Interview with Traveller Tui Snider: Part 3 “Leverage your Blog & Twitter Intelligently”

2012 Jul 25

Andrew Crusoe

Below is part two of a three part series in which I interviewed travel writer Tui Snider. See part one of this interview if you haven’t read it yet.

In this third and final segment, Tui and I discuss how to approach social networking with a healthy attitude, how to get a lot of Twitter followers without being an energy vampire, and Tui’s advice for those of you who are thinking of starting a blog yourself. Tui shows how leveraging technology can be immensely powerful, her website being just one example of that.

Tui Snider Interview
Part 3: Leverage your Blog & Twitter Intelligently

48. How important do you feel social media is to what you do, and how do you find balance with it?

Oh, yeah. Importance and Balance. I find it really important for me for socializing. At one of the classes I took at the DFW Writer’s Conference, the guy was talking about the importance of social media, and I realized that he saw it only as a selling tool for his book, whereas I saw it for many things. Bottom line is: I used it for fun, connecting with people, and making friends.

I was in Italy during the last US election cycle, and it was so great to be on Twitter then. I connected with a lot of other ex-pats. We would be up hours before the people in Washington. Sometimes I would break news to them. And we all stayed up to watch the debates. There were about 5 or 6 of us, and it was like 3:00 AM for us. But they did televise the debates in Italy, and it was fun to be live-tweeting with some other Americans. It gave me such a sense of connection where I would have otherwise felt really isolated, because I love to vote.

49. I gotta say I wish more people looked at Twitter the way you do, to be honest, because I think it would be a much warmer, more approachable place. I remember the early days around 2008. Everybody used it as almost a big chat room.

Yeah! It was slower-paced then.

50. It was much slower paced, and no one followed more than a few hundred people. There was more of a camaraderie. Everybody was kind of geeky and almost everyone had a website and things to share. And then at some point, around 2010, it went really, really mainstream; and it seemed like suddenly everybody was trying to push something in my face or sell something.

I started getting these auto-DMs from people and think, “Oh, they wrote me.” But it was all, do this and that, click on this link, and buy my book. And I’m like, “Geez, I don’t even know you yet. I just followed you, and I’m gonna get to know you.” It was off-putting.

51. Yeah! And I’m willing to cut people some slack because it is a new medium, but sometimes there’s just obnoxious behavior that won’t work in any medium which makes me nostalgic for the old days. (Like an old man.) But I wish more people used Twitter like you do because your personality and friendliness really comes across.

Oh, I’m glad to hear that!

52. It’s true. Now, on the other hand, there are certain people that you feel like you should be following because they are respected people and they follow you. But maybe you get to a point where you really don’t like anything this person is tweeting. Do you unfollow them or do you continue to follow them because it’s a mutual follow?

No, I unfollow people. If there’s kind of an ugly energy coming off of what they say—if it’s negative all the time. If they’re having a bad day I might try and perk them back up, but when their tweet just comes off as mean-spirited all the time, the jokes they’re telling just kind of make my stomach hurt, I’ll just unfollow them, ‘cuz I’m like, “Life’s too short. I don’t want to contribute to that.”

53. That’s a good place to draw the line, where your intuition is giving you a red flag.

Yeah, you’re like “Ouch.” If the pain that I feel from it is that the person is having a bad day. Once, this guy wrote something about women not liking the nice guys or whatever and I said, “Hey that’s not true, I think I married a pretty nice guy!” And we went back, and forth and I still follow him. So it was just one little thing, but if everything they say is negative, then I’m going to unfriend them.

54. That’s a good litmus test. Run it by your gut.

I treat it a lot like the coffeehouse where whoever comes up to the counter I kind of have to deal with them. But on the other hand I don’t have to put up with verbal abuse. There’s sort of a give and take. I always saw it as part of my job not just to serve coffee but to try and perk someone up mentally, too. That was always my challenge, and I would take certain customers on who were chronically grouchy and try and turn them around. I feel like, “This person, one day, I’m going to get her to smile!”

55. Are you a fixer, Tui? 😉

Maybe so! It would be my entertainment though. I’d be like, “I am going to make him smile one of these mornings.” You know, if he just comes through and treats me like a robot. If he doesn’t see me as a person. Sometimes it gives me challenges to see what I could learn about these people, where they were coming from, how they saw the world, how closed down some of them were.

56. It sounds like a very good growth experience, and I think that’s something that both of our sites have in common is that they both harp on these kinds of growth experiences.

Yeah, it’s a lot of energy. You’re dealing with energy. And I think that’s what happens on Twitter. It’s like a big conversation. You jump in and everyone is tossing in their energy.

