Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach (Ann Kroeker)

Show Notes Summary: Hundreds of thousands of writers are in the middle of National Novel Writing Month, or what is affectionately known as NaNoWriMo—where writers have signed up with the goal of completing a novel draft of 50,000 words. If you are among the participants—or if you decided to tackle a nonfiction project during the same month, tapping into the resources and momentum of NaNoWriMo—you’re heading toward the middle of the month and, presumably, the middle of your project’s draft. The middle is hard. A lot of people stop in the middle of things. How were you doing on your New Year’s Resolutions back in July? How about some hobby or craft you started but stopped about halfway through, that’s boxed up in the garage or basement? The halfway point is critical, because you know what it took to get to that point, so you know you need at least that much effort to finish. It can feel overwhelming. It’s easier to just stop and shelve the project. Click save. Say you’ll come back to it someday, but you know you probably won’t. Some people have trouble just getting started. Some people have trouble finishing. When you're stuck in the middle, you have to keep pushing through the middle. Keep the pen moving or, you know, the fingers tapping. If you’re in the middle of a project now, or you’re envisioning some of the half-finished drafts of poems, articles, essays, or novels, sitting on your hard drive, open a file today. Open the current project or dig into your archives. If you’re halfway through—if you’re stuck in the middle—you can begin again. You can finish. On Saturdays I post a writing quote—something to encourage you along the way. This past Saturday’s quote came from Ausonius. Begin, for half the deed is in beginning; Begin the other half, and you will finish. Begin the other half, friends. Begin—keep going—and you will finish. Ideas from this episode: The middle is hard; it's where a lot of people stop. NaNoWriMo participants are about halfway through their projects, and they can celebrate their progress; everyone should celebrate their progress if they made it to the middle. If you're halfway through any writing project, begin again—by beginning again, you will finish. Resources: Write in the Middle of Everyday Distractions: 7 Strategies for Getting Back on Track Write in the Middle: Yes, You Can Maximize Distraction-Free Writing Write in the Middle of Chaos NaNoWriMo NaNoWriMo stats WNFIN/NaNonFiWriMo How the Cuckoo Found Its Voice #1: Just Get Started (podcast) #14: Progress, Not Perfection (podcast) #21 One Thing Every Writer Needs to Succeed (podcast) Writing Quote - Begin, for half the deed is in beginning * * * Listen for the full podcast. You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. _______________________ Book Discussion - The Art of Memoir Do you read or write memoir? If so, you'll enjoy the book discussion of Mary Karr's recent release The Art of Memoir. On Saturday, I launched with questions about the preface, and on Tuesday we'll dive into the first three chapters. Join the conversation Tuesdays at my Facebook page: Preface Chapters 1-3

Show Notes Summary: A writer needs a rut to run in. If you're troubled by the construction, let me also say it this way: a writer needs a rut in which to run. But about this rut...you might be thinking, "Hold on, now, how can a coach who encourages curiosity and creativity be promoting a rut?" After all, People get stuck in ruts and never change, never take risks, never explore new possibilities. Ruts are things to get out of not to fall into. Ruts feel like tedium. Monotony. Boredom. And there’s some truth to that, but I’m going to try to convince you to think differently about the monorail experience. When you have a rut to run in, parts of your life switch to autopilot and you don’t have to reinvent every single day. It simplifies life and frees up mental energy for greater willpower and creativity. It steadies you. Think of a rut as a habit or set of habits—a routine—that automates parts of your life. In an article in The New York Times, John Tierney, who wrote the book Willpower with Roy Baumeister, says, “The more choices you make throughout the day, the harder each one becomes for your brain, and eventually it looks for shortcuts...there is a finite store of mental energy for exerting self-control." We writers need that self-control—that willpower—to stick with the job, to finish the story, to meet the deadline. And we need some creative energy to bring it all to life. Writers need a rut to run in. If we deplete our brains on a lot of inconsequential decisions, we're more likely to delay our writing and run off to the movies with a friend. We'll pay less attention to a long-term goal like, to finish a book, and just fiddle with Facebook for an hour. If we do manage to write, a brain lacking willpower will be tempted to default to tired, predictable expressions, too mentally fatigued to reach for something fresh. Baumeister says: [P]eople with the best self-control are the ones who structure their lives so as to conserve willpower...they establish habits that eliminate the mental effort of making choices. Instead of deciding every morning whether or not to force themselves to exercise, they set up regular appointments to work out with a friend. Instead of counting on willpower to remain robust all day, they conserve it so that it’s available for emergencies and important decisions. As writers, we want to conserve willpower so it’s available for some of the important decisions involved with creating and completing our art. A Guardian article quoted W.H. Auden: Decide what you want or ought to do with the day, then always do it at exactly the same moment every day, and passion will give you no trouble...Routine, in an intelligent man, is a sign of ambition. What routine will you form to free your mind to create? What rut will you run in that will leave enough willpower to keep you seated at your desk to do the work you’ve set out to do? Pre-decide what your routine will be. Set it on repeat, day after day, so that it's automated, so it’s a habit, and it becomes a rut to run in, leaving you with mental space and energy … to write. Ideas from this episode: A writer needs a rut to run in, freeing his mind to stick with the work and generate creative ideas. A rut to run in lassoes the power of routine, or a set of habits, to "automate" the more inconsequential parts of our lives. Structure your life to conserve willpower by reducing the number of decisions you need to make. Beethoven and Bergman lassoed the power of routine, running in ruts each day to free up their creativity. Pre-decide what your routine will be, then repeat it, day after day, to form the rut. Resources: Do You Suffer from Decision Fatigue? (The New York Times article by John Tierney) Rise and shine: The daily routines of history's most creative minds (The Guardian article featuring W.H. Auden, and the routines of Beethoven and Ingmar Bergman, mentioned in the audio)

Show Notes Summary: During the holiday season, while traveling and hosting or visiting others, you may not be able to keep up your writing at the same pace. We discussed in the last episode the benefit of having a rut to run in, and yet as we head into these next couple of months, we may not be able to maintain our writing routines at the same level. Today I want to encourage you that even if you are unable to keep up even a modified version of your writing routine, you can still do one thing: pay attention, to draw attention. If you pay attention to the details, events and interactions surrounding you over the next few weeks and you have a way to collect and store them, you will be able to use all of that for later, when you’re writing, to draw attention. Oliver Burkeman in an article in The Guardian, highlights thoughts on writing from Steven Pinker, who points out that writing is inherently a psychological phenomenon, "a way that one mind can cause ideas to happen in another mind." So our job is to be the ones who see, to notice what’s going on in the world directly around us, and beyond. We can take notes and store them someplace where we can find them again when we sit down to work. It may not feel like writing, but it's the work of a writer. This can be a task for the holidays if you can’t find an hour to open your computer and write. You could press pause on your work-in-progress for a few days, and instead, pay attention, take notes, and be ready to write, later, through story, description, the essay form, poetry, or fiction, in a way that draws the reader’s attention to something you’ve seen. This holiday season, pay attention. Gather what you need to recreate the scene, the moment, the revelation, the sensory experience, and store it up for later. Just type a few notes into Evernote or OneNote—wherever you would drop a few sentences or bullet points to jog your memory. When the days return to normal, you can pull those notes into Word, a Google Doc, or Scrivener, and start the process of “joint attention,” walking alongside your future reader. Write as if you’re saying, “Look here. Can you see it?” Pay attention, so you can draw your reader’s attention. Ideas from this episode: Should you write for yourself or for an audience? The answer is "for an audience," but not to impress them; using the concept of "joint attention," help them discern something you know they'd be able to see, if only they were looking in the right place. Our job as writers is to being the ones who see—to notice what’s going on in the world directly around us, and beyond. This holiday season, pay attention and gather what you need to recreate the scene, the moment, the revelation, the sensory experience—and store it up for later. When you can find time to sit at your computer, write as if you’re saying, “Look here. Can you see it?” Pay attention, so you can draw your reader’s attention. Resources: "This column will change your life: how to think about writing" (The Guardian article by Oliver Burkeman) Write in the Middle of the Holidays #26 Why Writers Need a Rut to Run In (podcast episode) #13 Multi-sensory Writing * * * Listen for the full podcast. You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. ______________________________ Is your writing life all it can be?   Let this book act as your personal coach, to explore the writing life you already have and the writing life you wish for, and close the gap between the two. "A genial marriage of practice and theory. For writers new and seasoned. This book is a winner." —Phil Gulley, author of Front Porch Tales

Show Notes Summary: This is a time to dream up some big goals for 2016 and think about how you can expand your reach and stretch yourself, and I definitely applaud and encourage that. But it can also be a time to go small—to use your words to connect with one or two people at a time. By "small," I mean brief, but also "intimate." You could: pull out a note card and write a letter craft an email to an old friend pen a poem and slip it under somebody's windshield wiper leave a love note under a pillow Small, focused, writing projects have some side benefits beyond blessing the recipient of your writing. By writing to someone specific, you develop your voice. You’ll be a little more comfortable and relaxed when writing that note or typing that email for someone you know well. You might insert a little inside joke, tell a story, and play with a more informal style. You’ll probably keep it somewhat tight and brief; then again, maybe you’ll be a bit more leisurely. When you know your audience well, you can tailor the message to them. You keep specificity instead of defaulting to generalities. Brain Pickings offers excerpts from a vintage book on letter writing: Though written, as all genuine letters are, for the private eye of one or two familiar friends, and without any thought of their publication, they nevertheless often form the most interesting and imperishable of an author’s productions...In other productions there is the restraint induced by the feeling that a thousand eyes are peering over the writer’s shoulder and scrutinizing every word; while letters are written when the mind is as it were in dressing-gown and slippers — free, natural, active, perfectly at home, and with all the fountains of fancy, wit, and sentiment in full play. When we write small, we can experience that same kind of natural, active approach that offers a kind of freedom and sense of play. Will you do it? Will you write small? If you write small—if you write that email or letter—would you let me know in the comments? You can just say, "I did it, Ann. I wrote small today." Ideas from this episode: While we're dreaming up big goals for 2016, we'll benefit from writing small. If you write small in the sense of writing for an intimate audience of one or two, you'll gain creative freedom. When you know your audience well, you can tailor the message to them and practice specificity. Experiment with voice and tone in these small writing projects. These efforts will bless the recipient, and if you take advantage of the playful approach, they'll bless you, as well. Resources: "How to Write Letters: A Vintage Guide to the Lost Art of Epistolary Etiquette from 1876" * * * Listen for the full podcast. You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive.

Show Notes Summary: One of my daughters has always been a playful, creative inventor, looking for ways to add tangible fun to her days. Once, she dragged a plastic bottle and paper towel tube from the recycling bin, grabbed a handful of rubber bands and duct-taped everything together to make a ukulele. It didn't play, but she sure had fun trying. Years later she applied this playful mindset to her part-time job at a dog kennel. The dogs would yap and bound playfully, but she invented even more fun by playing games such as trying to beat a self-imposed time limit while washing dog bowls or hosing down crates. She's discovering what research is indicating: work does not preclude play. Play energizes our work. And playful writers energize their work with fun In a 2009 TED talk, Dr. Stuart Brown claims play is more than fun—it's vital for adults. "Nothing lights up the brain like play." Jessica Walsh writes in a Good Magazine article that play is vital for brain growth. And she says several conditions are helpful for play to succeed, like having the confidence to fail, having plenty of time to play around with our work, having persistence, and having space to experiment. If we’ve been all work and no play for months on end, we’ll need to experiment to find what fits us and discover the best way to incorporate it into our days. Dr. Brown says, in that TED talk, to explore back as far as you can to your "most clear, joyful, playful image," whether it's with a toy, at a birthday, or on a vacation. Build that joy into your life now. Are you the type to repurpose juice bottles into musical instruments, or draw smiley faces on milk cartons? Pull out the Sharpies and duct tape and give it a try. Pull out a puzzle to work on, or challenge someone to a game of Bananagrams. Crank up some disco music and spin a hula hoop. Or play in the world of words. Write some flash fiction, pen a poem from a prompt, write a goofy letter to a friend in the voice of a long-lost aunt. Let play remind you how to be childlike. Let it light up your brain and feed your creativity. Research says the playful writer will come back with more energy and ideas than ever. If you are able to pull out that early, clear, joyful memory and write about it, or if you do something playful this week, would you let us know? Drop into the comments below a link to something you write, or explain it to us.  Ideas from this episode: Dr. Stuart Brown in a Ted talk says play is more than fun—it's vital for adults. "Nothing lights up the brain like play." Jessica Walsh writes that play is vital to brain growth. She writes that to be playful, we need: confidence to fail plenty of time persistence time away from responsibilities Dr. Brown suggests thinking back to childhood, to the most "clear, joyful, playful image that you have," and try to incorporate that into your life today. Play: spin hula hoop, work a puzzle Play with words: Write some poetry or flash fiction Resources: How to Be More Productive and Creative at Work? Play More Play is More Than Just Fun (Dr. Brown's Ted talk transcript) Poetry Prompts from Tweetspeak Poetry Stories in Your Pocket: How to Write Flash Fiction * * * Listen for the full podcast. You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive.

Show Notes Summary: My friend John, an entrepreneur, said to me years ago: Action creates clarity. I’ve passed this nugget along to many people who are just sitting on an idea, afraid to take action, worried they’ll get it wrong. Once you take action, you might feel like you’re stumbling or making mistakes, but what you’re doing is gathering information so you can adapt, fill in the gaps, improve, build and grow. I found the phrase actually originates not with my friend John, but with Peter Sheahan, in a book called FL!P. Sheahan talks about microplanning and overplanning, researching incessantly and planning and strategizing to the point where we're procrastinating and practically paralyzed. "[Y]ou can’t plan your way to greatness. There is nothing more valuable for your business (and for your life and career) than to do away with your commitment to microplanning everything and to let loose with some bold and courageous action" (29). I agree. It's time to do something. Write something. To take action and gain clarity. Start trying to express your thoughts and as you write, your ideas and stories will solidify—or maybe they'll get muddier! But you’ll know what to do next. You’ll know what information to seek out, the research you need to do, the questions to ask, the people to talk to. It's time for us to take bold and courageous action, so we can have clarity not only on our projects, but also on ourselves. We can become the writers we were meant to be, writing the works we were meant to write. Listen for the full podcast. Ideas from this episode: Fear, perfectionism, and a desire to maintain control can all keep us from taking action. We need to reframe "failure" because to improve, we need the information and clarity that comes from taking action. If you want quality, you need clarity, which you can only get from taking action and figuring out what to tweak. Everyone's afraid. The ones who come out on top are the ones who take action. Resources: #1: Just Get Started (the first episode of this podcast, where I model action by starting this podcast a year ago) Source: Sheahan, Peter. Fl!p: How to Succeed by Turning Everything You Know on Its Head. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Print. [Library] * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive

Show Notes Summary: This is the time of year when people look back at 2015 and consider how they did at achieving their goals, then they look ahead to 2016 and start to plan the year ahead. They decide the habits they want to eradicate and establish, and the goals they want to achieve. It happens that this time of resolution setting overlaps with the Play Project: Every single day in January I'm going to do something big or small to be more playful. When you think back to the early days of your writing life, do you remember being playful? Playing with words and stories? Writing just for the fun of it? If we can regain that playful freedom as writers, we'll find freedom to be more creative and productive. Look ahead. Dream big. Set goals. And actually plan some play. Kickstart it by joining the Play Project, intentionally setting aside time to play every day for a month. Try something you've never tried before. Lose yourself in your work, in your art. When you play, you'll likely start to turn out fresh, original work you never realized was in you. If you make January a month of play, and 2016 a year of play, maybe you'll end up with a lifetime of play. Listen for the full podcast. Ideas from this episode: Planning a year of play will free you to be more creative and original. Resources: The Play Project: A Month of Fun for Anyone (especially writers and other creatives) #29: The Energizing Work of a Playful Writer Take Your Play History * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive ______________________________ Is your writing life all it can be?   Let this book act as your personal coach, to explore the writing life you already have and the writing life you wish for, and close the gap between the two. "A genial marriage of practice and theory. For writers new and seasoned. This book is a winner." —Phil Gulley, author of Front Porch Tales

