. Intrinsic motivation refers to doing something because the action of doing said thing is rewarding in and of itself. We work jobs we don’t like because they pay the bills; we work jobs we love, even when they don’t pay the bills, because we love them. Extrinsic motivation is fine for the more basic things; but if you’re going to make a nerdy living, you need to be in it because you love what you’re doing, not because you have some ulterior goal in mind. If you try to write books because you want to be a famous author, you will fail. You have to write books because you find
the task itself intrinsically rewarding.

  Intrinsic motivation is by far the more powerful motivational force; there are countless people who keep working and practicing the things they love even if they’re not being paid to do it simply because they love to do it. Before you expend the resources toward making a nerdy living, take stock of why, exactly, you want to make a nerdy living and make sure they’re reasons that will keep you motivated in the days, weeks, and even years to come when the only thing motivating you is you.

  RELISH YOUR PROGRESS. Striving to perform and create better is a good thing. At the same time, you need to take a moment to allow yourself the feeling of reward that comes with making progress. Some days, you won’t feel as if you’ve made much progress. Others, you may feel as if you’re moving backward or undoing previous progress. These days still provide valuable experience that makes you better at creating, so try to focus on the overall positive instead of the momentary negative.

  Ultimately, though, it’s important to understand FLOW IS DIFFERENT FOR EVERYONE. My brother-from-another-mother Marko Head, for example, finds his flow drawing with television shows or podcasts playing in the background. I, on the other hand, have trouble getting my writing flowing if there’s another person in the room, let alone if there’s someone talking through a headset or on a small screen, which is one of the reasons I listen almost exclusively to video game soundtracks and video game–inspired music while I work.* As you work more and more, you’ll find what your flow is, so don’t let anyone tell you your way is “wrong” and theirs is “right.” If you’re getting the work done, if you’re flowing, and as long as your flow doesn’t involve hurting anyone through blood sacrifices and the like, then your flow is the right kind of flow.

  But, before you get to flowing, you’ll need to find whatever activity (or activities) which flow your bow, so keep reading to figure out what exactly that may be.

  SELF-IMPROVEMENT NEVER STOPS

  Sucking at something is the first step toward becoming kinda good at something.10 After you’ve been blogging for a while, you’re probably going to look back at your earliest writing and cringe. Good. You should. If you don’t, it means you haven’t improved and are deluding yourself about the quality of your writing (we all have trouble seeing our own shortcomings sometimes). No matter what you’re passionate about doing, you must have an equal amount of passion for growing better at it. Those who don’t will become—at best—hacks with limited audience, and at worst, will achieve nothing. If you want to edge out the competition, turn a critical eye inward to see what you can improve about your writing.

  BASIC GRAMMAR TIPS ALL BLOGGERS SHOULD KNOW*†

  Use spellcheck. You have a magic machine capable of pointing out when you’ve spelled something wrong, but you didn’t use it and now your most popular blog post is called “Top Five Tips for Making Healthy Fruit Smoo”? For shame! Go stand in the corner for a minute and think about what you’ve done, then come back and use your damn spellcheck.

  Effect is a noun, affect is a verb. Something has an effect, and you are affected by it. Do not mix these up.‡

  There, their, and they’re. They’re not the same, so know their different meanings and use them here and there as needed.§

  Semicolons, colons, commas, and periods are all different and do different things. If you think you need a semicolon, odds are high that you don’t. Commas denote a series of things in a list or join independent clauses, colons denote that the clause following it is a list, and a semicolon connects two closely related clauses. That’s right, fool, we’re talkin’ ’bout clauses! It’s not all fun and games being a nerdy pro!

  Know your tenses. Whether your tense is past, present, or future, perfect or imperfect, keep it straight in your writing.

  Capitalize the first words of sentences; proper nouns such as people, places, and things; as well as most words in headlines except for small articles like a, an, or the. Also capitalize commonly abbreviated phrases such as OMG, AFK, or ROTFLUMSBAIHTGTTHWIMMTWGSABATTOUEUOASSIM.¶

  Stiff writing isn’t necessarily formal, nor is it good. Don’t write every post like you’re trying to get an A on an English paper. Contractions are fine. Write conversationally without getting so loose that it becomes unfocused.