57. That’s a really good way to think of it. It’s kind of an energy pool. And let the record state that as of this interview you have over 1,900 followers, which is great! Your follower count is really a testament that if you come to Twitter with a playful attitude, you can still affect a good number of people.

So, to start winding this down, before you started Mental Mosaic, did you consider yourself having entrepreneurial tendencies or was it something that grew out of when you were in Italy?

Well, I never saw myself as an entrepreneur.

58. Or was it just something where you saw yourself as a writer first, and then it started to be more of a business? I don’t think you sell anything. Do you sell anything on the site yet?

No, but I am going to put my blog on Kindle. I just found out I could do that because of #commenthour. Two people on there have put their blogs on Kindle, and my mother-in-law is not online at all. So we want to get her a Kindle for her birthday. She’s always asking about photos and travel. Seemed like a fun thing to do!

59. Yeah, they’re great devices. I have one. There are lot of people who are super nostalgic for books. I love books, too, but…

I love books too, but hey, I’ve moved enough. I know how heavy they are! And I’m thinking of doing some indie-publishing, too, so I’m really interested in that.

60. Do you mean self-publishing?

Yeah!

61. It’s funny you should bring that up because I’ve been doing a lot of research on that for the novel I’m finishing up right now.

I’m interested about your novel. Well, you know, the keynote speaker on the conference, James Rollins, who has had like 49 books published, been on the New York Times Bestseller list. I attended one of his classes and he said, “You know what, I just want to try self-publishing, just because it seems so great! It gives you so much more power.” He was so excited about it. So, you’re thinking about doing it?

62. I am going to self-publish, probably through Amazon’s CreateSpace.com service. I like self-publishing because it gives me complete creative control, which brings me to my next question. Do you look at MentalMosaic.com more as an outlet for your creativity or more as a business?

Yeah, I totally look at it as an outlet.

63. If you feel comfortable answering, may I ask if you make any money from it currently?

Not right now. I was making enough from ads to pay my hosting for a while. But I have gotten writing jobs from it before—editors writing to me for different reasons. I’ve gotten writing gigs through Twitter, as well. Someone tweets something, “Hey, I told an editor about you because they wanted me to write this and I can’t. Too busy.” So I’ve gotten things that way.

But I really haven’t until last week at DFW Con I really thinking about it, realizing that I really do want to self-publish my memoir. In that regard, I’m thinking that I want to look at my blog a little differently. I want to put more personality into it. I want to have it more of an outlet, because I would sometimes feel stymied. I would think, “If editors see me being too playful then they’re not going to like it.” Now I’m just like, “No, I’m really going to share a lot more about myself, in that regard.” And I’m going to share my journey into self-publishing, coming up.

64. I will definitely be interested in following that. I feel like we could have an entirely separate interview about self-publishing.

Yeah! Maybe I’ll be interviewing you on that.

65. Yeah, maybe! My goal is to have this novel published in the Kindle Store by the end of the year.

Oh, great! That’s an excellent goal. And I like how tangible it is, and measurable.

66. Thanks! I’m excited about it. And that also brings me to one of my last questions: out of everything you’ve ever published or created, what are you most proud of?

That’s a hard one. One thing I was proud of was a magazine article where I had to interview people in Italian and write it in English, and it was in a real magazine that paid well. Print pays so much better than online in my experience. So that was fun, because it was challenging. I was nervous to interview people, and I was also nervous to speak Italian. So thank goodness I had a good digital recorder.

And also it was fun doing the shopping chapter for the Time Out Guide about Naples. That was a lot of fun because I felt like I got to put in some personality, too. I got to tell about the cultural aspects of what it’s like to go shopping in Naples; because not only do they have a different rhythm there, but compliments are part of the culture.

67. Really?

Yeah, and I think for women, you shouldn’t take it wrong like, “This man is hitting on me.” That’s a big Italian thing. They give compliments. That’s part of their culture. It felt good to impart something like that.

68. That sounds like a wonderful project, and you make a good point in that people are not just interested in information anymore. The personality behind it has become just as important, in some cases more important, than the actual information being conveyed.

And maybe some insight, too. I felt like I was giving them something insightful.

69. An insight that perhaps only you could provide them.

Yeah, you had to be there for a while to get. So by getting their before they arrive and save them from potentially from being offended or just not knowing. That cultural side of things I like to share.

70. Exactly, and why does someone keep coming back to a given website? Because they enjoy a person’s style, they enjoy a person’s personality, and the way that they tell the story. I think this is why people tend to see movies based on what actors are in them. Because they know the actor is going to provide a certain personality to that role. And I think people have underestimated the power of personality when it comes to creativity.