Show Notes Summary: Think of something you’ve really wanted to write...something that feels exciting to try, maybe a little risky to undertake...something you feel is urgent or important. And you haven’t written it yet because you’re scared. You could be scared for a lot of reasons: Maybe you’re a little scared because it’s a new style for you, or a new genre, and you feel you’ve don’t have the skills or experience to pull it off. Maybe you’re a little scared because it’s a new style, a new genre, and you’re afraid people may laugh at you for trying something other than what you’re known for. Maybe you’re a little scared because the subject matter is challenging or emotional. Maybe you’re a little scared because writing it will name other people and you’re afraid of the relational fallout. Maybe you’re a little scared because you start so many things and never finish them, you’re afraid this will be yet another project to add to the half-done list. You find it easier if you don’t start it at all. You could be scared for a lot of reasons. But if you really want to write something and you’re scared...write it. Write it scared. Take a minute to think about this project...if you go ahead and write it, even though it scares you, and you finish it, will you look back in ten years and be glad? If you don’t write it, will you look back in ten years and wish you had written it? In the podcast, I address some of the reasons you may be scared and urge you to leave time in your days for some quiet mental space, some playful distractions, and some easy interactions—things to refuel you emotionally and prepare you to keep writing the next day. Before you click away from this post or podcast, write the idea, the scene, the working title on a piece of paper or scribble it in your journal—use code if you want to hide it from others for now. And when you’re sitting at your computer, open a file. Give it a title. And write three lines of that thing you really want to write. Three lines. You can do that. You’ve got the skills, no one needs to know yet. It’s time to write that thing you really want to write. That thing that scares you. Write it. Write it scared. Listen for the full podcast. Resources: To ensure you have some down time including playful distractions, check out The Play Project: A Month of Fun for Anyone (especially writers and other creatives), #29: The Energizing Work of a Playful Writer, and Take Your Play History #30: Action Creates Clarity Password protect a document (in Word) * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. Photograph by Ryan McGuire, via Gratisography under Creative Commons Zero terms. Words added by Ann Kroeker. ______________________________ Is your writing life all it can be?   Let this book act as your personal coach, to explore the writing life you already have and the writing life you wish for, and close the gap between the two. "A genial marriage of practice and theory. For writers new and seasoned. This book is a winner." —Phil Gulley, author of Front Porch Tales

Show Notes   Summary: Last week I urged you to write that thing that scares you...and to get started by writing three sentences. Did you do that? Did you write those three sentences? I did. I dove straight into the thing that scares me and wrote three sentences. Then three more. Then a whole paragraph. And another. I got going and didn’t stop for two pages. Then, okay, then I stopped because I started to feel a bunch of feelings sloshing around inside me and I was sitting in the library and didn’t want to slosh out a lot of tears in front of the librarian helping a woman search for a biography. So I stopped writing for the day. The progress reminded me that a few sentences quickly grow to be a paragraph and another and next thing you know, you have a scene or a chapter. Committing to those first three sentences engaged my mind; once engaged, the ideas flowed. I would have continued had I been in a more private location. Another way of looking at those three sentences is that even if I’d managed only three sentences and no more, I would have made progress. The only way I won’t make progress is by not writing at all. If I manage to write three sentences and stop, the piece has begun, ever so slightly, to exist and take shape. Don’t underestimate the power of those first three sentences to get a project—especially a scary one—in motion. It’s like you’re committing to more if you get three sentences down and return the next day and add three more. In fact, next time, you might add four. Author and speaker James Clear explores how small habits can change our lives. In one article, he tells about Dave Brailsford, the General Manager and Performance Director for Great Britain’s professional cycling team, who started to train his team in 2010 using an approach he referred to as the “aggregation of marginal gains” which was “the 1 percent margin for improvement in everything you do.” The idea was those small gains would add up and you’d meet your goal, over time. Their goal was to win the Tour de France. They looked for 1 percent improvements in every aspect of these cyclist’s lives, from what they ate to how they slept. Brailsford anticipated they’d win in five years. Surprise! They won it in three years...and then they went on to dominate the 2012 Olympic Games, won the Tour de France again in 2013 with another rider on the team. How does the Aggregation of Marginal Gains affect us today, as writers, writing three sentences a day? James Clear says, “Almost every habit that you have — good or bad — is the result of many small decisions over time...And yet, how easily we forget this when we want to make a change.” He did a “tiny gains” challenge with exercise, adding on a tiny bit of weight to his strength training program and encouraging others to add a tiny bit to whatever their exercise was, whether it’s squats, pushups, or walking. In other words, tiny gains add up. Three sentences per day on any project, whether it scares you or not, will add up. Start with three sentences, and to make tiny gains over time, try adding an extra sentence each week. This means you'd write three sentences every day the first week. The following week, you'd write four sentences each day, and so on. If you have a crazy week or day, revert back to the minimum of at least three sentences to ensure you'll make progress. But think of ways you can make tiny gains, because a few sentences will become a paragraph, a few paragraphs become a chapter. And a few chapters become a book. Set out to write at least three sentences. And then the following week, try to make a tiny gain, whatever that means for you. And sentence by sentence, you're going to meet your goal, because tiny gains over time add up. Listen for the full podcast. Resources: #32: What's the Thing You Really Want to Write...That Scares You? #14: Progress, Not Perfection The 2015 Tiny Gains Challenge (James Clear)

Show Notes Summary: When you wake up in the morning and dive into your to-do list—maybe you made it the night before, maybe in the morning, or maybe you make it up on the fly—isn't it gratifying to cross things off? It provides a sense of closure—of satisfaction—for getting something done. Then you move on to the next thing. It's a productive approach to make the list and check things off. But the tendency we can have is to continually look ahead to what we have yet to do, and never really stop, look back, and reflect on the day and say, "Look at all I got done!" So as writers, as we set out with a goal of writing 500 words or so many pages each day, at the end of that day it's almost like we press restart and look ahead to the next day rather than taking those few minutes to say, "Hey, I actually got that done!" Today I recommend you come up with a system to reflect at the end of the day on what you got done, so you can celebrate what's done! Productivity expert Claire Burge recommended to me an app called idonethis. The program sends you an email at the end of the day, and you reply to the email, listing what you did, as a way to document what you completed. You can look at a calendar that shows what you completed on any given day. It's helpful for people who love digital solutions, but you could keep the list just as easily in a journal, notebook or Evernote note. However you go about it, I want you to reflect on what you did, and celebrate what's done. idonethis screenshot showing completed items to celebrate Even if you don't make it all the way through your to-do list and you have to copy things over to the next day, you can still be satisfied at what you got done, and celebrate what's done. Listen for the full podcast. Resources: idonethis.com Claire Burge Evernote #14: Progress, Not Perfection All the Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach podcasts since day one * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. ______________________________ It's January ... are you still playing?  This month I'm encouraging everyone—anyone, especially writers and other creatives—to take time out of every day to play. Learn more: #PlayProject Update Week Two #PlayProject Update Week One Podcast episode #31: Play a Playful Year Main Play Project Page (complete with worksheets and inspiring quotes)      

Show Notes Summary: Episode #35: Want to Be a More Creative Writer? Get Curious! Curiosity can distract us from our work and disrupt our productivity. Curiosity can tempt us to waste time watching Buzzfeed and Upworthy videos, discover our friends' latest Facebook updates, tag trends on Twitter, and obsessively check weather reports. But curiosity is a powerful force—an energizing force—that can fuel our creativity if we lasso its power and funnel it in the right direction. Curiosity can lead us new ways of looking at the world, new people who can guide and inspire us. Curiosity can lead us to new books, new blogs, new podcasts, new poems, new ideas. Curiosity sends us in search of answers to questions, and solutions to problems. Curiosity is key to creativity. This month, I hosted the Play Project, where I encouraged people to engage in playful activities, to add fun to their days. Though I haven’t really linked the two ideas during the PlayProject, play and curiosity are complementary concepts. Curiosity leads us to trying new things, exploring new places, meeting new people, creating something artistic—all playful activities. See how all three of those go together: play, creativity, and curiosity? Writers who integrate these three things into their lives fill their minds with fresh ideas and images and fuel their creative energy. Whether you write fiction or non-fiction, long-form or short, poetry or blog posts, you can lasso curiosity to be a powerful force in your writing life. Todd Kashdan, author of Curious?, writes, "While intelligence is quite resistant to change, curiosity can be cultivated, and it is available to anyone who desires a fulfilling life" (37). And Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi, author of Flow, explains: Each of us is born with two contradictory sets of instructions: a conservative tendency, made up of instincts for self-preservation...and saving energy, and an expansive tendency made up of instincts for exploring, for enjoying novelty and risk. We need both. But whereas the first tendency requires little encouragement, the second can wilt if it is not cultivated. If too few opportunities for curiosity are available, if too many obstacles are placed in the way of risk and exploration, the motivation to engage in creative behavior is easily extinguished. Sustaining high levels of curiosity is the starting point of creativity...the first step toward a more creative life is the cultivation of curiosity and interest, that is, the allocation of attention to things for their own sake. We need to cultivate this daily. A playful mindset can shake us out of our predictability and increase curiosity in our everyday lives. Mihaly says, “When there's nothing specific to do, our thoughts soon return to the most predictable state, which is randomness or confusion. We pay attention and concentrate when we must … But when there is no external force demanding that we concentrate, we lose focus. Our mind falls to the lowest energetic state, where the least amount of effort is required." Learning to be more curious helps us focus on our work and our ideas with fresh perspective and increased creativity. Well, I hope you’re convinced that curiosity is worth developing and practicing. But how do we get there? Mihaly has some suggestions. To get more curious: try to be surprised by something every day try to surprise at least one person everyday write down each day what surprised you and how you surprised others when something strikes a spark of interest, follow it. That right there is key to fueling our creativity when we're working on our writing projects. When something strikes a spark of interest, follow it. It lead you to a new project, it can lead you to a new solution to something you're stumped with, it can energize you when you're feeling kind of...in a slump. Let me leave you with this quote I found at Brain Pickings. It's from Susan Sontag: Do stuff.

Show Notes: Episode #36: Why Writers Need Five Fat Files Years ago, I heard about author Elizabeth George’s five fat files. Her idea is to pick five areas you’d like to grow in and even develop into an expert in, and focus your resources on those five areas. They could be five ideas, topics, themes, or skills, and they are five areas you can live with for a long, long time. Because you’re investing in them in a way that invests in yourself as a writer, and as a person, over time. Already you might find yourself starting to sort through what you might make your main five files. To try to figure yours out, I suggest you begin by asking a few questions: First, where does your curiosity consistently carry you? Last week we talked about following the spark of interest and letting curiosity make us more creative writers. What sparks your interest? Over the years have you seen a trend? Another obvious question to ask is what do you already know a lot about? And...do you want to go deeper with it? An article at Path of Life Christian Coaching asks two more profound questions that can take it to the next level. They ask: What would you like to be known for?  What would you like your name to be associated with? These questions can help you sort that through and figure out what your five fat files will be. As we review the questions, answer them in your head: Where does curiosity tend to lead you? What do you already know a lot about, and would you like to go deeper with it? What would you like to be known for? What would you like your name to be associated with? With these questions, you can begin homing in on your five main themes, your five favorite topics of interest, your five skills and areas of expertise you’d like to explore. You don’t have to have five, but it’s an effective number. If you get too many, it’s harder to go deep with any of them. If you have too few, you might get bored. As soon as you’ve identified one of the five, you can begin the process of gathering material to read, to absorb, to own. You can create physical files or digital files to store them in. Whatever you choose, you want to make it easy to access, easy to organize, easy to keep track of all the citation information so you can go back and figure out your original sources, so set up a simple system that you can tweak as you go. But most importantly, start learning. Start practicing. Start increasing the depth of your understanding. Read books and peer-reviewed studies Attend lectures and seminars and conferences Meet other experts and talk with them or interview them Take classes Visit locations. Write about the topics, ideas, knowledge, or skills you’re acquiring--and the more you know, the more you’ll be able to write about it. By focusing on five areas of interest, knowledge or skills, you make decisions more easily. Because you know what you’re focusing on in life and as a writer, you can easily skim an article and realize it isn’t contributing to your bank of knowledge or ability. Your five files will grow fat over time, and you’ll begin to dive deep. As you continue to let curiosity lead the way, you’re funneling it to these topics. You'll gain information that raises still more questions. When you’ve hit on the five areas that are right for you, you’ll find that the more you know, the more you want to know. Writers need five fat files to have a boundless supply of ideas and material for the work they're doing, and to grow into an expert people turn to. Five fat files means you aren’t limited to just one thing, so you aren’t necessarily pigeon-holed or typecast. It inspires us to find all we can on the things that engage our minds. Those questions once again: Where does curiosity tend lead you? What do you already know a lot about and would you like to go deeper with it? What would you like to be known for?

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #37: How Good Does My Writing Need to Be Online? Not long ago, writer, poet and blogger Christina Hubbard asked me, “How polished should a blog post be?” Shortly after she asked that, I saw a presentation by a successful young online entrepreneur who suggested that blogs can be a little sloppy; people reading online don’t mind an error here or there. Blogging’s casual, he said, so don’t worry about it—the mistakes make you more real. I couldn’t help but notice a similar message from another young online entrepreneur who trains business owners how to communicate their message more clearly. She urges people to get their message out there. Don’t let perfectionism hold you back, she says. Better to get the message out into the world than to wait forever and never take action because you’re afraid it’s not perfect—or you keep trying to make it perfect. What do you think? Is the first person right? Do people expect blog posts to be messy? Maybe some readers don’t mind. But then I think...well, I’m a reader. I'm also a writer, a writing coach, and an editor, but as a reader, I disagree. I spotted many typos in someone’s webinar a few weeks ago, and maybe it’s because of my work—maybe a typical viewer wouldn’t react the same—but that sort of lowered my trust in the presenter’s message. I advise writers to produce their best work every time they write. Three Big Reasons to Publish Quality Blog Posts If you've wondered how good your writing online needs to be, I have three big reasons to give it your best, even if it means publishing less frequently. 1. It’s a first impression to readers. People arrive at your website a lot of different ways: from a link on someone’s blog, from a link in social media, through a search, from a referral. They could arrive at a post you published last year or yesterday, and if this is the first time they encounter you, they’re going to make a quick decision about what kind of writer you are in the first few lines. If it’s riddled with errors, delivers little value, or doesn’t flow well, what impression have you left them with? Give every article your best effort, because with a good impression, you could convert a casual one-time visitor to a subscriber to wants to read more from you. 2. It’s your online portfolio. You may have a tab on your blog where you present an official portfolio, but everything you publish on your website becomes an unofficial contribution to your portfolio. Not only casual readers who could be converted to fans or followers but also industry influencers could find their way to your home online. Imagine if the post you churn out without a lot of effort ends up being a publisher’s first encounter with you. If this person is going to recommend you to an acquisitions editor or make a decision about offering you a contract, why give them a reason to hesitate? Show them quality work anywhere they might land on your site. 3. It’s a key element to building your platform. Some of us have been told that our platform depends upon frequent and consistent publishing online, to bulk up our site's content. To pull that off as one lone blogger is asking a lot when we have so many other tasks. In order to stay on schedule and keep up the pace, we might be tempted to push something out before it's ready. But you want to deliver value to readers and build a reputation as someone who has ideas, answers to questions, solutions to problems, and thoughtful input on a topic or theme. Better to take your time and write fewer posts that will be saved and shared and build your name in association with that field or genre or topic than to spit out a few short posts that didn’t contribute much to the bigger conversation. Part of building a platform is to become a resource or spokesperson for something. Even if it’s poetry or storytelling, you want to be known for quality work. More frequent posting may or may not increase our exposure...