  I once heard someone say stream-of-consciousness writing was an avant-garde means of expression outside a theater—not the movie theater, mind you, but the actual theater where actors perform live plays in front of an audience, which I realize now must be really tough because of the distraction of phones, like, you’re up there performing and you see phones lighting up the bored faces in the audience, or maybe they’re not even bored, they just really need to check their e-mail to see whether or not the alpaca farm they invested in is going to make any money before the end of the month because your wife is going to absolutely destroy you when she finds out you emptied out your savings because you were positive it was a sure thing, which reminds me . . . What was I saying? Oh yeah—stream-of-consciousness babbling is probably a bad idea.

  Do some research. This section only covers some of the basics. As you practice your writing more and more, brush up on grammar and keep your skills up to snuff, lest you run the risk of sounding like a mush-mouthed sewer-dweller.

  STICK TO A SCHEDULE (BUT TAKE A BREAK IF YOU NEED ONE)

  Whether you update your site once a week or once a day, find the groove that works for you, stick with it, and notify readers what that groove is. As a reader, few things are as annoying as finding a great new site only to have it update unpredictably. Random updates lead to sparse readership. If possible, try to plan ahead and create a buffer of several posts so, should you get sick, get busy, or get plain ol’ burnt out, you’ll keep the content flowing while you’re AFK.

  USE WHAT YOU KNOW

  If you have an advanced degree or specialized interest, don’t be afraid to incorporate the perspective that knowledge brings into your writing, even if it’s a bit off-topic. For example, if you have a degree in computer engineering and blog about video games, add a paragraph or two to each article hitting your topic du jour from the computer-engineering angle. If you’re a zombie running a movie-review site, you could add in a rating system in each review analyzing how tasty-looking those humans are or whether any zombies were mistreated in the making of the film.

  You could also work to become a self-made expert in something esoteric, like a particular style of film, video game, or Little Debbie’s snack cakes.

  INTERACT WITH READERS WITHOUT SEEMING DESPERATE

  Answering questions people post after your article? Good! Thanking people who post particularly kind or personal comments? Good! Commenting on the comments of every single person who responds to your post, and then commenting on those comments? Less good. In fact, kinda bad. It makes you seem desperate and can make pedantic readers expect unreasonable amounts of interaction from you when you don’t have the time for it. Answer questions, comment on other people’s blogs, and try to write posts that foster intelligent discussion by integrating open-ended questions to encourage people to respond (try to add better questions than the over-used “What do you guys think?”).

  BE CAREFUL WHEN GIVING ADVICE

  If you plan on running any kind of advice column, be careful. There’s a reason psychologists have to go to a lot of school to do what they do, and it’s because advising people on their lives is something that must be done with intelligence and discretion. Advice columns, in general, are kind of a bad idea, as they frequently have untrained people giving their thoughts on situations they don’t have complete information about. If this type of blogging is something you feel passionately about doing, then take it seriously, get the right training, and don’t give advice you’re not fully sure of.

  ENCOURAGE READERS TO KEEP IN TOUCH

  To help encourage repeat readers, encourage your audience to subscribe via RSS feed or e-mail. These may seem a bit antiquated to some, but they’re solid ways to let interested people
know when you have new content. Also encourage them to follow you on other social media platforms by having unobtrusive links to your various profiles at the end of every article.

  MAKE FRIENDS

  Blogging can be a lonely profession, and since many blogs are one-person operations, the pressure to succeed can feel almost overwhelming. To let some steam out of your mechanisms before you go kablooey, try to build up a network of people you can depend on. Find other blogs discussing similar topics and reach out to their writers to see if they’d like to do a guest post for you. Do guest posts for them. Collaborate together on an überpost. Do whatever you can to connect with your fellow bloggers—it’s good for your business, and it’s nice to make friends.

  WORDS FROM WORKING NERDS

  Jenna Busch, writer, journalist, blogger, editor-in-chief, host, geek personality (if properly caffeinated), and public speaker

  I was a makeup artist in Los Angeles, which started as a job to support my acting habit back in New York City. I left acting and was traveling as a global artist for a makeup line. One day my buddy and old theater crony from high school, Chris Radtke, called me and asked if I wanted to interview Jack Nicholson and Morgan Freeman for a movie for his website. You don’t say no to that. I started working for [pop culture–comedy site] UGO.com, reviewing, and then covering, video games, TV, and comics as well. Once I did a few things on camera, I was asked to appear on shows, and the rest is very geeky history.