I agree! It’s like Christopher Walken or something. Or Jack Nicholson.

71. So, do you have any advice for people who want to start their own travel blog or grow their own travel website if they’re starting out now?

Yeah!

72. Tui, be honest. Are they doomed? Is it too late? Is blogging dead?

Oh, I’m never one of these people that thinks any form is dead. I’m never one of those people who thinks every song has been written. My big advice is to go back to free-writing. Maybe before you even put a blog up, pretend you have a blog. Do a fake blog you don’t go public with and privately write some things every day on your computer for a while and see what rhythm you get into. Don’t put yourself out there with no clue. Do a lot of pre-writing. Not years of it, but do a little of it beforehand to help hone your topic. And then look at the blogs that you like and think about what they have in common before you jump in.

Some people I see, they start a blog. They do like write three articles, and then just burn out. Maybe because it wasn’t a good topic for them, and they only really had three articles in them. But they’ve got this great domain name. Maybe if they had a set schedule of writing before they would have discovered “Oh, what I really want to say is…” ‘Cuz that happens to me a lot when I write, anyway. I have to burn through a certain amount of stuff, and suddenly I hit the marrow. “Ah, this is what I really want to say!” And I throw out the whole big beginning part!

73. I know exactly what you mean! Is there anything you’d like to plug before we wrap this up?

Just come by my blog, say Hi. I don’t really have anything to plug. Come to #storydam, say “Hi” on Twitter. Say “Hi” to me anywhere, and I’ll say “Hi” back!

74. And let’s not forget about your book about living on an island with a population of seven.

Yes! I’m going to be self-publishing that this year. I don’t have a title yet exactly.

75. Well, I definitely look forward to that. And that brings us to the last question: how do you see travel writing and travel sites evolving into the future as we go on? Will people move on to reading everything on the Kindle? Will everything become mobile and people stop reading websites on their computers? Feel free to speculate.

I’m not sure. I think there’s always the need—and this is becoming more and more apparent, like you said—for people who can tell a good story. There are two different things. The straight information, and there’s a lot of apps for that, and those are great. And I think the stronger those get, like Yelp, the more streamlined those get, the less of a need there is for that in blogs, but there’s always a need for that human story. So I think that’s what’s always going to be there, and that’s going to be more apparent. The human behind it, the person’s experience being shared, the memoir behind the travel is going to become more important.

76. I completely agree. Wow, thank you much, Tui, for agreeing to do an interview today! I had so much fun. 🙂

Oh, I’m grinnin’ ear to ear. Yeah, I had a blast! That was a lot fun! I doodled and I took notes, so yeah! I think I have a lot to blog about from here. Was a blast! 🙂

77. Excellent! Thank you so much, Tui!

And that’s the interview. If you’re interested in Tui’s work, feel free to checkout her blog at MentalMosaic.com.

If you’re a writer who is interested in getting more attention to your work, checkout @storydam on Twitter, which is a weekly Twitter chat for writers each Thursday evening from 8-9PM US Central Time. And if you’re not sure how to participate in a Twitter chat, see Tui’s post: Top Tips for Chatting on Twitter

While you’re at it, checkout TweetGrid.com which Tui recommends for conversation-heavy twitter use. And for more info about the DFW Writer’s Conference, checkout DFWWritersConference.org

More interviews to come!

Receive new posts by email →

Interview with Traveller Tui Snider: P2 “How to be Mindful & Make Hypothetical Pie”

2012 Jul 17

Andrew Crusoe

Below is part two of a three part series in which I interviewed travel writer Tui Snider. See part one of this interview if you haven’t read it yet.

For part two, Tui and I discuss powerful yet free writing productivity tools that you should check out, how to cultivate healthy expectations as a writer, what to call that feeling of “fresh yet familiar”, how to be mindful in your travels, and how to leverage your site to meet other people in that amazing realm known as “real life.”

Tui Snider Interview
Part 2: How to be Mindful & Make Hypothetical Pie

33. I’m curious how your journey has been with building your website. What was it like navigating all of this complexity and finally building your site with WordPress, as I have. You put a lot of yourself into the design, and I’ve seen the design change over time.

Yeah, it has! I’ve gotten more and more into the photographs because I realized how that’s a big part of travel. Instagram was such a leap for me because I like the immediacy of being able look at something and then post it right away. And then connect with people, too. Like I could say: “I wonder who made this sculpture.” And someone will say, “Oh, I know.” And two seconds later on Instagram, I’ve learned something. “Oh, and while you’re there make sure you eat at such and such.” But about the website journey: I always keep it up in HTML when I’m writing, but I don’t get too carried away with it. I’ve backed off from getting too deep into PHP, because it can suck you in too much. I’m like, “Okay, how much time do I want to spend on that side of it? I wanna make sure that I’ve got a finished product!”