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #38: Manage Your Space, Time, Energy and Attention To be a more successful writer, you're probably going to have to be a more productive writer. To be more productive, it's best to learn to manage several things, including the space in which you work, the time you have to work, your energy levels, and your attention, or focus, on any given thing. I'm going to introduce them in today's episode and dive more deeply into them in successive episodes. Today, I want you to begin doing an evaluation or inventory of each of these four areas of your writing life: Space Time Energy levels Attention, or focus Pull out your favorite way to take notes, whether it's in Evernote or on a piece of paper, and start making lists. First, look at your space. If it's a mobile office, do you have what you need in the bag you carry with you to the coffee shop or library? If you have dedicated office space, take a look around. What's missing, what's working, what needs to change? Make it a priority to create the kind of space you need, to be a productive writer who gets the work done. To better manage your time, you'll want to do a time inventory. We'll talk about this in more detail later, but the more information you have, the better. You can use a lot of different tools. The simplest is to use a notebook and pen, and write down start and stop times for various tasks. By doing this, you begin to see the time truly available to you as a writer. Next is energy levels. Start now tracking energy levels to help determine how to organize your day to take advantage of peak energy. You probably already know whether you're a morning person or evening person, but if you start tracking it, you may find opportunities you might not have realized were there. There has been a lot of talk about maximizing focus. Minimizing distractions maximizes focus, and that's how we gain productivity, they claim. We're going to evaluate what distracts us and see whether or not managing our attention makes a difference in our productivity. If we focus on these four areas, I'm convinced we can increase productivity as writers, even if we're working with limited space, limited time, limited energy, and limited focus. Do what you can in the days ahead to take stock. Gather up your materials. Take good notes. And tune in next week. Listen for the full podcast. * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. Image by Ann Kroeker, using photo by Ryan McGuire via Gratisography, free of copyright restrictions.

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #39: Manage Your Writing Space to Be a More Productive Writer In the last episode I introduced four areas we writers can begin to evaluate and inventory in order to increase productivity: our writing space, time, energy, and attention. My hope is that through this series we see ways to prioritize our writing—and ourselves as writers—so that our decisions reflect that priority. When we manage our writing lives with intentionality, our space, time, energy and attention can be arranged to reduce barriers to productivity. The first goal is to manage our writing spaces. Maybe your space is a table at a coffee shop, maybe it’s a desk in the corner of your bedroom, or maybe it’s a dedicated home office. Are you in your writing space right now? If so, look around. If you're not in your writing space, try to visualize your space. Look at the flat surfaces and pause at the papers and any electronics you use. Think about your chair if you sit to work, and what’s at your fingertips. If you stand, what’s at eye level and what’s around you if you turn in a full circle? What’s working well for you? What makes you happy? Can you identify all the things that energize you to work creatively when you’re writing? Do you have on hand the equipment you need to efficiently plow through administrative tasks—anything from a stapler to a well-designed mouse? Have you incorporated some decorative items that reflect your personality and make you smile? How well does the color of your workspace suit you? Have you included at least one or two things that contribute to your health, like a water bottle, a plant, or an exercise ball you can sit on or use during breaks to stretch and strengthen? Did your eye land on something that bugged you a little—something that’s stealing some of your energy? Maybe it’s a stack of papers you need to file or a bag of trash that needs to go out. In the corner of my office, I’ve stacked several storage boxes packed with stuff I need to deal with. These nag at me and subtly draw my mind away from the writing I want and need to do. And how’s the lighting? Could you replace fluorescent with incandescent lights? Would a whiteboard help you create mind maps for your projects? Would a long blank wall serve as a place to stick Post-its and map out the plot of your novel? Or could it become an idea wall where you post a collage of images that inspire you to stick with your big picture goals and your crazy writing dreams? Do you need to save money to upgrade equipment and pay for faster WiFi? Do you want to try a standing desk for part of the day and see how it affects your energy level and creative process? Is it time to incorporate a more ergonomic chair despite how well the current one from IKEA matches your decor? Make a punch list that includes: things you want to rearrange things you want to get rid of items you want to swap out for something better goodies you want to make or buy new and incorporate into your space piles or containers you need to deal with soon Keep that as a master to-do list, so you can work your way through. This coming week, I urge you to do one thing on that list each day. After you check something off, see how your body, mind, attention and energy respond to the change. And let me leave you with an additional challenge: If your workspace isn’t clear, bump that up in priority. At the end of your work day, as you’re winding down, take a minute to clear your desk and restore the order.  I actually have that as a recurring item on my digital to-do list, and I check it off each day after I complete it: clean and clear desk. You know what happens? My future self the next morning thanks me, because I get a fresh start. Take the time to evaluate, manage, organize, and maintain your writing space and you will be a more productive writer. Listen for the full podcast. * * *

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #40: Take Charge of Your Writing Space, Tasks, and Projects Episode 38 introduced four major areas we can manage: our writing space, time, energy, and attention. The next week, in episode 39, I posed a series of questions to help us evaluate our writing spaces in order to create a master "punch list" to work through in the week ahead. In this episode, I review some progress I made on my own punch list; remind us to add a whimsical, playful element to our workspace; and then dive into another aspect of our space—ways to manage our writing tasks and projects. Whether you choose an analog or digital solution (or a combination of both), dump everything into one task management or project management system and commit to it. Have your system (journal, notebook, checklist, or app) with you at all times to store any ideas that come to mind. Finally, before we leave the topic of managing our space and move on to managing our time, I suggest thinking through a system for storing and accessing physical files—printed paperwork. Digitize what you can and store the scanned documents on a hard drive or app like Evernote. For the remaining physical, printed documents that must be archived or at your fingertips for easy access, a simple drawer with file folders may do the trick. Take charge of your space, tasks, and projects for a more productive (and I predict happier) writing life. Post your progress on Instagram, Twitter or Facebook using #writingspace, and I'll try to track you down! I'd love to read about (and see) how your space is shaping up. Listen for the full podcast. Resources: The Play Project: A Month of Fun for Anyone (especially writers and other creatives) Take Your Play History #29: The Energizing Work of a Playful Writer #31: Plan a Playful Year #39: Manage Your Writing Space to Be a More Productive Writer #38: Manage Your Writing Space, Time, Energy, and Attention Beyond the To-Do List podcast episode that mentions committing to one project management system Todoist.com Bullet Journal overview Bullet Journal search on Pinterest Poets & Writers Toolkit: Productivity Apps for Busy Writers (Tweetspeak Poetry) 20 Awesome DIY Office Organization Ideas That Boost Efficiency (via Lifehack)  * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. Image by Ann Kroeker, using photo from Pixabay, free for use under Creative Commons CC0.

Show Notes   Summary: Episode #41: 5 Steps to Find Time for Writing This week I planned to record a podcast about managing time and—wouldn't you know it—I had absolutely no time to record it. I’m not 100 percent sure that’s situational irony, but I can tell you it is definitely 100 percent frustrating. At any rate, I finally snatched some time to record it, and I'm offering five steps to find time for writing. The steps are: Figure out what you're doing with your days. Stop doing some of those things by eliminating, delegating, or pausing anything you can. Determine if you're in a chaotic season, and if you are, admit it and as much as possible, embrace it. If you have a predictable schedule, block off time for writing; if you're in a chaotic season, be ready to snatch an opportunity when time opens up. When you find the time, write. Soon you'll see how managing our energy and attention fits together with managing our space and time, but we have to find time for writing before we can make the most of it with maximum energy and attention. Listen for the full podcast. Resources: #40: Take Charge of Your Writing Space, Tasks, and Projects #39: Manage Your Writing Space to Be a More Productive Writer #38: Manage Your Writing Space, Time, Energy, and Attention Toggl app to track time * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player you use. Connect with me on Twitter and Facebook, where I'm always sharing ideas to help us be more curious, creative, and productive. Image by Ann Kroeker, using photo from Pixabay, free for use under Creative Commons CC0.

Show Notes  Episode #42: Manage Your Energy So You Can Write In this longer-than-normal episode (over 7 minutes), I offer ideas for how to manage your energy as a writer. You’ve taken charge of your writing space and begun to prioritize it. You’ve figured out where your time is going and now you're scheduling a regular writing slot and/or grabbing opportunities where you can. Now it’s time to manage your energy to make the most of that time. Takeaway 1: Managing our energy starts with identifying activities that energize or drain us. If you do something for 40 minutes that drains you while I do something for those same 40 minutes that energizes me, I'll be able to continue making progress without much of a break, while you may need to pause and create some space. Takeaway 2: Doing an energy audit can help us understand the flow of our days—our natural peak energy hours, and the times of day we dip into valleys. Whenever possible, we can schedule writing for peak energy, when creativity is at its max. The audit may also reveal bad habits that are causing the valleys. Takeaway 3: Improve your sleep (get enough sleep, and make sure it's quality sleep), nutrition (read studies to see pros and cons of caffeine, and determine the best foods to eat for meals and snacks), and exercise, and you’ll maximize your energy so you can write. Takeaway 4: Try one of the following three actionable ideas today, during your writing hours, to boost energy while you work. Standing desk: I've been using a DIY standing desk for several months (in conjunction with a normal, sit-down desk), and I find that standing to write keeps me more alert, creative, and productive—especially at times of the day when I'd be lagging. Mini exercise breaks: Once in a while, when you feel you're losing focus, take a five-minute break and do some sit-ups, jumping jacks, the plank, or a few minutes of hula hooping. These brief, focused exercise sessions not only improve strength and flexibility, they also energize our minds when we return to our writing. Drink water: During a low energy time, we may reach for caffeine when what we really need is to simply hydrate. A big glass of water may energize you without relying on coffee. These simple solutions offer immediate results to help us manage our energy so we can write. Listen for the full podcast. Lots of Resources: #41: 5 Steps to Find Time for Writing #40: Take Charge of Your Writing Space, Tasks, and Projects #39: Manage Your Writing Space to Be a More Productive Writer #38: Manage Your Writing Space, Time, Energy, and Attention Manage Energy, Not Time (article by Jenné Fromm on tracking whether an activity energizes or drains) 8 Healthy Ways to Boost Energy and How to Eat Healthy Throughout the Day for Maximum Productivity (both articles include tip of drinking water) How to Get Better Sleep (And Need Less Every Night) 7 Things You Didn't Know about Caffeine and How to get as much energy out of caffeine as possible (both are pro-caffeine, in moderation) 10 Reasons to Quit Your Coffee Five Health Benefits of Standing Desks 44 Benefits of a Standing Desk (from the maker of one) How to Use Your Body's Circadian Rhythm as a Recipe for Productivity Beyond the To-Do List podcast episode (mentions several ideas including drinking water and exercise breaks for energy) * * * You can subscribe with iTunes and Stitcher, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. You can also use the feed with any podcast player. Image by Isabelle Kroeker.

Show Notes  Episode #43: How to Avoid Distraction and Manage Attention to Write In this episode, I take both a macro and micro view of attention, focus, and distraction. At the macro level, I suggest that formulating a general plan of where you’d like to go as a writer will make it easier to focus your attention on how a given activity fits into the big picture (and you can more easily resist Shiny Object Syndrome). At the micro level, we can focus our attention by minimizing everyday, moment-by-moment distractions. Clear your desk. Try the Pomodoro technique. When you launch your writing session, silence phone notifications, close the browser. You can even try using the "focus" view in Word to minimize visual distractions on the screen. In addition, we can learn to become "meta-aware," noticing when our mind is wandering. When we increase meta-awareness, we can learn to nudge our mind back to the task at hand by telling ourselves, “Okay, I’m writing now. So, quiet. I’m trying to concentrate." Listen for the full podcast. Lots of Resources: #42: Manage Your Energy So You Can Write #41: 5 Steps to Find Time for Writing #40: Take Charge of Your Writing Space, Tasks, and Projects #39: Manage Your Writing Space to Be a More Productive Writer #38: Manage Your Writing Space, Time, Energy, and Attention Novelty and the Brain: Why New Things Make Us Feel So Good Concentrate! How to Tame a Wandering Mind Write in the Middle: Yes, You Can Maximize Distraction-Free Writing Write in the Middle of Everyday Distractions: 7 Strategies for Getting Back on Track Productivity 101: A Primer to the Pomodoro Technique * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. Image by Ann Kroeker.

Show Notes  Episode #44: Why Every Writer Needs a Buddy You may feel like such an introvert, you don’t want or need a writing buddy. And it’s true that most of the time you do the work of writing all by yourself. When you write, it’s just you and the keyboard...it’s just you and the screen. But let’s say you finished the draft of an essay you plan to submit to a literary journal, and you really want another set of eyes. Wouldn’t it be nice to phone another writer—someone who could provide a little input? You could swap projects and offer a few thoughts on each other's work. Wouldn’t that be a great gift to both of you? Or maybe you simply hold each other accountable to deadlines and goals in a weekly or monthly check-in. If one of you is stuck on a project, the other could offer ideas as you talk it through. In this episode, I suggest where to find a writing buddy, when you should ask someone to be a mentor or coach instead of a buddy, and what you can gain from forming this relationship. I hope you can find someone you trust, who asks about your projects and cheers you on—someone who trusts you, too, as you cheer him on. Listen for the full podcast. Resources: Bless, Assess or Press (a way to ask for input from someone reviewing your work) How to Write Together (the day my writing buddy Charity Singleton Craig and I wrote together) * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. Image by Isabelle Kroeker.

Show Notes  Episode #45: You Don't Have to Do It All The writing life involves a lot more than writing. These days a writer has to at least consider blogging, even if she isn’t officially a blogger. A writer has to build up an online presence and think about platform, encouraging likes, follows, and pins. A writer is encouraged to do readings and speak and present. Writers learn to propose and pitch and query, and to promote their work online and in real life. We do all this when all we really want to do is sit down and pen a few lines of poetry, write another romance novel, compose a screenplay, or finish the draft of an article for a dream publication. As the list grows long, we start to see things sitting unfinished and half-done on our screen or our to-do list. We can’t get everything done. We can’t. We’re just one person trying to write something meaningful, something funny, something true. Sometimes we’re going to have to pick just one thing, do that well, and be okay with the rest waiting another day. If you’ve been putting a lot of pressure on yourself to try it all, to get it right, to work nonstop, to reach every goal in a tight time frame, and everything’s falling apart or you’re falling apart...give yourself a break. For a few minutes. For a day. Sit down and have some tea. Or stand up, and stretch or dance. And when you finish that break, pull out a Post-It and write on it no more than three things you can honestly pull off. Depending on what time of day it is, you might just write one thing on that little square of paper. Or maybe it’s bedtime. Put away the paper and get some sleep. Because you can’t do it all. And that’s okay. You don’t have to do it all. At the very least, though, make sure ... you write. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: #9: Start Where You Are #12: Rest and Productivity #14: Progress, Not Perfection #34: Celebrate What's Done * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. Photo of artwork and image design by Ann Kroeker.

Summary and Show Notes Episode #46: What's the Big Idea? Whether you start writing and discover what you want to say as the words spill out, or you outline and plot it all out in advance, either way, you probably have a big idea. With the first method, you may not be able to articulate it up front, but I’ll bet some spark of a driving thought sent you to the screen or the page. As you write, the big idea becomes clearer and clearer. If you are the latter personality as a writer—the outliner or plotter—you probably couldn’t organize your material if you didn’t have that controlling idea. Back in high school and college, the big idea might have been called the controlling idea or the thesis. Remember the thesis? You were probably trained to express it as one sentence—a statement that is, in fact, arguable. The thesis statement expresses the big idea of your project in that one sentence and then you set out to explore and support this statement. That seems so...academic. Author and writing coach Jack Hart's approach is less academic and more practical. He explains: I always start every piece of writing I do by thinking about what is the core thing that I really want to say. And the first thing that I always write is theme—the word theme, t-h-e-m-e, colon—and then try to come up with a theme statement that is a simple subject-predicate-object sentence that is my core idea. It probably will never appear in print, so there's no angst associated with it. It's not for public consumption. But it's right there on the top of my screen to guide me all through the writing process...it's a lot easier to write if you know where you're headed. In his book A Writer's Coach, Hart offers an example of a theme statement: EX: [SUBJECT] [TRANSITIVE VERB] [OBJECT] [The myth of the perfect first line] [obscures] [the importance of focus and organization] So that sentence—The myth of the perfect first line obscures the importance of focus and organization—appears at the top of his screen, to remind him where he's headed. Next time you set out to write, consider writing at the top of your screen your controlling idea, your theme statement, your thesis, or, simply, your big idea. Let that guide you. Because it's a lot easier to write, if you know where you're headed. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resource: Ep 169: How to Be a Better Writer: Boost All 7 Traits of Great Writing "Getting into the Writing Game, With Words of Advice From a Coach" (interview with Jack Hart) * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. Featured image design by Ann Kroeker (photo via Pixabay, Creative Commons).

