Spotlight Media is an open media network with the goal of elevating talented Steemians. Our mission is to highlight and broadcast talent on Steemit to help get them increased exposure and reach, on steemit and beyond.
Every week, we encourage these steemians to break out of their comfort zone to be in the spotlight. We offer weekly contests with amazing rewards in SP Delegation. Check out our entertainment contest here.
In addition to contests, we interview and highlight successful steemians in particular fields: Entertainment, Writing and Art to get a first-hand perspective of what it takes to make it.
Today we are happy to announce an interview with someone that many of you are surely already familiar with @suesa! She has been on steemit for just over 3 months and has had phenominal success on the platform writing some of the most amazing short-stories steemit has ever seen. Interviewed by @sasha.shade we get the answers to some of those much pondered questions and a peak into her creative brain!
The Interview
Shade: When did you first realize you wanted to be a writer?
Suesa: In elementary school we were once given a series of pictures with the last picture missing and were supposed to first write what happens in the pictures and then create an ending. I loved it so much that I kept writing short stories in my free time, although the first attempts were badly plagiarized from well known fairy tales. I think I've improved since back then!
Shade: Wow it's been quite a while then. If you could tell your younger writing self anything, what would it be?
Suesa: Don't listen to people who say you won't ever be successful as a writer. Especially your 6th grade German teacher. She doesn't know shit.
Shade: Haha good advice. If you didn't write, what would you do instead?
Suesa: Probably exactly what I'm currently doing when I don't write: Study Biology. I've only joined Steemit in June 2017 and despite my current success, I wouldn't be able to make a living from it. But I have a passion for Biology so I'll keep going in that direction.
Shade: Yes as you said, you just joined Steemit in June, and have had more success than a large majority of the community. What do you think has helped you to be so successful on Steemit and do you have any tips or suggestions to help other writers get noticed and share in a similar level of success?
Suesa: I always recommend the same things:
Write something original. Nobody wants to see the same thing over and over again. My concept of fictional stories that have scientific elements was something completely new on Steemit which drew a lot of attention.
But don't go ahead and copy my concept, because then you won't have something original. It's difficult.Credit your pictures, cite your sources. There is so much plagiarism on Steemit that many people are very careful not to upvote something that looks stolen. If you provide links to where your content comes from you will be a lot more trustworthy.
Connect with people. Be it steemit.chat, discord or the comment section, building friendships is the best thing you can do. Follow4Follow, Upvote4Upvote, comments where you are begging people to look at your posts, all that is just highly annoying and it's unlikely that you will have success with it. Talk to people. Have normal conversations. Encourage them. Maybe ask them for feedback. But don't push your content onto them if they don't ask. Also: Followers don't equal readers.
One post a week might be too little. Three posts a day are too much. People have limited voting power and usually don't want to spend it all on one person. One post a day or maybe even every second day gives some consistency but doesn't overwhelm your readers.
Last but not least, don't give up. If one concept doesn't work, try another. If one post flops, write it off as experience and try again.
Shade: Those are some great tips and obviously you have found the magic formula, almost every post of yours has earned well over $80 while many people are struggling to hit the $1 mark. Do you think any particular topics are taboo on steemit that could automatically set the writer far behind just as they are starting to get in a rhythm, or is anything fair game?
Suesa: As long as you don't plagiarize or copy&paste stuff from the internet, that should be fine. Which is actually a problem sometimes. Especially the "science" tag is swamped with pseudoscience and the other tags don't look much better. But it basically shows that you can earn money with anything. Although some topics should be avoided simply because there already exist 20+ posts about it, like the new iPhone or the eclipse a while back.
One piece of advice though: Don't get involved in any Steemit drama, fights or flag wars. Those have the potential to cost you a good piece of your payout and/or reputation.
Shade: How many hours per day do you usually write? If you don't write every day, how many hours per week do you write? Whether it be working on a story, or just jotting down ideas and possible arcs that you may revisit in the distant future?
Suesa: Well, just writing one post itself (if it's a story) usually takes me about half an hour. But that's only if the research is done beforehand. Researching something can take 30 minutes to 3 hours, depending on how complex the topic is.
Considering that I publish one post a day and try to have some posts as backup, I spend way too much time on all of this, which is only possible because I'm still on semester break. When the semester starts again, my post frequency will probably slow down.