34. That’s the really interesting thing about having your own website, isn’t it? You can wear so many hats. There’s a side of you that’s the designer side, the crazy mad-scientist writing side, and the editor side. And then there’s the socializing side, making sure that you show up on people’s radar. There are all these facets. Did you realize that going in? Did you have a plan of how you were going to grow? Or was it sort of a playful experiment to see where it was going to go? Or a bit of both?

It was, yeah. I didn’t really have a clear business plan, which I thought I should at the beginning. I wanted to have something different than a LiveJournal. It was going to be a blog, so I felt like I needed to share information and be helpful to people, which at times kind of crippled me and made my writing voice a little stilted. And then, when I would just let loose and write something kind of silly, then I would get more feedback from that. I would enjoy it more, and I would connect with people more. So I just let go of that and decided to have fun with it.

At the time, it was just a way to make friends and meet other people living in Italy, and elsewhere, too. I never really expected people in real life to read my blog. And I’ve known other people who start blogs, and then they get all bummed out because no one they know in real life reads their blog. I’m like, “That’s a different thing. You’re gonna meet bloggers.” Some people read books. People get their social input from different places. It never bothered me that my family doesn’t often read my blog or that some of my friends don’t check it out. Other friends do, but I never felt like that was my audience. I was just putting things out there, and hopefully I’d meet some people I could relate to and would understand my sense of humor.

And the slogan “Even Home is a Travel Destination”—that slowly became apparent to me. Because I was living in Italy, and I was engaged. But it was actually a very lonely time over there. I realized, “Oh, everyone thinks I’m living this great, exotic life.” And I thought, “Well, I could just as well be living in Kansas in an apartment complex, and no one would think it’s exotic. But I could have the same exact situation.” There’s always something exotic, too, about where you live. I remember a conversation with someone in Belgium. We posted a picture of our house, and the Belgian guy goes, “Your house! It looks like it’s made of wood!” And we were like, “Yeah!” And he said, “Wow, that’s weird.” That made me realize that what’s exotic to one person isn’t exotic to another.

35. Dare I ask what houses are made out of in Belgium?

Oh, a lot of stone, a lot of brick.

36. “We use all the wood for ottomans and dressers here!”

Yeah! That’s right, the wood is for chopsticks! Hah!

37. “Even home is a travel destination.” That’s a good point. Because once you get used to something, almost anything that seemed exotic to you at first can become almost mundane in time. But you can also reverse that and see your home through new eyes, as well.

That was something I’d noticed as a kid. My family would travel a lot because we lived in Virginia and one grandma lived in New Mexico, which meant a big long car trip to get there. And then we’d come home, and I just loved that feeling of how the house was so familiar but so foreign at the same time. Made me feel really awake to my house, and I would be so happy to see my little room again. I was like, “Hello room, and now I’m really seeing you.” And I always liked that.

38. I love that. I know exactly what you mean. That sense of freshness to something that’s also familiar is a lovely feeling isn’t it?

Yeah, and it kind of stimulated me in a philosophical way as a kid. I would try to be mindful. I would come home and think, “Now when I eat dinner, I’m going to pay attention to every bite!” I’d try to stay awake for longer. It just made me aware of that idea of being awake versus being asleep to your life.

39. I wish we had like 3 hours to talk because I think we could go for an hour just on mindfulness.

Yeah, I think that’s one reason why I always really liked your blog, because I could always sense that mindful aspect to what you write. And that’s a real common denominator to the type of writing I like. It could be about anything, but if you present it in a mindful manner suddenly I’m like, “Velvet paintings! Tell me more!”

40. Since you bring it up, what do you think is a good way for travel writers to be mindful in their writing?

Oh, gosh! Let me think on this. I do think that whole idea of treating your—I know it sounds corny to say “staycation”—but I do this at work. If I’m on hold, I look around the office and try to describe it as if I were telling someone else. You know, I keep my good friend Woofmutt in my mind a lot when I’m writing, I guess because he always appreciates those mindful details, those quirky things that you see. I know he’ll appreciate it, so even if I’m in a mundane situation, like at the office, I’ll think of how I’d describe it to him in that moment.