Episode #47: Don't Be Afraid to Evolve The Evolution of Projects Don’t be afraid of letting a writing piece sit until the idea grows and matures to the point where you feel you’ve got a handle on it. It happens with lots of writing projects, as drafts 1 to 20 and beyond take a twist or turn, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry or essays. Book proposals are an interesting example, especially nonfiction proposals. The author puts together an idea he feels great about and submits it. The agent or acquisitions editor shows interest, but contacts the author saying they like it, but would like to see some tweaks and changes. If the heart of the message or idea remains and the author has the time, energy, and grit, I’d encourage him to go for it. Don’t be afraid to let that project evolve to give that publisher what they think will sell in the market and best serve their readers. The evolution of an individual project is an expected part of the writing process, but don’t be afraid to evolve as a writer. The Evolution of the Writer You might launch your career thinking you’re a poet. That’s how I started. Over the years I've gone on to publish everything from feature stories in newspapers and magazine articles, to books and a podcast. From poet to podcaster, I evolved. With each new venture, I wasn’t always sure I wanted to take the risk of being a beginner in that area. It would have been easier not to evolve—to stick with what I knew. The Evolution of This Podcast In fact, if you’ve followed this podcast for long, you know that it, too, has evolved. When I launched, I called it The Writing Life with Ann Kroeker. But somewhere along the way, I realized a technological misunderstanding on my part meant I thought my podcast name was used for the feed in places like iTunes, but all that time it was actually grabbing the name of my website, which is Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach. I had to adjust in some way, to make some decisions, to evolve. Would I launch a new site devoted to the podcast using that original name, disentangling it from my main website and blog? Or would I simply change the name of the podcast midstream, renaming and rebranding it to what iTunes thought it was all along and leave everything else the same? I chose the latter. That’s why you’re listening to Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach. At risk of confusing listeners, I let the podcast evolve. Stay Focused or Evolve? If you’re feeling safe and secure in the genre you know well, where you’ve gained accolades and name recognition, that’s great. It shows you are working toward mastery. You’re focused. If you are scared to evolve, however, and that’s holding you back from something you’d like to try, don’t let fear keep you from evolving. You may find that the new type of writing you wanted to try ends up being your sweet spot, and you never would have known if you hadn’t let yourself evolve. A lot of us feel we don’t have a lot of extra time to mess around—like we need to stay laser focused to accomplish our goals. And that very well may be. You may have the last laugh when you walk on stage to receive your Pulitzer Prize. There’s wisdom in "niche-ing down," as they say, and being the best you can be at that one thing. But I think back to that 20-year-old poet straight out of college, and I’m glad I evolved. I love the writing I do and the coaching I’m capable of because I was willing to evolve. Experiment If someone offers you the opportunity to contribute to a project and you’ve never written like that before...maybe you should try it. If you’re an essayist feeling a little nudge to try your hand at fiction...experiment. And remember that even skilled poets may not excel at the first few attempts at creative nonfiction. A novelist may struggle to adjust to the format of a screenplay. An essayist may wonder how to operate within the constraints of poetry. Enjoy what you’re good at. Keep doing that. And then, on the side,

We feel like so much is at stake in our writing lives, the pressure is on. Let’s make writing fun again. Let's find the joy of writing.

This one’s for the moms out there who are also writers. Writer moms. My mom was a writer mom. I am a writer mom. You might be a writer mom, too. And I'm sure you know one. Please know this: Writer moms are trying to raise their family while advancing their writing in some way. And it’s hard. Madeleine L'Engle once wrote in one of her Crosswicks Journals: During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump. (p. 19) I got a chance to hear Madeleine speak one time, and afterwards she signed books. I would have one instant to ask her about that—to ask about writing and motherhood. We waited and inched forward in line until it was finally my turn. I handed her Walking on Water. She asked for my name and scrawled a note on one of its front pages. She looked up and handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said. Then I blurted out: “When your kids were young…how did you do it? How did you manage to write?” She looked up at me. One beat. Two beats. I’m sure my eyes looked wild and desperate, but I needed to know. Three beats. Four beats. “It was hard,” she said. And that was all she said. Then she looked past me, hand outstretched for the next book. Ask any writer-mom and she'll tell you the same. It's hard. We know that. We need a little something more to keep us going. I craved more than that—some insight or encouragement from a mom who had been there and could speak into the life of a young writer-mom. I finally got another chance, not with Madeleine, but with Holly Miller. Holly wrote for The Saturday Evening Post and taught at Anderson University. She was leading a workshop in a small setting and invited questions afterwards. I lugged my big ol' portfolio with me, so I positioned myself at the end of the line so I wouldn't hold things up unzipping it and flopping it onto the desk to show her my work. Finally, it was my turn. She gestured to open it up, so I unzipped the portfolio and she flipped through it. I told her how young my kids were and asked how she did it. How did she raise her kids while achieving such success as a writer? She answered, “I’m where I am today because I worked long hours full-time when my kids were young. And now they’re grown. You’ll still have time to develop your career later, but you only have now with your kids. Your kids are so little, and they’re little for such a short time. Right now, I suggest you focus on your children. You’ll never regret spending time with those kids." Then she said this: “Keep your finger in the publishing world. Just keep your name out there. Publish locally with your paper, like you are. Submit to magazines. Keep it going on a small scale and your time will come.” That. That's what I needed to hear. Keep your finger in the publishing world. Keep it going on a small scale, and your time will come. I needed someone to tell me that making those small deposits in my writing career would add up and pay off later. Holly was right: they did. They do. If you're a writer mom, let me pass that along to you: Keep your finger in the publishing world—keep making deposits in your writing career—and it will add up. Your time will come. In fact, your time might be...right now! Those small deposits? It's happening! Your writing life is happening! You might be trying to raise your kids, getting up early to make your word count or staying up after the kids go to bed so you can meet your deadline. Keep making progress as you can. It is adding up. If you know a writer-mom personally you can encourage, I hope you will make it your goal to make a deposit into her life to encourage and empower her along the way. Offer to watch her kids so she can write. Send her a gift certificate to eat out,

My life presents numerous complications making it hard to plan ahead or get ahead. One simple practice I’ve begun is to stop waiting around for last-minute writing inspiration and instead, generate ideas that can be waiting in the wings, for their chance to step onto the screen and become a blog post, podcast, article or even a book project. That way when some time opens up to write, I don’t spend half that time trying to come up with an idea; instead, I choose from my existing list. Jon Morrow's Massive Headline Output Not long ago, I was listening to a Duct Tape Marketing interview with Copyblogger writer Jon Morrow. In it, Jon said he likes to focus on the emotion he wants to bring out in the reader. The interviewer asked him about his practice for finding that target emotion, and Jon explained that Brian Clark, the founder of Copyblogger, gave Jon an assignment early on when they started working together. Brian told John to write 100 headlines a day for different blog posts and get really good at it. And Jon did. A month later, he went back to Brian with 3,000 headlines. And Brian was astonished! Because even though Brian had told other people to do the same thing, no one had actually followed through. But Jon did. By taking on that assignment, John noticed certain headlines made him feel something, and those were the ones that grabbed his attention. So his approach is to focus on what he wants the reader to feel, and then choose a topic and dive into the writing. We’ve got two things going here...one is this philosophy of writing for emotional results—emotional connection. That’s interesting and we could discuss this in more detail in another podcast. But I want us to pause for just a second and let that number sink in: Jon wrote 3,000 headlines in one month. In fact, Jon continued that practice of writing 100 headlines a day. He says he got so much out of it for 30 days, he continued doing it for two years, seven days a week. He never took a day off. He wrote 36,400 headlines in one year, and at the end of two years, he’d written 72,800 headlines. With all that practice and repetition, he got better and better. And he had absolutely no lack of ideas when he came time to write an article! The 50-Headline Challenge So in honor of this 50th episode of the podcast, I’m issuing a challenge. You can take Brian Clark’s challenge of 100 headlines a day if you want to, but I’m going to go easy on you. I challenge you—and I’m challenging myself, too—to write no fewer than 50 headlines for whatever kind of writing you do...in one week. If you write online content, you might enjoy playing around with some tools like CoSchedule’s Headline Analyzer or a tool called the “Emotional Marketing Value Headline Analyzer.” You can have a little fun with this. Screen Shot of CoSchedule Headline Analyzer at work Fifty might feel like a lot if you've never done this before, and the first few could feel clunky, but once you get going, I think you'll start to feel yourself loosen up, and the ideas will flow. Headlines Provide Writing Inspiration In episode 46: What’s the Big Idea, I suggested coming up with the big idea of your piece, your controlling idea, your theme statement, your thesis, to guide your writing. Well, each of these headlines can capture a big idea. And don’t feel like you’re locking yourself into writing all 50 of these ideas. It’s practice for headline writing, and offers you options when it comes time to write. Let’s take the challenge. Let's generate headlines, or titles, so we have options and inspiration at our fingertips, because I don’t want to be stuck sitting around waiting for last-minute inspiration. And I don’t want that for you, either. Are you ready? 50 headlines. Let's do it. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: Duct Tape Marketing interview with Jon Morrow

How’s the challenge going? If you’ve just discovered the podcast and haven’t listened to Episode 50, “Stop Waiting for Last-Minute Writing Inspiration,” you might want to go back and listen. At the end, I issued a 50-Headline Challenge in honor of the 50th episode: write 50 headlines in the week ahead. About a week has passed, and I’ve been hearing from people who took it on. Two days after episode 50 went live, Kate Motaung tweeted that she already had 23 of her 50 written. https://twitter.com/k8motaung/status/732537449436590080 Jessica Van Roekel left a comment at the show notes saying she wrote 50 headlines in an hour. People are doing the work and finding it fruitful. When I started, I thought 50 headlines or titles sounded like a lot, but once I got going, the ideas flowed and suddenly 50 seemed well within reach. I’d take a break and come back to it, and then boom! Another batch would come to me. I counted and realized I’d hit 50 headlines easily. It didn’t feel overwhelming at all. And I feel like I’m learning to make them stronger, clearer, and more specific. Are all 50 headlines usable? No. But some are. And I generated ideas I might never have arrived at, had I not taken the challenge. Like so many things in the writing life—or life in general—the more you create, the more you learn and the better you get. I really enjoyed the process, so I’m going to make this a regular challenge for myself: 50 headlines per week. Make the Most of Your Headlines But how do we make the most of our 50 headlines? Consider some ideas that have come from the challenge: Organize into categories that reflect your writing life. Maybe you’ll want a category of headlines or titles that you would use for books, another for articles, another for blog posts. Organize based on topics you want to write about, picking from your Five Fat Files, a concept I introduced in Episode 36. Zero in on a headline that shows promise and improve on it. Experiment with different ways to phrase it until you land on one that has a great hook. Dive deep into topics by grabbing a headline or title that is pretty broad and generate some specific subtitles that naturally connect with, support, or flow from the broad headline. This can begin to narrow your topic and help you generate a lot more content from one idea. It might lead to a book, with the broad headline serving as the book title, and all the narrowed, specific variations forming the chapters; or they could be turned into a blog series or article series; or you might even see the opportunity to pitch yourself as a columnist because of the flow of ideas. Use the list as a set of unique prompts made just for you. When you sit down to write, you pull up the list, pick a headline, and start writing. In fact, that’s a natural follow-up to the 50-Headline Challenge I want to throw out to you. Now that you’ve got all those wonderful ideas, the next thing you can do is write something based on one of those headlines. Pick a Headline and Write Don’t hesitate to write a story, blog post, article, essay or poem based on a headline or title you generated. It’s up to you if you decide to continue writing 50 headlines per week, but I urge you to take time this week to open a new document and get to work on one of those great ideas you captured as a headline. The ideas all came to you for a reason; I mean, something in you must want to write these or they wouldn’t have come to mind. You could just read through the list and randomly pick one. Or you could read through your list and pick one that seems to have some energy to it—you might have typed out a headline and added some notes to the side of ideas you could use to develop that story or article. The fact that ideas came to you suggests a certain energy and the writing will probably go a lot faster. Or maybe you’ll pick a headline that represents a topic or idea you feel passionate about.

The inspiration for the 50-Headline Challenge that I introduced back in Episode 50 came from an interview with Jon Morrow, who wrote 100 headlines a day for two years. One of the things Jon brought up in that original interview with Duct Tape Marketing is that he likes to focus on the emotion he wants to bring out in the reader. The interviewer asked about his practice for finding that target emotion, and Jon explained that writing the 100 headlines a day helped him a) get better at writing headlines; and, b) find the ideas that seemed to generate emotion. Headlines with Emotion Those are the headlines he uses to write his posts: The ones that start with a target emotion, that make you feel something. He wants to write something that might make you cry or get mad. Jon stressed that sometimes you want a reader to get angry because, for example, let's say something is holding a reader back and he or she needs to push past that—Jon argues the reader should get angry at that block or resistance, so bringing out that emotion can be a good gift to the reader. The interviewer asked Jon how it all worked, and Jon said he has to get himself into the state he wants the reader to be in. To do so, he might watch some YouTube videos or read a passage in a book or draw up a memory. And when the emotion is stirred inside him so strong that he can no longer contain it, he dumps it onto the page. When people read and begin to feel that emotion, you create a connection—maybe even form a bond— between writer and reader. This reminds me of Robert Frost's famous quote: No tears in the writer, no tears in the reader. No surprise for the writer, no surprise for the reader. When I work on little snippets of memoir in an article or book, I take myself back and try to not only remember what happened but how I felt. Chapter 8 of On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts is titled "Discover (When I write, I discover myself)." When working on that chapter, I took myself back to a formative stage in my teens and tried to pull up the circumstances and feelings. I keep the emotion understated, but here’s a portion of what I wrote. Excerpt from On Being a Writer, Chapter 8 - "Notice" By the time I (Ann) was 14, I realized the children’s department of the local library couldn’t provide the depth I yearned for. Shyly, I made it a habit to browse the adult nonfiction shelves for exercise books, vegetarian cookbooks, drawing tutorials, and a series that taught survival skills, in case I ever acted on my dream of living by myself in the woods, like the kid in My Side of the Mountain. One afternoon I glanced through books on writing. A title caught my eye: Write to Discover Yourself, by Ruth Vaughn. I looked both ways and plucked it from the shelf, running my fingers over the green cover with a fuchsia Gerbera daisy poking out of a pencil cup. It seemed a little wacky, but . . . Write. Discover. I desperately wanted to understand myself, unearth who I was meant to become. And deep down, I wanted to write. Cheeks flushed, heart thumping, I tucked the book under my arm to hide the title from anyone who might question my desire to write, or ridicule my search for self. I feared my family’s response most of all. In a household of word-people—both parents were journalists and my brother would eventually become an advertising executive—I was the vegetarian runner who asked for art supplies at Christmas. Compared with my family, I had never demonstrated noteworthy writing talent. I lost every game of Scrabble®. Nevertheless, I retreated to my room, tiptoeing up the staircase, and secretly penned responses to the author’s writing exercises. I stuffed the spiral-bound notebook far back in my closet so no one would peek. Over time, I kept a journal and followed instructions to “portrait” the important people in my life, exploring memories, capturing life. I sat on the hardwood floor of my bedroom and composed a w...