Shade: So you can write a story, or publishable 'chapter' of a story, in only 30 minutes from start to finish? Does it just come to you as you free-write or do you have most of these already prepared and simmering on paper or in your head long-beforehand?
Suesa: The story usually develops while I'm researching. I have a topic in mind, for example "what happens to the human body when you dive for a long time", and type that into google. The results lead me to more specific questions and those questions lead me to papers written about studies. In the case of the example I've given, one study was about how eating dark chocolate before diving influences your cardiovascular system.
Gems like those promptly create an idea for how the plot could progress. When I finally sit down to write, everything just flows out.
Sometimes, I don't have anything scientific to base my story on. That happens especially with my longer series. In those cases I just sit down and start writing and follow the plot that spreads out before me. In most cases I suddenly have an idea and start my research in the middle of the story, sometimes it stays a fictional story with no scientific elements. In those cases I just drop the "science" tag.
So yeah, most stories come to life the moment I'm writing them down.
Shade: I've seen that many of your stories are broken into parts. Is that because you've found a magic word count that steemit readers like or simply because you've finished writing for the day, find a stopping point and post?
Suesa: Both.
I noticed that post over 1k words are often tiring to read if you're not super invested in the topic so I try to stay under or just slightly over it.
But only writing one chapter at a time is also easier for me. Breaking it down in smaller pieces makes writing less exhausting and you can just write one part, do something else for 2 hours and then write the next one.
Writing one chapter and then stopping to get some feedback has always been my way of writing which is extremely useful for Steemit.
Shade: Most of what I've read of yours are short stories. If someone wanted to write a novel, do you think that a novel has the same potential for success on steemit as short-stories or do you feel that readers would lose interest with stories that have more detail and take a big longer to get going?
If you believe that a novel also has great potential, do you believe it should be completed before the author starts to publish per-chapter on steemit, or could they also write chapter-by-chapter for each post and let the story evolve over time?
Suesa: I don't think novels are suited for Steemit - just as my stories with more parts are not suited to be turned into novels (despite what several people in the comments suggested).
That doesn't have anything to do with the content or the length but with the way Steemit works. People want something short, easy to digest and then return to their life. Long stories must be adjusted to this desire.
In theory, you could start reading any of my series right in the middle. Sure, you'd miss some plot points but the post itself still has enough going on to be interesting.
A novel on the other hand tends to have chapters where not much happens. And that's important because when you read a novel, you rarely read one chapter at a time. You read several. And if every chapter was its own story, that would get annoying very fast.
You can turn a novel into a series of posts by cutting out those parts. You could turn my short stories into a novel by adding those parts. But I think in both cases, the story would suffer from it.
Shade: What was your hardest scene to write, what made it difficult and do you feel it was worth the additional effort once completed or doing it over again would you have skipped the scene or changed it to something that may have been easier for you to write?
Suesa: There is a story which is a bit older now, called "Uncanny Valley". With this story, it wasn't a single scene. It was the whole story. I had this awesome concept, this question "Why does the uncanny valley exist? What if there was some kind of predator that almost looked human?" but couldn't come up with a story.
I wrote a story, about thousand words long. I picked out a picture. I formatted it. And then I deleted the whole thing and started over, writing something completely different.
I can't really explain why it was so difficult for me, but the first draft just felt like chewing some gum that's several hours old. I couldn't publish that. It felt horrible to write.
Sometimes, you just have to throw out work that sucks.
Shade: Ok lastly but surely not least, how many stories have you written, of all of the stories you've written on steemit, which one is your favorite?
Suesa: Oh my, I have no idea how many stories I've written. The "published posts" folder in my Dropbox says 87 but I didn't save the first few stories in there. The number also includes posts that aren't stories but other posts like something for the "sciencepic" tag. And for longer stories, every chapter is stored separately.
Let's just say too many. Way too many.
My favorite story? Hard to pick. I think it's "Death in the Greenhouse". Writing it felt pretty good.
We'd like to thank @suesa for taking the time to be part of this weeks Elevate Expertise. We'd like to ask all our readers to check out @suesa and her fantastic writing.
If you'd like to nominate someone to be highlighted for Elevate Expertise, please tag them in a comment below.