41. How do you find the act of being mindful affects you? That act of describing or being present?

It makes me feel exhilarated. I feel happy! It makes me feel kinder towards everyone else, too, for some reason. It puts me in a better mood, for sure. I can just be mindful. “This is life, I’m experiencing it.” Even if it’s not pleasant. Most of the time it’s pleasant, but yeah that’s a really good question! I’ll have to think on that one some more.

42. I know that not everyone is familiar with your site. (Which should change after this interview, because literally everyone should check out your Ren Fair Wedding article because your fairy outfit is adorable.) But how would you recommend someone bring mindfulness to their writing?

Start by doing freewriting first thing in the morning, preferably if you’re still kind of sleepy because you won’t be so judgmental. Write as fast as you can for a set period of time. Don’t let yourself stop to edit it. Just write, and then go back and look at what you have. And you’d be surprised. There will be some cool stuff. There will be some crap, but at least you’ll have something to work with. It could be two sentences that you like. That can really be enough to set you off on another word rampage.

43. Is that how a lot of your articles begin, or do you go in with a set purpose and write to that purpose? Or do you freewrite and articles come out of that?

I get ideas for them, and then I always have a little notebook on me so I’ll write down topics. And I have tons of topics. Some I haven’t even written yet. Then when I start to write, I always end up wanting to write too much, and I realize it’s too long for a blog and I need to cut it down to just one idea. And then I realize, “Well now I’ve got enough for five things to blog about!” A lot of times picking photos helps me narrow it down. I just write a whole bunch and discard the rest. I have one little file that I called compost. I also use this thing called Yarny.me, and I love it. If I think of something at my work computer, I can just type it in. Or if I think of something on my iPhone. Whichever computer I’m on, as long as I go to Yarny.me and login, I have my whole memoir on there. And I have a bunch of idea files in there. It’s a great way to keep my stuff in the cloud.

44. Have you heard of SimpleNote? That sounds a lot like SimpleNote.app that I use on the Mac and iOS. It’s free, and it synchronizes between the two. And it sounds like Yarny. But I completely agree. It’s so important to have a place to put those ideas when they come. You can’t put a pause button on that. If you don’t capture it, it’s gone.

In fact, when I was a barista and I would be talking to people and suddenly get an idea, I would write it on a scrap of paper and shove it in my tip jar. And at the end of the day I’d have this pile of little notes from my tip jar, ideas of things I wanted to write about. But I called this Hypothetical Pie because sometimes I would get back, and I would not know what my little cryptic note meant. And one of them, that I still never figured out, just said ‘Hypothetical Pie’ on it. “That’s my handwriting. What did I mean by that?” I still don’t know what I meant by that!

45. I wish I couldn’t relate to finding inscrutable notes, but I can totally relate. And I find it interesting that you use photos to inform your articles. I use a similar technique with most of my review articles since I find photography very useful to frame an article and constrain what I’m going to discuss. Do you use photos to “reel things in”, too?

Yeah, to keep me on topic. I’ll just be like, “I’m going to write about these three things.” Not always, though. Sometimes the picture doesn’t always relate directly, because I like to have a picture with every post. Although sometimes it ends up relating, later on. It ends up being a metaphor.

46. I’m curious how you use your website to meet people. A lot of people that I meet might have a website, but they haven’t met any human beings through it. It just remains virtual for most people, so how do you use it to meet people?

You know, for three years in a row I did NaBloPoMo, where you would try to post something on your blog every day for a month. And for the first few years that went on, it had a lot of energy to it. People would come by, and they would start conversations on your blog. I really connected with a couple people that way. I met Paula from Texas through that, and we actually got to have lunch over in Dallas together. We really connected. Because something about posting something every day and the people who would start conversations with you… Some of them you would really connect with. We stayed in touch a lot through Twitter, and it kind of grew from there.

47. Yeah, I think it can be challenging, because it’s such a global audience. The odds of somebody being really passionate about what you write within 50 miles of you is statistically… not great. Unless you’re super popular, that can be rare.

The nice thing was that when I moved so much (there was a period of time when I moved 16 times in a period of 10 years), having the internet was nice because I got to take my friends with me. I got to “pack my friends up”; it wasn’t like I was constantly leaving friends behind. Now I’ve been in Texas for 2 ½ years, but still the majority of my friends that I feel the closest to are online or in another time zone. I’m always homesick for someplace, it seems like!

That’s all for now. I hope you’ll join me in the 3rd and final installment of my interview with Tui Snider, coming next week!

Coming up in Part 3: The principles behind social interaction, how to find balance when using social networking, how to leverage Twitter’s big energy pool, and Tui’s advice for those of you who are thinking of starting a blog yourself.

Continue to part 3 of the interview →

Receive new posts by email →