In the first creative writing course I took in college, I felt like my life was boring. I had nothing interesting to write about. The professor told us to pull from childhood memories, so I wrote a poem about feeding the cows on the farm where I grew up. When I read the poem aloud in class, I expected a little laughter, but instead I looked around and everybody was engaged. They asked questions about the cows, and they asked about the process of feeding them. They encouraged me to add more sensory details. Turns out my rural upbringing fascinated these kids—most of them had grown up in the suburbs. What seemed familiar and ordinary, even boring, to me offered unusual and engaging content for others. This was a revelation, and it has served me well. My world and the way I experience and process it serves as fodder for my next writing projects. That's what I want you to discover, too. Someone, somewhere, is going to be delighted to read about your world and the way you experience and process it. So, do you need ideas for your next writing project? Take inventory of your life. Take Inventory of Your Life It sounds so simple, so basic, but I don't know how many writers take time to reflect on all the content available from the life they’ve lived and the life they're living. From where you sit, you can generate fresh ideas by reflecting on your past, dusting off memories, and tapping into your existing knowledge base. To discover what lies inside you just waiting to contribute to the core of our next story or article or essay, I'd like to offer a few categories you can start thinking through. As you do, you can throw the information into an idea file like a spreadsheet, Evernote, or your bullet journal for easy access—maybe in the same place you're storing your 50 headlines. That way you’ll have material on hand when you need to write and pitch something new. Work Experience Go all the way back to your first job, even if that means the candy stand in third grade you set up at the local pool or your summer job weeding your neighbor’s flower garden. Ideas like those can be leveraged for articles like “Job Ideas for Industrious Kids” or “Elementary-Aged Entrepreneurs.” Keep going and list all the jobs you’ve ever worked. Describe what you did, who you met, challenges you faced, lessons you learned, information and skills you gained. This adds to your collection of material to draw from, as you might recall a stressful interaction with a colleague or a disappointing encounter with your boss or the time you spilled an entire cup of root beer all over yourself during a meeting with the acquisitions editor of a publishing house. Not that I know anything about that. People You Know Do your friends and family members have experiences or stories you could use in your work? A good friend of mine, for example, is an inspiring entrepreneur whose philosophy of work fit a publication I often write for, so I interviewed him for an article. List people you know and key facts you might use in your writing sometime, and then when you're looking for an idea, you can flip through these notes about friends and, with their permission, feature their story in an upcoming piece. Places You’ve Lived Record all the places you’ve lived. While the locations, climate, and demographics may seem ordinary to you, city people may be fascinated by an essay about country living, as I discovered with my cow poem and countless people have found when reading Wendell Berry. Or maybe you’ve lived on another continent and can contrast life there with where you’re living now. Or you could talk about cross country moves and cross-cultural challenges. Tap into your life for material related to locales you know well—they don't have to be exotic to hold interest. Places You’ve Visited—and Plan to Visit List all of the places you’ve visited and your upcoming vacations to see if you can generate a fresh take on a trip. Find the right slant—for example,

When’s the last time you asked yourself "Why?" Why am I pursuing writing? Why am I writing this particular project? Why am I working on this book proposal or replying to this email or spending time over here on Facebook when I should be finishing an article to meet a deadline—and why “should” I be finishing that article? Asking why about why we write helps us get to the root of our life motivation. Why Do You Write? And why do you write what you write? Asking this from time to time—exploring it, maybe even through a quick daily review—helps us stay on track and avoid shiny object syndrome, because if we know the overall reason why we write, we can say no to the opportunities and requests that come up, realizing they don’t fit with our why. We can have multiple answers to the question of why we write: We can write for our own pleasure, to express our thoughts clearly, to get the stories and ideas out. Maybe we write because we want to share those stories and ideas with others, or we want fame and fortune, or we want to preserve details about events or to make an impact on the world. A lot of writing life questions flow from bigger questions and bigger issues, so although I’m not a life coach, I often end up talking with clients about higher-level issues in their lives. If you spend some time pondering this “Why?” question at a more existential level or from a values angle, determining your main values as you try to figure out your purpose, you may find clarity for a lot of areas in your life, not just your writing. But that could be overwhelming, and since people meet up with me to talk about writing, writing is a good place to start asking why. Writing is such a revealing process, whether we write privately or publicly, we might as well start by asking “Why write?” and let that start to reveal other ideas about the "why" of our lives overall. Why do you write? Be honest about your answer. If you really just want to make money from writing, record that somewhere, like in a journal, and own it. Knowing that you want to make money—even earn a living—from your writing will help you make practical decisions; instead of submitting essays to literary journals, for example, you might focus on building a business doing technical or corporate writing. If your compelling reason for writing is to contribute memorable art without regard for financial gain, knowing that is your “why” will help you make decisions about how you funnel your creative energy. If your “why” is to gain popularity in a particular genre, you’ll study the market and focus in on that goal, and decisions will be far easier than if you generally think you want to write because it satisfies your creative impulse. Maybe you write for fun, to make people laugh, to reveal an issue you’ve seen and want to bring to light. You want to help people, entertain people, touch people, connect with people. The Evolution of Your Why As you write, your “why” may evolve, and that’s okay. It doesn’t mean your principles have crumpled or your dreams are dying. It may mean you’re discovering new dreams and see new possibilities you may not have even known existed! In the year 1997, who knew blogging would be a thing? In 2000, who imagined someone could write a novel or memoir, image by image on Instagram? Maybe these new possibilities have awakened a new “why”: to lasso current technology and playfully discover new ways to interact with people, writing tighter and clearer poetry and prose. You might not have even thought like that in the early stages of your career because you couldn’t have imagined it. You might have looked around at what existed—books, magazines, newspapers—and worked within those constraints. Why This Particular Project? Asking "why" about a particular project helps us figure out how it fits with the overall "why." At some point in your writing, you’re going to see some of those new possibilities.

It seems like writers are encouraged to do three things: Apply bottom to chair, write regularly, and read a lot. This is great advice, and I encourage writers to do all three. But there are a lot of other things a person can do to become a stronger, more interesting writer. One of those is to say yes to new experiences. I got this advice in a session at the first writing conference I ever went to. The presenter appeared to be heading into middle age—did not look like much of a risk taker—and she was saying we as writers should say yes to new experiences. She talked about how it would make us stronger writers because the more experiences we had, the more we could draw from in our writing. It made so much sense to me. I thought, Yeah, the more senses I tap into, the more memories I form, the more conversations I have, the more places I visit, the more I can write about. To give us an example from her life, she said in all those years she had never been water skiing, but was finally given the opportunity and decided to give it a try. It’s funny she used that example, because for a lot of people, that would not be a crazy-new experience, but for me, it was. I’d never been water skiing, either. Something about it terrified me, too; it seemed like complete lack of control—like a carnival ride with no rails or safety harness. I listened closely as she described her experience: the sensation of the water spraying her face, of flying across the surface of the lake. It sounded so appealing—and she’d already convinced me that new experiences would give me more material for my writing. I decided if I were given the opportunity to try something like that, I'd say yes. Not too long after, I was indeed given the opportunity to go water skiing. And because of her advice, I said yes. I got a quick explanation from my friend who would be driving the boat, and lots of other friends stood on the shore bearing witness to my “yes.” They watched as I took hold of the handle, the boat took off, I started to ski just a little bit, and then...I had the most spectacular wipeout ever, at least according to my friends. They said they’d never seen such a thing: I toppled head over heel, and one of the skis popped off my foot and flew through the air and somehow flipped around so the tip jabbed me in the hip, gouging deep. It happened in slow-motion for me. Stunned, I swam back to the shore, stood up, walked out of the water. My friends were all describing the event, gesturing wildly to reenact the flipping. I couldn’t even speak. I walked back to the house where we were staying and just sat for a while. Alone. Trying to settle my discombobulated, disoriented self. And I thought, Is this what that writer meant when she said we needed new experiences? ‘Cause I sure did get a new set of sensations. Yes. I mean, maybe that’s not what she meant, but yes, I could use that. I tapped into more senses, formed more memories, and had more to write about. I thought I would be writing about the joy of zooming across the water’s surface, but instead, if I can recreate the crazy, topsy-turvy scene in a short story or essay (or podcast), I’ve got material. So I think she’s right. Go ahead and take the trip, try the zip line, explore the cave, hike that mountain, tour that museum, visit that distant relative. And if you’ve never gone water skiing, I think you should say yes. At least once. Because even if an experience doesn’t turn out quite the way you imagined or expected, you’ll have more to write about when you take that other advice: to apply bottom to chair, and write. Go ahead and say yes to that new experience. Regardless of the outcome, your life is going to be richer, and so will your writing. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: #35: Want to be a More Creative Writer? Get Curious! #31: Plan a Playful Year * * *

Writers become writers because they read something that made them want to pick up a pen or open a laptop and do the same thing. They read some piece of literature that inspired. Did that happen to you? Maybe when you were young? Maybe last week? You opened a book and thought: This novel makes me want to tell a story, too, with characters as vibrant as these and scenes just as stunning. Or you clicked through to an online magazine and sighed: This essay gets me thinking in new directions. I want to explore things at this level, too. I want to help readers read, think, learn, and question. Or you turned the page of a literary journal and sank into the stanzas of a new poem: It has everything I love in it. I, too, want to work with images and metaphor, rhythm and rhyme. So you go to your computer ready to try your hand at the craft. You can’t wait—your mind is brimming with your own ideas and phrases. You open a new document and you start writing, and 500 or a thousand words later, you stop. You look out the window for a minute, maybe go to the kitchen and get a sandwich, make some tea, then you come back to the screen and read what you just wrote. You finish reading and see that cursor at the end of your last line, blinking, like a wicked wink, mocking you, as if to say, What were you thinking? You can’t produce at that level and you never will. And then, next time you read something in a magazine or at a website you admire, or you open a book or that literary journal, and ponder the poem or essay or novel...instead of inspiring you, it intimidates, and you think, Man, my work will never sound like this. I mean, I want it to. But I tried. And it doesn’t sound like that. Not at all. And you start to question: Should I keep at this? Or am I doomed to mediocrity? Might as well slam that laptop shut. Leave the real writing to the experts, the ones who’ve been at this game longer than I have and have the real training—the ones who have arrived. Yeah. What were you thinking? Shut it down. Give it up. Walk away. No! Why do we let ourselves go down line of thinking? We have to stop it long before it gets to that point. Because you know what? Your initial inspiration—those experts, the ones who have been at this game longer than you? The ones who have “arrived”? First of all, they probably have been at it longer than you. You never saw their early work when they were first starting out. You didn’t see draft one of novel one that sits in a desk drawer or on a floppy disk gathering dust in a closet somewhere. And you know what else? Most of them have probably had these same thoughts. Maybe 20 years ago, maybe ten. Maybe the last time they battled these thoughts was an hour ago. They read other writers whose work both inspired and intimidated. But they pushed past those voices or shut them down—or they plugged their ears and refused to listen. They knew that to learn how to write, they had to write. So they kept writing. They kept making their art. They kept learning and growing and improving and trying. They pushed through it and wrote. Have you seen that Ira Glass video? Someone took a clip from a longer interview and made into a video. In it, Ira Glass talked about filling the gap. If you haven’t seen it, take a minute to watch it below. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PbC4gqZGPSY I’ll touch on a couple of his main ideas here, but you’ll enjoy hearing Ira Glass himself say this in his own words. He was talking about how we start out making our art and see this big gap between the kind of art we’re making, and the kind of art that drew us into it, that inspired us to try it in the first place. He says when you see that gap, don’t stop. Don’t give up. Don’t be disappointed. What you have to do is fill that gap. You catch up and close the gap between the not-so-great art you’re creating and the kind of work you want to make by creating a volume of work.

If you want to expand your reach, gain new skills, stretch yourself and take your writing to the next level, you can dance at the edge of your comfort zone—that place where we have to push ourselves just a little bit to try something new that we’ve been talking about for years. Embrace the Edge of Your Comfort Zone At the edge of our comfort zone we have to take risks, and taking risks—even small ones—can help us overcome irrational fears and rescue us from settling into the path of least resistance. It can save us from never accomplishing the goals—even the dreams—we’ve never quite had the guts to try. Discover Your Hidden Potential Experts advise us to step out of our comfort zone and take those risks, because that’s when and where we make personal discoveries and learn we’re capable of more than we ever thought or imagined. It gets us out of our safe spot and out into a place of adrenaline, adventure, and growth. A few years ago I stepped outside my comfort zone to start coaching, leveraging every bit of experience and knowledge I’ve gained in 25+ years of writing, and with coaching, I’ve discovered work that I love. It taps into almost every skill I’ve acquired all these years. Because I danced on the edges of my comfort zone, I gained a new sweet spot. Coaching allows me to celebrate successes in the lives of my clients, help them overcome hurdles, and I love it. That was worth the risk. What initially felt like a stretch turned out to be a perfect fit—I never would have known if I hadn’t pushed myself and taken the risk. Learning When to Retreat But here’s a different example. Several years ago I tried a type of writing that could have been lucrative. I worked hard and produced the best I was capable of, but it was outside my comfort zone and my area of strength. I could tell I was not improving and this was not ever going to be a sweet spot, so I stepped away from that work and then I tried to return to a style and genre where I could shine. I’d been doing the other style long enough that I was drained and doubted myself. I’d lost my pizzazz. I didn’t have the confidence that needed to come through in my content. I struggled to get my groove back. It came. Eventually. But it’s a reminder not to linger too long if the stress is too high—there’s a point of diminishing returns. While it might be good to step out of our safe spot sometimes, if we’re continually operating outside our comfort zone, we might stray too far from our sweet spot. Return to Your Sweet Spot from the Zone of Bad Stress If you’re out there in the hinterland so long you’re cold and shaky and don’t even know who you are anymore, anxiety can rise and confidence plummet—not to mention quality. If you’re not careful, you’re operating in a place of nervous fear, and you can’t even retrace your steps back to your sweet spot. Daniel Goleman wrote in Psychology Today: [W]hen demands become too great for us to handle, when the pressure overwhelms us, too much to do with too little time or support, we enter the zone of bad stress. Just beyond the optimal zone at the top of the performance arc, there is a tipping point where the brain secretes too many stress hormones, and they start to interfere with our ability to work well, to learn, to innovate, to listen, and to plan effectively. (Emphasis mine)1 He goes on to say an organization will be top-performing “to the extent to which its employees can contribute their best skills at full force. The more moments of flow, or even just staying in the zone of engagement and motivation, the better” (emphasis mine).2 Find Your Zone of Engagement That’s it, friend. Find that zone of engagement and motivation. It’s playing to your strengths—maybe strengthening your strengths—and the engagement happens because you are pushing yourself to the edge. Sometimes. When I find myself outside my comfort zone for too long and I’m losing motivation,

Some days, you wake up and feel like you can finish a novel in a month—and it’s not even November, National Novel Writing Month (NaNoWriMo)! Or you feel so on fire you could pitch and land an essay in The Paris Review and The New Yorker. Then there are the other days. On those days, you might have gotten a rejection from the magazine you queried. Or your writing group shredded your latest short story. Or your own self-doubt douses the fire and fills your mind with negativity. You feel dragged down and depressed. I touched on those days in Episode 56, when you’re questioning why you ever thought you could write. When you feel like hanging it up ’cause you don’t think you have what it takes. On those days, you have to fight through that and refuse to listen to the voices and instead, create a volume of work. You’ve got to keep writing, even when you’re not on fire. Even when you have nothing more than a glimmer of hope, like a tiny flickering ember buried under the ash heap, about to go out. That’s when you need to affirm reality to combat the discouraging lies. You need to remember what’s true. Because this writing life can be brutal. The publishing world and the process of entering in feels a little like grade school gym glass or a dating game: "Pick me! Pick me!" or "Do you like me?" We submit to publishers—could be a book, could be an essay, could be a poem or article. The process is similar. We submit and wait and hope that maybe this time someone will feel an affinity with our work. Maybe someone will take a chance and offer a contract. Maybe. Or not. And they send a rejection. "Sorry, but we’re going to pass." "Doesn’t fit our editorial requirements at this time." "After careful consideration, we’re not accepting it for publication and hope you find a good fit for your work." Don’t base your worth or talent or future on a rejection. Feel free to revisit your work a few days later, after you’ve had a good cry, and see if you can improve anything. It’s possible your piece would benefit from edits. But most of the time, a rejection simply means that one editor on one day at one publication is turning down this one submission. So on a good day—it doesn’t have to be your on fire day; it can just be a regular old good day (maybe that’s today)—sit down with a pen and notebook, or a computer screen, or a typewriter and paper, whatever you use, and take on an assignment. You’re going to write something with a special reader in mind: You. The future you. The you who is going to doubt himself. The you whose writing group is about to shoot down a poem you spent weeks revising. The you who might wake up tomorrow and think, “I’m not a writer. Why even try?” The you-on-a-good-day—which might be right now—can take time to sit down and write accurate, affirming statements. You need these on the hard days, to remind you of what’s true. People of any age, especially people who are struggling with self-confidence, like writers, can benefit from positive, true statements about their strengths and abilities and worth. Affirmations do that. So the current you, in a good place, sets up to coach the future you, when you’re in a hard place, by composing what some life coaches and creativity coaches call, as I said, “affirmations.” I was reminded of them recently in a book by creativity coach Eric Maisel, and by life coach Amanda Foust, who urges parents to use affirmations with themselves and their kids. Today, when you’re feeling strong and clear-minded, think of some things that are true about you, about your writing, and about writing in general. I’ll offer some suggestions here and present them in first person, so you can say them to yourself, if you'd like: I am a writer. And writers write. Today, regardless of how I’m feeling, I will write. Only writers who risk rejection even have a chance at publishing success. When I get an acceptance and when I get a rejec...

Have you ever attempted the “I Am From” exercise? I’ll give you some links in the Resources section below to templates and lists you can use to write your own. In her book Writing to Change the World, Mary Pipher recommends this “I Am From” exercise as a way to know yourself, to explore identity issues by reflecting on food, places, people in your upbringing. You start to see what shaped you and formed your values and beliefs. If you use the template, you'll end up with a list poem. Mine turned out more like a short essay, because I took the liberty of composing more than one sentence in response to the prompts. Either way, I agree with Pipher that the process of digging up memories and images helped me better understand myself. This is what I wrote in 2011. Where I’m From I am from the persimmon tree, ripe fruit dropping, splitting, squishing soft into the grassy lawn below. I am from sweet-spring lilac and lily-of-the-valley. I am from clover and crown vetch, hollyhocks and honeysuckle, peonies and pansies. I am from soybean and corn fields, hay and straw, and Black Angus cattle grazing in the pond field. Our 30 acres held barn swallows, snapping turtles, red-winged blackbirds, and the lanky black-and-yellow garden spider poised in the center of a stringy orb made of dewy threads stretching from the flaking boards of the tool shed to the old red gas tank used to fuel the 8N tractor. I am from Dick and Lynn, editors who carried home the scent of newsprint and ink in their hair and clothes. Their book collection lined the walls of every room in the house, and I am from those classics, mysteries, westerns, and biographies. I am from my brother’s comic book and insect collections, “The Maple Leaf Rag” he played on the chipped keys of our family piano, and his Beatles albums that spun on the stereo console. Barbies and Breyer Horses, Operation and Life, Pong and Pacman; Scooby-Doo, Gilligan’s Island and The Brady Bunch; I am from board games and early electronics, cartoons and sitcoms. I am from white diaries snapped shut with a metal lock and key; and I am from the library, curled in a corner with Nancy Drew and the Hardy Boys. About a mile from home sits the tiny brick church with tall windows opened on hot summer Sundays to let the breeze blow across Mr. Bowman’s farm field and onto our sweat-glistened faces and necks. I stood among neighboring farmers holding worn hymnals, singing “In the Garden” and “Trust and Obey.” I am from those dark wooden pews and the coins and bills jangling in the offering plate. I am from the two-digit numbers slid into the display board listing the previous week’s attendance. Squeezed between my dad and brother on the bench seat of the old red GMC truck, straddling the stick shift mounted to the floor board, I rode to the Belleville diner for giant tenderloin sandwiches, all-you-can-eat catfish, or Beef Manhattan topped with mashed potatoes and gravy. Dad would sing sometimes, songs from his childhood, like “Indian Love Call,” imitating Jeanette MacDonald in a falsetto voice, and “Down by the Old Mill Stream,” encouraging us to join in the chorus. I am from track meets, softball games, and the woodwind section of the high school band. I am from the bedroom with yellow-flowered wallpaper and two windows overlooking the lilacs where a mockingbird perched to serenade. I am from Dairy Queen Dilly Bars and Dr Pepper chilled in a glass bottle. I am from simpler, slower times, riding barefoot down the tar and gravel country road to the creek on a banana seat blue Schwinn, wearing ponytails and secondhand T-shirts and shorts. I would wade into the creek and dig for clay to make coil pots that would dry in the sun. I would skip rocks and watch minnows the color of silt or moss slip past my ankles faster than I could catch them. I am from long summer days. When the sun sank low, I would pedal home for fresh-sliced tomatoes straight from the garden,

Years ago I read Dale Carnegie’s How to Win Friends and Influence People and found one of the most useful principles from the book was this: Become genuinely interested in other people. Carnegie would meet people at a gathering or party and get them talking about their hobbies and areas of expertise. By being genuinely interested in them—by being curious—he met interesting people, learned a lot, and gathered a wealth of material for his books and lectures. He inserted a story in that chapter that every writer should probably hear. Carnegie said: I once took a course in short-story writing at New York University, and during that course the editor of a leading magazine talked to our class. He said he could pick up any one of the dozens of stories that drifted across his desk every day and after a few paragraphs he could feel whether or not the author liked people. "If the author doesn’t like people," he said, "people won’t like his or her stories." This hard-boiled editor stopped twice in the course of his talk on fiction writing and apologized for preaching a sermon. "I am telling you," he said, "the same things your preacher would tell you, but remember, you have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories." (68) You have to be interested in people if you want to be a successful writer of stories. Maybe you’d like to be interested in people but you’re shy. Maybe you’re an introvert. Maybe you hate to be in the spotlight. That describes a lot of writers. If that’s you, you may find it hard to be curious about people and ask them questions. But it’s a skill you can practice by learning to ask questions and listening. Once you do, you’ll not only begin to gather material and inspiration—you’ll enjoy a side benefit of getting the focus off yourself. Once you ask a couple of open-ended questions that get the other person talking, you won’t have to say much more about yourself, which is handy for the shy or introverted person. People will love to tell you about their woodworking hobby, or their recent vacation to Spain, or their daughter’s prize-winning pie at the state fair. Being curious about people is also an excellent way to understand people who come from a completely different walk of life or have views that are opposite of yours. Respectfully ask curious questions, listening without the intent to argue or jump in with your own stories, and you may learn how someone ended up with a certain religious belief or political stance and gain deeper understanding about something you’d only barely been exposed to. Novelists can write more complex characters when they understand more about where real people have come from or why they’ve developed an interest in an uncommon topic or activity. As you meet people and show interest, you don’t want to use them, but you can sort of think of conversations as research. Someone could spark an idea for an essay when she mentions a restaurant that shut down where her mom and dad met in the 1960s. A person at the laundromat might tell a story about his great uncle who served in World War II, and that sparks the idea for a character in your next short story. Carnegie talks about showing genuine interest in people as a practice for getting to know them through the stories they share when you ask about them. He claims you’ll develop real friendships, get people to like you, and tell better stories because you like people and take a genuine interest in them. You’ll tell better stories. You’ll tell better stories because you’ll have lots of them, collecting stories from every person you meet. And you’ll tell better stories because you’ll likely develop excellent storytelling skills from people simply by listening to stories told. Learning to ask open-ended questions and to listen closely as the person responds is a skill not only for journalists but for all writers. Be genuinely interested in other people,

“Curiosity can ruin my writing? What? I thought Ann Kroeker lauded curiosity as a key component to the writing life! She claims it’s one way we can achieve our writing goals!” “Is she turning her back on curiosity? Has it killed the cat and now she’s urging us to return to predictable poetry and lifeless prose?” No worries, friends. Curiosity still fuels my creativity. I’m still convinced that curious writers are generally more creative and productive, and able to achieve their writing goals—all while having fun! But every once in awhile, curiosity ruins my writing. And if you’re not careful, it can ruin yours. 1: Trouble with Curiosity about our Environment First, what happens when we give in to an insatiable curiosity about our environment? We think we’re sidetracked by interruptions and distractions, and those do exist and they can be the issue. But distractions alone aren’t always to blame. Sometimes what threatens my productivity or the depth of my ideas isn’t the distraction itself but my curiosity about the distraction. Even if someone else addresses the interruption and I didn’t have to lift a finger from the keyboard, curiosity wonders: Wait, who called? Who was that at the door? What’s that noise? I wonder who wrote that song? Hey, who’s he texting? Curiosity is behind that niggling feeling that asks: “I wonder if I should open that email now or if it can wait?” “Isn’t that my Words with Friends notification?” “Are there any chips left? I should check.” So it’s not only the distractions—it’s our curiosity about the distractions that can create disruption, which can ruin my writing, or at least my writing session. Try asking a question out loud about your project to distract from the distraction and bring yourself back to the work. It reminds your brain where to direct its attention, like, “What would make this section stronger?” Or, “What am I trying to say here about the topic?” It re-engages you with the work. 2: Trouble with Curiosity about Systems Another trouble area is a consuming curiosity about systems. This is like Shiny Object Syndrome. You’re curious to try a new organizational tool or productivity app, so you spend a few hours downloading it, messing around with it to understand how it works, then another hour moving all your information over to it, then it’s kind of slow because you’re still adapting, and just when you gain some momentum a week or a month later, you hear about another one and find yourself drawn to give it a try—Maybe it’ll work better than the last one?—and you go through the process all over again. Productivity experts will tell you this about these alluring systems: The best system is the one you actually use. Pick one. Commit. Don’t worry if Trello’s color scheme isn’t your favorite or Evernote’s tagging system feels a little cumbersome. If it’s working pretty well, stick with that. You’ll be able to get to your work much more effectively if you can curb your curiosity next time someone—even someone like me—entices you to try something else. You want to be able to find your notes and research, and that works best with something you use consistently. 3: Trouble with Curiosity During the Research Process That leads to number three: Curiosity is a friend to the research process...to a point. It can become a crutch and an excuse not to do the work of finally planning the piece and writing it. We research and research and research for a short story, novel, article, or essay, following interesting tidbits that branch out to more and more interesting tidbits driven by insatiable curiosity, when you already had what you needed to get busy and write the story to meet the deadline...that you miss because you spent hours hopping down those trails. Whether we’re distracted by all that great information or afraid to get to work, there comes a time when you have enough—you have enough to write the story and meet the ...

You’ve been thinking about a project, trying out beginnings, thinking through images. In your mind, this book, short story, essay, or poem is evolving into something brilliant—something shimmering like stained glass, light streaming through the colors, gleaming, perfect, like the rose window in Notre Dame. Ann Patchett talks about this phenomenon, how that stunning masterpiece in our mind is so beautiful and perfect, it’s like a butterfly flitting around. It’s alive. Brilliant. Gleaming. Perfect. In “The Getaway Car,” she writes about her confidence in this book she hasn’t yet written, how it is “the greatest novel in the history of literature.” She simply needs to put it down on paper for the beautiful butterfly to be seen with awe by all. She stalls, but eventually realizes it’s time. She must sit down and write this masterpiece into existence. And that’s when she says she reaches up and plucks the butterfly from the air—from her head, where it’s been flitting around on creativity’s breezes—and presses it to her desk, killing it. Here’s how she describes it in “The Getaway Car”: Just to make sure the job is done I stick it into place with a pin. Imagine running over a butterfly with an SUV. Everything that was beautiful about this living thing—all the color, the light and movement—is gone. What I’m left with is the dry husk of my friend, the broken body chipped, dismantled, and poorly reassembled. Dead. That’s my book. (25) Whether the masterpiece in your head looks like a stained glass window or butterfly, we, too, have to take up the keyboard or pen and try to put words to it. We slam the three-dimensional perfect project down to the surface of our desk and it falls flat. The stained glass window starts to look more like a paint-by-numbers project, and the butterfly? It looks like an entry in the coloring contest at the local grocery story or a specimen in your brother’s insect collection. It’s so disappointing, it’s tempting to give up. In episode 56, "To Learn How to Write, You Have to Write," we talked about filling the gap between where we’re at and where we want to be with a volume of work. We look ahead and see the skill level and beauty others make—those who have inspired us—and then we know where we’re at, so we get to work trying to fill that gap. We keep making stuff. And every effort disappoints. Our ideas and words fall onto the page, lifeless. Where’s the gleam, the shimmer, the brilliance that’s in our minds? We’re left staring at this two-dimensional, dead specimen in front of us on the screen or the page, wondering why we ever thought we could be a writer. But look how Ann Patchett herself is discouraged with what she puts down on the page compared with what’s in her head. What we need to do at that point, when we’re disappointed, Patchett says, is forgive ourselves. We have to forgive ourselves for not being the writer we felt we needed to be to write the beautiful story in our heads. All we can do is be the writer we are at that moment in time. Patchett says: [T]his grief of constantly having to face down our own inadequacies is what keeps people from being writers. Forgiveness, therefore, is key. I can’t write the book I want to write, but I can and will write the book I am capable of writing. Again and again throughout the course of my life I will forgive myself. (29) You and I will have to face the fact that we can’t write the book, short story, essay or poem we want to write, but we can and will write the book, short story, essay or poem we’re capable of writing. Again and again throughout our writing lives, we’ll have to forgive ourselves for not being where we want to be, to give our project what we want it to have. Even today. Forgive yourself. Then sit down and bring everything you can to your project, and write the most beautiful butterfly you’re capable of writing, as the writer you are at this moment in time.

My coauthor, colleague, and friend Charity Singleton Craig was the first person to share with me the three things Neil Gaiman says freelancers need to keep working: They need to be good writers They need to be easy to get along with They need to deliver their work on time Gaiman mentioned these in his keynote address at The University of the Arts 2012 commencement. Ideally, in my opinion you’ll have all three traits or at least be working on them. But Gaiman claims you don’t even need all three. He says: Two out of three is fine. People will tolerate how unpleasant you are if your work is good and you deliver it on time. They'll forgive the lateness of the work if it's good, and if they like you. And you don't have to be as good as the others if you're on time and it's always a pleasure to hear from you. I like his relaxed approach, but I think if you settle for two out of three, it's best to be a really good writer and then have one of the other two. I’m not sure simply being easy to get along with and delivering your work on time will keep you in business. To maximize your freelance writing opportunities, I urge you to aim for all three as much as possible. Be a good writer Be easy to get along with Deliver your work on time Starting with that first trait, consider taking it to the next level: be a good writer who’s getting better all the time. Look for ways to invest in professional development. For example, you could take a course or workshop, listen to lectures and podcasts, work through books with writing exercises, or seek out a writing partner, coach, or mentor. In fact, if you can get writing feedback from somebody with experience who can provide thoughtful notes on form, technique, organization, character development, plot, and themes, you’ll be able to identify where to improve and where your greatest strengths lie, and create a plan to grow stronger as a writer. As for being easy to get along with...with editors and peers, be pleasant in every interaction, never burn bridges, and try not to fight every single change. Stay open when an editor requests a revision. This can be hard when you feel the editor is adapting so much of the piece you’re losing your voice and stylistic choices, but the editor knows his or her readers well. So review through the piece several times with the suggested changes and see if they make it tighter and clearer or if the changes seem to transform the article into a length or style that fits the publisher’s target reader. Practice humility, maybe giving up some of your individuality at times. And if, after reviewing, you feel strongly that the changes need to be reconsidered, approach the editor with respect, gently making your argument for how you think your version strengthens the piece. As for meeting deadlines, do everything you can to manage your time and ship the manuscript on or before the promised due date. That editor is counting on you to deliver your article in order to meet her own deadlines with her managing editor or publisher. When an editor entrusts you to write an article, she’s responsible for some segment of the magazine or website. Make her look good. Surprise her with quality work in her inbox on or before the deadline. And then? Don’t be surprised if she asks you to write for her again. Keep growing as a writer so you consistently produce good work. Be positive, upbeat, and supportive to work with. And meet deadlines. You might get by with two out of three, but when you nail all three, you’ll be irresistible. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: Neil Gaiman's keynote address transcription (or watch it below and enjoy his mesmerizing voice) Improve as a writer with The Art & Craft of Writing (see if we're enrolling) https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ikAb-NYkseI * * * ____________________

Some writers talk freely about their projects, while others won’t say a peep, offering no clue what they’re working on. How about you? How much do you reveal? Why do you choose to talk about your writing projects or why do you choose to stay silent? Obviously we’re going to want to talk a lot about our projects just before and right after they’re published, to let people know they’re available. Today, though, I thought it might be interesting to offer some reasons writers might want to talk about their projects during the early and developmental stages. Reasons to Talk About Writing Projects 1. You're excited about it! Usually I want to talk about my project with people because I’m so doggone excited about it! I’m so happy to have this great book, article, or essay idea, I want to tell my good friends all about it, to celebrate the creative joy and have them join me in the delight of having something new in the works. They’ll even ask me if I’m working on something, so they’re supportive and interested, even curious to know more. Sharing an idea out of delight is reason number one. 2. Talking about it helps develop the project Sometimes simply talking about a project—without the other person saying a single thing—helps me clarify content and develop the idea. This means I’m at least partly a verbal processor. Maybe you are, too? I heard one time that people are either verbal and nonverbal in the way they process information and ideas. Rather than being simply one or the other, verbal or nonverbal, I usually imagine a continuum for these kinds of things, where some people might be on one end of the spectrum, some people on the other, and others in-between. I think I’m kind of in-between. Part of me is comfortable thinking through ideas silently, but I do think part of me is a verbal processor and talking out my ideas for a project helps me adjust and readjust different sections on the fly, while I’m talking. When I’ve talked through initial ideas for a project with my spouse, for example, he can actually sit there and say nothing, just listen and nod, and I’ll rephrase things or think of two more ideas to add. I’ll thank him for his time and walk back to my computer without requiring a word of input from him. He’s welcome to offer ideas, but when I’m in that mode, processing my ideas out loud, verbally, I really don’t need a lot from others. I just talk it through, and talking it through helps me develop the project. 3. Talking about it gives input to beef up weak spots As I said, sometimes I just need to talk through my ideas without needing any input from others, but sometimes I do need that constructive input and critique. I need some ideas, some insight. Sometimes I’m hitting a rough patch where I can’t answer a question or solve a problem...maybe I don’t even know the right question to ask. When that happens, I’ve been known to find a trusted friend and share about my project. I might focus on a particularly troubled section in order to get a response from them. I’ll read what I’ve got and this person might ask me a question I hadn’t thought of before. “What about X?” And I’ll be like, “I don’t know. I didn’t think about X. That’s fabulous! Thank you!” Then off I go to research X, and the project gains momentum again. Sometimes input from others will help strengthen my writing by beefing up weak spots I can’t solve by myself. 4. You might receive a fabulous gift. Several years ago I was talking through aspects of one of my books with a friend, and at some point she either told me on the phone or emailed me a subtitle idea for the book. It was perfect. The publisher used it. That’s a gift. You might share your project with someone who gives you the third act twist you need to finish your screenplay, or the rhyme to wrap up a rondeau. If your friend gives you something that specific, that’s a good friend, great input, and a true gift to you as a writer—and a good ...

In episode 64 I shared reasons to go ahead and open up about your project. After listening to some of the benefits, you might have wondered why we wouldn’t always talk about our projects with people. Why not take advantage of that great input and the energy and fun of collaboration and developmental input? Why stay secretive? Today I’ll share six reasons people choose to stay secretive about their writing projects. 1. So no one steals their idea It’s a common concern. Some writers won’t talk about their projects with other writers or in a public setting, in case someone would overhear and decide to grab it and write it themselves. Some are so nervous, they even hesitate pitching their projects to editors, for fear their idea will be rejected during the pitch but then passed on to some other writer to be developed for that publishing house. When you’ve generated some idea, some story, some concept you feel is yours to create and shepherd, it is kind of freaky to imagine someone else taking that and running with it. Are these fears founded? Some believe it happens more than we’d like to think, but other industry experts say it doesn’t. For example, Jane Friedman addresses the concern of idea theft in an article where she says, “Most people don’t view unpublished writings (or writers) as an untapped gold mine” and she shares Jeanne Bowerman‘s take on this fear, that it is possible for someone to steal your idea, sure, “but they can’t possibly execute it or interpret it in the same way you can. No one can be you. That is your best protection of all.” Whether or not you choose to be secretive, don’t sit on your idea. If you’ve got a project in mind, write it. Get your version out there. Be the first. 2. So no one inadvertently absorbs their idea and claims it as their own This is similar to the first reason, but instead of someone intentionally stealing your idea, this is a subconscious act. You talk about it to someone, and they forget the source. Or maybe they just overheard it and they sort of absorb the idea eventually thinking it was theirs all along. The only way to avoid your idea getting out there where people can absorb it, is to keep your writing project a secret from everyone. But remember, to refer back to Bowerman’s point, even if someone were to use your idea, they still have to do the hard work of writing it. And no one will write it the same as you will. As she said, that’s your best protection. So don’t be too afraid. 3. To keep their project from getting shot down Let’s say you phone a friend to tell her about your exciting new idea or project, but you catch her on a bad day or while she’s binge-watching The Gilmore Girls. She may not sound all that interested after you explain your idea. You might think she’s feeling blah about your project when she’s simply feeling blah or preoccupied. But it’s too late. You think she hates your idea and all the joy drains away. This seems to happen most often when the idea is in its embryonic stage. Or maybe it's just a tiny tadpole of an idea. If that's the case, it’s delicate, fragile, still taking shape. Give it time. Maybe you can tell your friend later, when you have more of the storyline to share or you know all the content you plan to cover in your nonfiction book And maybe you catch her when she's well rested and fully caffeinated. She can listen carefully, she’ll catch your vision, and then she may blow you away with her enthusiasm. Until then, keep it under wraps. 4. So they don’t have to admit they never followed through What happens if you share your idea with people, then end up not writing it? They’ll ask about it. “Hey, what about that romance about the two food truck owners you told me about?” “Oh, yeah, I gave that up. It just wasn’t taking shape.” “But I loved that idea! Are you sure you aren’t going to write it?” And they try to convince you to write it, or just by bringing it up you start to feel gu...

Today I’m leaning on Olympic marathoner Meb Keflezighi's goal-setting strategies to help us set good writing goals. They’re pretty close to SMART goals, but I like these examples from Meb’s running experience. It starts with this: A good goal has personal meaning. Meb points out that no one gave him a goal or forced a goal onto him. No one said, “You have to win the 2014 Boston Marathon” or “You have to make the 2012 Olympic team.” He says, "Those were goals I set for myself. When I told myself, 'I want to win Boston,' it just felt right. I knew that chasing that goal would motivate me to do what was necessary to achieve it and that doing so would require me to do my best." He says, "Your goals should have that same pull on you. They should be things you want to achieve for yourself, not to meet someone else’s expectations." Same with your writing. If you find yourself with a goal, make sure it’s yours. Make sure it has personal meaning. Make sure it’s something you want to pursue for yourself, not because it’s the trend in publishing, or it’s the next logical thing after earning your MFA, or it’s what your friends, parents, spouse or coworkers expect of you. Your goal has to be yours and it has to feel right. And it should have a pull on you to do what’s necessary to achieve it. A good goal is specific. Rather than say, “I want to run well at Boston,” Meb stated specific goals: win the 2014 Boston Marathon and make the 2012 Olympic team. The great thing about being specific is he knew how to devise a plan to get him there. As a runner, he had exact times to aim for. A more ordinary runner might set a time goal for a personal best or determine a number of times or number of miles to run per week. Writers can follow this same approach. We could set a goal of landing our first byline in a local magazine or submitting a short story to a literary journal by January 2017. A writer might want to start a blog and publish an article once a week starting on a specific date. The plan leading up to that might be to identify two or three local magazines that might be a good fit, find their submission guidelines, and outline an article to propose in a query by a certain date. Or to write a certain number of words in the short story and set a deadline to finish the draft in order to submit within a literary journal’s reading period. That new blogger might plan to write seven posts prior to launching in order to have a little cushion as he adjusts to the new schedule. So to follow Meb’s approach, the first two steps are that the goal has to feel right to you, and works best when it's specific because you can figure out exact steps to lead you to the target you’re aiming for. A good goal is challenging but realistic. Meb says, "Your goals should require you to reach outside your comfort zone while remaining within the realm of possibility.” In other words, it should stretch you without breaking you or causing you to give up. He warns against aiming too low or too high. In his running world, he says an example is if you've run a two-hour half marathon then make your next goal to run another two-hour half marathon, it might not be particularly inspiring as a goal. On the other extreme, to imagine you could lower your time by an hour would be unattainable in a reasonable time frame. If a writer is just starting out and has written only three blog posts, it’s probably unrealistic to set a goal of pitching to The New Yorker or National Geographic in a reasonable time frame. But that three-post writer might set the goal of increasing the frequency of how often he posts over the next two months from once a week to twice, or he might set a goal of increasing social media presence to two platforms and trying to guest post at a website open to new voices. That could be challenging, but realistic. A good goal has a time element. Meb says we need a time element—a deadline—and warns against setting a “someday” goa...

I saw a quote going around Facebook among writing friends that shows a line drawing of a woman leaning over a typewriter. Above her, it says, "Nothing makes me want to clean, cook, fold laundry, daydream, or nap like having a writing deadline." Sometimes that kind of non-writing activity frees my mind to come up with a great idea; but much of the time, I’m doing those things to avoid the work of writing; it's resistance. Instead of cleaning, cooking, folding laundry, daydreaming, or napping, try following Raymond Chandler's writing approach. The short of it is this. When you sit down to write, follow two simple rules: "a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else" (154, Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler). In more detail, Chandler explains in a 1949 letter to Alex Barris: I write when I can and I don't write when I can't...I'm always seeing little pieces by writers about how they don't ever wait for inspiration; they just sit down at their little desks every morning at eight, rain or shine.... However blank their minds or dull their wits, no nonsense about inspiration from them. I offer them my admiration and take care to avoid their books. Me, I wait for inspiration, although I don't necessarily call it by that name...The important thing is that there should be a space of time, say four hours a day at least, when a professional writer doesn't do anything else but write. He doesn't have to write, and if he doesn't feel like it, he shouldn't try. He can look out of the window or stand on his head or writhe on the floor. But he is not to do any other positive thing, not read, write letters, glance at magazines, or write checks. Either write or nothing.... I find it works. Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. The rest comes of itself. (153, 154, ibid) This flies in the face of the well-known quote attributed to several people, including William Faulkner: I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning. Or what Barbara Kingsolver describes in High Tide in Tucson. She said she longs for more time of her own, and silence. She writes: My jaw drops when I hear of the rituals some authors use to put themselves in the so-called mood to write: William Gass confesses to spending a couple of hours every morning photographing dilapidated corners of his city. Diane Ackerman begins each summer day “by choosing and arranging flowers for a Zenlike hour or so.” She listens to music obsessively, then speed-walks for an hour, every single day. (95-96, High Tide in Tucson) Kingsolver contrasts that with her reality: My muse wears a baseball cap, backward. The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, “Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job.” (p. 96, ibid) Okay, so which is more realistic? Which will produce better writing? Better to stare out the window and wait? Or sit down and write, now, whatever you can as best you can? I say we conduct an experiment. We’ll try both. First, in the week ahead, to avoid resisting the work of writing and to write inspired, I propose we try Raymond Chandler’s approach and report back. When you set aside your four hours, or two hours, or half an hour to write, don’t sit for five minutes and then click over to check email or pop up to fold laundry. Sit there, like Chandler said. The idea is to sit and write, but you don't have to write, and if you don't feel like it, you shouldn't try. Remember, you can look out of the window, stand on your head, or writhe on the floor. But resist any other positive thing. Don't read, write letters, glance at magazines, or check email. Either write or nothing. Chances are, boredom will free your mind to find inspiration after all.

  Last week, I encouraged listeners to try out Raymond Chandler’s writing approach to avoid resisting the work of writing and, perhaps, to write inspired: Two very simple rules, a. you don't have to write. b. you can't do anything else. (154 Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler) How did it go? Chandler freed us to look out the window or stand on our heads or writhe on the floor. But during the time we set aside for writing we were not to do any other positive thing—not read, write letters, check Facebook, or heart a photo on Instagram. We were to write or do nothing. I contrasted this with the grit-it-out-and-churn-it-out approach that many people advise. You might have heard the quote that’s been attributed to several people: “I only write when inspiration strikes. Fortunately it strikes at nine every morning.” I shared that Barbara Kingsolver said she had no time to lure the muse into her creative process and wait for it, like many writers she admired. As she explained in High Tide in Tucson, when she was a young mom, her writing time began the minute her daughter climbed on the school bus. At that point, she said her muse flipped a baseball cap around on his head backwards and said, “Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job” (96). I don't know which approach is more realistic or will produce better writing, so I proposed we give them both a test run. There’s the write-or-do-nothing approach of Raymond Chandler. If I got bored, an idea would eventually pop into my head and I’d be back to tapping away at the keyboard. Then there’s Kingsolver’s approach, where we sit down and write, now, whatever we can as best we can, to get it out and meet deadline. If you tried Raymond Chandler’s approach, I’d love to hear how it worked for you. Or if it worked at all. Did you sit for hours and do nothing? Or did the doing nothing part end up energizing your creativity? This week, when you set aside your four hours, or two hours, or half an hour to write, you’ll still have to avoid the temptation to click over and check email or pop up to fold laundry. The basic advice is the same from both Raymond Chandler and Barbara Kingsolver. You have to sit there. But where Chandler says you don’t have to write, Kingsolver’s muse urges her, “Get to work. Pound out some words." Chandler said write, or do nothing. I think Kingsolver was saying write. Period. Kingsolver’s approach is that you’ve got six hours, or four, or 20 minutes, or whatever, until your writing time is over. "You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job.” This week, as part of our experiment, try the Kingsolver approach. Sit down and write, now, whatever you can, as best you can. Get it out, get it down, and meet deadline. No stopping, no staring, no waiting, no writhing. Just write. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: Episode #67: Either Write or Nothing Selected Letters of Raymond Chandler, edited by Frank MacShane. New York: Columbus University Press, 1981 High Tide in Tucson, by Barbara Kingsolver * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. ____________________ Is your writing life all it can be?   Let this book act as your personal coach, to explore the writing life you already have and the writing life you wish for, and close the gap between the two. "A genial marriage of practice and theory. For writers new and seasoned. This book is a winner." —Phil Gulley, author of Front Porch Tales

Since I was in my teens, I’ve browsed the library shelves that hold the books about writing. It’s an ongoing, casual approach to professional development, as I head out with one or more books to at least skim if not pore over. I figure even if some of the material is similar to other books I’ve read, I’ll surely come away with some nugget of inspiration or instruction I can integrate into my writing life. It’s like having dozens of temporary mentors or attending small conferences with lots of breakout sessions. Except it’s free. So the other day I was back at those shelves for a moment—I had not been for a while. As I was scanning the titles, I saw one I’d never seen before. A trim book. A simple title. And a name I recognized. The Art of Nonfiction: A Guide for Writers and Readers by Ayn Rand. Rand wrote fiction including Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead as well as numerous nonfiction works, like The Virtue of Selfishness and Philosophy: Who Needs It. Regardless of where you stand on her life philosophy and views on capitalism, she certainly succeeded at expressing her ideas through writing—and I appreciated some of her thoughts in The Art of Nonfiction. Edited into book form from a series of lectures, The Art of Nonfiction begins with an important reminder for anyone who struggles with self-doubt, worried they shouldn’t be writing. Rand says: If you have difficulty with writing, do not conclude that there is something wrong with you. Writing should never be a test of self-esteem. If things are not going as you want, do not see it as proof of an unknowable flaw in your subconscious…. If you tell yourself you are guilty for not writing brilliant sentences within five minutes, that stops your subconscious and leads to a host of writing problems. Writing is not an index of psychological health…If you do have any guilt, earned or unearned, that is between you and your psychologist. (1) She assures the reader: "Do not conclude, at the first difficulty, that you are hopeless…you have the capacity to make your work what you want to make it.” How can she say and believe that to be true? Because she believes nonfiction writing is something one can learn. "There is no mystery about it," she says. What’s the key? In a world of Google searches, shallow reading, and limited reflection, she says we need to think: What you need for nonfiction writing is what you need for life in general: an orderly method of thinking. If you have problems in this regard, they will slow you down (in both realms). But writing is literally only the skill of putting down on paper a clear thought, in clear terms. Everything else, such as drama and “jazziness,” is merely the trimmings. (2) When I taught creative writing to high school students, I emphasized the need for a strong and clear idea, solid organization that flows in a logical way to convey the idea, and sentence structure that supports the ideas and the organization. Only at that level of sentence structure were we beginning to enhance style and we continued with additional layers of editing, but we started at that high level of critique. Because who cares how beautiful you phrase something if no one knows what you’re trying to say? Why work for hours on finding just the right word for a section you realize you ought to cut to keep the piece moving? Why spend time creating an effective transition if you haven’t yet moved around paragraphs? In nonfiction, then, start with that idea. Think it through. Make sure you know what you’re trying to say, and work on that above all else. I love this section from Rand’s book: "I once said that the three most important elements of fiction are plot, plot, and plot. The equivalent in nonfiction is: clarity, clarity, and clarity.” If you’re writing anything from an article or blog post to a nonfiction book, I suggest you follow this writing philosophy of Ayn Rand, even if you disagree with all of her other ideas.

Once upon a time... In the beginning… Call me Ishmael... Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation... Beginnings are inevitable, but good beginnings—are essential. And challenging. We’re told we must hook the reader in the first few words and that effective introductions will make or break our story, our message. We need the attention grabber, and we’re told to use something like a startling fact, a quippy quotation, a top-of-mind question, or suspenseful narrative. The first line, we’re told, is everything: draw the reader in within seconds or you’ve lost them forever. They’ve clicked or swiped away. They’ve moved on. It’s a lot of pressure to get the beginning right, so we fret and stew about whether we’ve begun our piece in the best possible way, and we can end up frozen, paralyzed by the thought that we don’t have what it takes to hook the reader. The story stalls before it even gets started because we can barely begin. Start Writing to Get the Piece in Motion The simplest answer to this problem is: Just write. Seriously, just get your idea in motion and if it means you write the most sluggish, boring, wordy beginning, keep going. If it takes six paragraphs to finally get the wheels turning and the story in motion, who cares? Write. Write, write, write. Because you know what? You can write—or rewrite—the beginning…at the end. Yes, at the end of the whole process of getting your draft down, you can swing back around to the beginning and edit. But you can’t go back to the beginning and edit if there’s no draft. So write. Write it all out. Write bad stuff, bad beginnings, miserable middles, clunky conclusions and go back later to fine tune it. You can cut down that introduction and spruce up that opening line. You can find the one gem that showed up in the second paragraph, third line down, and try that one. Or you might stumble across a quote in a book you finish this weekend and feel it might fit perfectly. Pop it in. Try it. If it doesn’t work, delete it and try starting with story. Start in the Middle — Write the Beginning Later Another way you can trick yourself into beginning is to start in the middle. With or without a simple outline, you can actually start writing further into the piece. With fiction, this gets you deeper into the action; with nonfiction, this might have you starting with your first main point. You can write the whole complex middle before you write the beginning—or the end—and add those later. Nothing Is Wasted Sometimes I’ve edited articles where the opening paragraph ends up working best toward the end of the introduction or as the conclusion. In other words, if you’re self-editing or you work with an editor and realize the beginning needs to change, your words may find a new home elsewhere. But even if it ends up on the proverbial cutting room floor, even then it’s not wasted. Why? Because it got you in motion so you could finish your draft. That beginning served a purpose—an important one. It got your idea in motion. Without it, a great piece might never have emerged. Betsy Lerner says in The Forest for the Trees, “A good editor knows when the three pages at the beginning of a chapter are throat clearing. Start here, she’ll mark in the margin. This is where your story begins.” That so-called throat clearing may be in the form of a lengthy description, spending a lot of time introducing a character, or writing your way into your subject, theme, or thesis—even giving away your conclusion from the first line. An editor, sometimes even a writing buddy, can spot these things that were hard for us to see ourselves. I think we can learn to edit ourselves, but it’s helpful to invite an objective eye to catch the throat-clearing. The Daring Edit One time the founder of Tweetspeak Poetry, L.L. Barkat, worked with author Laura Boggess on the beginning of a novel she was working on.

The following is an excerpt from On Being a Writer: 12 Simple Habits for a Writing Life That Lasts, a book I coauthored with Charity Singleton Craig, published by T. S. Poetry Press. This is from Chapter 10: Plan, and explains, briefly, why I decided to be a little more intentional about having some kind of plan as a writer. In fact, that’s the subtitle of Chapter 10: I am intentional about my next steps. * * * I traveled out west the summer of 2013. As my family and I barreled down a New Mexico highway through a barren landscape, we saw a storm. Winds, like a giant, invisible broom, swept sand up and around. Swoosh! Currents pushed against the side of our vehicle, and debris shot across the road. “Look!” I pointed. “A tumbleweed!” It hopped over the fence and bounced like a beachball twice to cross the highway, before soaring high over the fence on the other side, disappearing into the swirling dust. I had to shout over the roar of the wind for my husband to hear. “I always wanted to see a tumbleweed, but I didn’t realize I’d see it under these circumstances!” I’d only seen tumbleweeds in movies and cartoons. This was my first glimpse of the real thing, and realizing that its movement depended on violent, threatening gusts, I decided to stop comparing myself to a tumbleweed. In my Midwestern mind, tumbleweeds had seemed sort of go-with-the-flow, lazily rolling across the desert in whatever direction a puff of wind might send them. That’s also how I viewed my life as a writer. I didn’t plan my direction much or set definitive goals; I just went where the wind blew. In the early days, I could never quite see the big picture through the blustery dust of the tumbleweed approach. When I stopped being buffeted about, I was able to schedule my weeks and days to align with the vision I have for my writing life. I developed a long-range plan, hoping to look back decades from now and say, “I’m glad I invested in the creation of that work,” instead of, “What was I doing all those years?” But watching that storm hurl the hapless tumbleweed, I realized I didn’t want to be blown completely off the path. I wanted enough control to dig in and stay for a while, especially if I liked where I’d landed. So I’ve abandoned the tumbleweed analogy in favor of something more stable (if overused): my writing life these days is more like the habit of keeping a garden. I sow seeds, watch for growth and fruit, nurture what’s flourishing until it seems the harvest is fading, and a sow a new batch of seeds when the time is right. My planning isn’t perfect; unexpected events, both good and bad, can throw me off. Nevertheless, my writing life is taking root and growing; I’m making significant, measurable progress each day. I still leave room for serendipity—a phone call from an event planner looking for a conference speaker, or a publisher wanting to hire a writing coach to work with one of their writers, or a magazine editor requesting a 2,000-word article on a topic of my choice. I edit content for two online communities, submit my work to websites and magazines, collaborate with other writers, coach high school students and adults in their craft, and publish articles at my own website. I intentionally work this literary garden on my own and with others. Clarity. Vision. Organization. Planning. I’m not waiting for the writing life to randomly bounce across my path. And if the wind whips up a surprise for me, I’m ready. My fellow gardeners inspire me to plan and set goals. They model risk-taking and organization, tackling new projects and integrating the latest technology. Thanks to the encouragement of others in this broad community of writers, I’m more organized and deliberate. When looking at a project, I break it into manageable tasks and schedule them to pace myself leading up to the deadline. I use a task management system that serves as a to-do list for each day and coordinates with a calendar. I wake up,

Last weekend I presented a breakout session at a writing conference. I arrived in time to register and had a snack before the opening session, then headed into the auditorium with my plum-colored backpack, a rather chunky bag I take everywhere. It serves as my mobile office, so it’s filled with a wide range of items. I found a seat next to an attendee and flopped my bag down by my feet. We introduced ourselves, and I asked what kind of writing she did. She asked about my writing life, and I described some of my work and mentioned that I was a writing coach. At that moment I thought, “Oh, I should get out my business cards.” I thought I’d hand her one and then tuck the little container in my jacket pocket so I could easily whip them out. I said, “Hold on. I’ll get you a card.” I unzipped the section of my bag where they should be, but…no cards. Hm. I shoved my hand into every little compartment—and this bag has a bunch of slick nylon sleeves and sections to help segment and organize stuff, so I started to make a lot of commotion for just one person. She sat there bemused while I zipped and unzipped every section of my backpack multiple times, hoisting it back up to my lap to peer down inside. I offered a goofy commentary as I rooted around the contents justifying items like the plastic fork, knife, and spoon I always carry because I’m often grabbing food on the go when I have that bag. I’m telling you, people often forget to include the cutlery in to-go bags, so it’s totally worth it. Then I saw a card. Yes! I reached down to whip out the one lone card I spotted tucked in a small pocket. “Here!" “Great!” she said. Before I handed it over, I flipped it around to see the front. Oh. It was somebody else’s card I’d shoved in there at another event. “Um, that’s not mine.” Back to the bag. More zipping and unzipping. This writer saw all my cords and pens, my lip balm, gum, tissues, Post-It notes, and a single-serving packet of dijon mustard, “not for retail sale.” All that, but no business cards—at least none of my own. Here I was at a writing conference, talking with a writer—I should have an abundance of business cards! I should have dozens—no, I should have a box of a hundred at the hotel room and an extra baggie right here in my bag stuffed with 50 to replenish the cute little business card holder that was nowhere to be found. For at least five full minutes I rummaged through that bag, but finally, I gave up. I’m sure the other writer was relieved. I zipped shut each compartment, stunned that I’d forgotten. I mean, the business card is key. You meet someone. Shake hands. Chat about writing. Then you hand them your business card. You’re discussing your work, and they’re holding your brand. The business card is tangible and memorable. It’s low-tech, high-touch. It’s an open door, an invitation, a welcome mat of sorts. “Contact me any time,” the card seems to say. “I’m glad our paths have crossed today." At a conference you’re making industry contacts: agents, editors, publishers—even writers who might want to collaborate with you. You want to make a lasting impression. You want them to remember you. You want to leave behind something, a bread crumb that leads back to you. You want to hand them a business card. And I couldn’t find even one of mine. Not one. The opening session began and I tried to shake it off. Forget about the cards. It’s fine. You’ll be fine. If they can spell your name they can find you online. The session ended and I couldn’t resist. I unzipped that backpack one more time and dug into the slot that holds a few papers I rarely touch. And then I felt it. At the very bottom of that slot, between the papers and another Post-It pad, sat the elusive business card holder. I turned to the writer who had seen all of my personal items. “You aren’t going believe this, but I just found it!" The writer grinned. “I’m so glad!"

  Let’s say you send a query letter to a magazine or a book proposal to an agent. She reads it through and feels there’s potential—it looks like there’s a match between you and her publication or agency. What’s the next thing she’s going to do, most likely? Google you. She’s going to type your name into a search engine and then click around the links that come up. "Let’s see what we can find out about this writer..." What will she turn up? Maybe some articles you submitted to an online organization? Comments you left at someone’s blog? Your Facebook and Google+ profiles? Maybe the race results from a 5K Turkey Trot you ran last Thanksgiving? Is that it? Is that all she’s going to find? If so, you may need to set up a permanent residence. Your virtual home. If you’re a writer working on building a writing platform, you need a website. Help Industry Professionals Find You When you secure your own little plot of online real estate, an editor at a publishing house or literary journal can type your name into a search engine and find articles and “About” information that you compose, that you want him to see, that represents you well, that reflects your personality as a writer. Your author website is presented in your voice and features ideas, stories, and topics you tend to write about along with samples of your work—everything you publish there serves as an online portfolio. It’s the hub of your writing platform. The foundation. Other platform efforts may be super-fruitful, but you still need to have one space where you control your image and content. Help Readers Find You Of course, it’s not just industry professionals who may search for you. Don’t forget readers. Who are you trying to reach? What do you write, and who would read your work if you could just get it into their hands? Again, you want to establish yourself online with the kind of content that will draw those people and help them find you and your work. Imagine if they were to find in a magazine’s archives a story you wrote. It intrigues them, and they search for your name. If they find nothing else about you, that’s a missed opportunity. You could have made a connection with readers, invited them into your space, and welcomed them. All the other places you might start making friends online—on Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter—they all offer various strengths and opportunities to connect. But to help people really get to know you as a writer, think about inviting them over to your place for a visit. A Website That Reflects You and Your Work Your website doesn’t have to be fancy with lots of bells and whistles—not at all. It can be simple. At the very least, you want a clean space that doesn’t mislead people about the kind of writer you are and the kind of writing you produce. If you write thrillers, you probably don’t want a lot of white space with flowers in the header. If you write reflective, serious creative nonfiction, you probably don’t want a hand-drawn comic strip like The Oatmeal featured front and center on your home page. And you want a way to get content out there from time to time, even if you aren’t regularly blogging. A Simple, Flexible Online Home You can set up a self-hosted website, which will require a monthly fee, but if resources are limited, don’t wait. With all the free and inexpensive website options out there, there’s no need to be a wandering troubadour with no permanent residence. Come up with a basic idea of how you want to present yourself to the world, and find a simple template that will allow you to create some content—pages people can click on to get to know you, and maybe a blog feature that allows you to write and publish your own content. Just get started and soon you'll see what you’d like to add or remove. Your “permanent” residence online is not really all that permanent—on your website, you can knock out walls and reorganize any time you wish.

  Back in 2004, I was on the phone with my publisher and he told me I should start a blog. "It’s what authors are doing," he said. So, I tried to figure it out. I started learning about blogs and paid particular attention to the sub-category of mom-bloggers because my first book was for moms and it felt like the right world to run around in. Rather than using the mom’s name in association with the website, these mom-blogs would often be named things like, "Patience and Pacifiers,” or “Somewhere Under the Laundry Heap”—creative names that said something about what the website would contain and communicate. They were focused. I liked the idea, so I thought for a long time about what to name my blog. For a brief time I used the name of my book, The Contemplative Mom, but before long I realized the adjective “contemplative” felt too limiting or confusing, because while I was contemplative, I was also downright goofy sometimes. I dropped that name and generated a long list of alternative ideas, debated with myself which one fit best, and finally gave up and just went with my name. I don’t think I even had a tagline or subtitle. In a world of clever, creative, specific, branded blog names—even though we didn’t think of as branding at the time—I was just…me. Ann Kroeker. Name Association What was the name Ann Kroeker associated with back then? What was the focus of her website? What would a visitor expect? What would AnnKroeker.com contain and communicate? I don’t think anyone could tell you. I don’t think I could tell you. My blog needed focus. And for my blog to have focus, I needed focus. I had none. I decided to find out what I would write, by writing. That was my strategy. And I learned, in time, it was not the savviest strategy, nor the most efficient. For years, I wrote about whatever came into my mind, and being a curious lifelong learner, just about anything could pop into my mind, including fascinating facts about katydids and the Byzantine Empire. If we looked back in my archives, I would not be surprised to see a reference to Constantinople. I was all over the map. I was a Russian roulette of content with no niche, no clear brand, no focus. I’d have been better off with a narrow tagline, like Ann Kroeker: Somewhere Under the Laundry Heap. But as I said, I wasn’t savvy. I just wrote about whatever. The Oatmeal Connection One day, I wrote about steel cut oats. I wanted to make them and eat them, but I didn’t want to cook them for 20-30 minutes on the stove, which is what’s required, so I dug around the internet and found, deep in a discussion thread somewhere, a method for cooking them overnight in a crock pot using a water bath. And it worked. The oats were delicious—ready and waiting for me in the morning. I was so excited to share this with readers, I snapped photos to show the bowl of oats sitting in the crock, surrounded by water. I included a blurry image of the steel cut oats container—in other words, this was not the staged, high-end, natural-light presentation you’d find in a foodie blogger’s post. It was just unfocused Ann, sharing another random tidbit. Well, I must have hit the right moment in the wave of interest in steel cut oats. Because before long, this post became the most visited post on my website. I’d peek at the stats and see that hundreds clicked through from referral sites. Then thousands. Then ten thousand. A hundred thousand. I switched my website to another host at some point and lost my stats, but based on current information, I would not be surprised if that post has hit a million views. Ann Kroeker was finally associated with something: Oatmeal. This is not what my publisher had in mind when he told me to start a blog. I needed focus. Something intentional. So do you. Name It and Claim It Now, I did accidentally do one thing right, and that is snag my name as my domain name: annkroeker.com. Over the years,

If you’re writing nonfiction, you’re probably trying to zero in on a category or topic that you’d like to write about and be known for. You’re trying to find your focus. If you haven’t already been exploring the possibilities by writing blog posts or articles, you’ve probably had some inkling. If not, look for clues. When you’re leafing through a magazine, what articles catch your eye? What do you rip out and stick in a folder? When you’re skimming your Twitter or Facebook feed, what do you retweet or share? What do you save to Pocket or Evernote? What Topics Fascinate, Captivate, or Energize You? Make a list of those fascinating, captivating, energizing topics—the ones you return to again and again. Once you’ve identified those topics or categories, you have some choices. For example, do you see a common thread that ties them together? If so, see if you can create an umbrella under which they can fall. Lifestyle bloggers do this, where under that “umbrella” they have categories on their website—buttons or tabs to click on—for things like “travel,” “health,” “style” and “photography.” A mom-blogger “umbrella" might have these for “recipes,” “crafts, “money-saving tips” and “organization.” It all depends on the things you love and want to write about—the things that fascinate, captivate, and energize you. Narrow Your Categories A couple of things may help you at this point. First, as much as possible, consider narrowing down—or “niche-ing down,” as they say—to stand out in a crowded online world. You can try to enter the lifestyle blogger world, but by narrowing, you’ll make it easier for people to find you and your focused topic. You can narrow by the audience or reader you find yourself drawn to—or the readers drawn to you already if you’re out there writing now. Or, you can narrow the topic to a subtopic and focus on that. For example, instead of “travel," which is a big, crowded category, maybe you focus on frugal travel tips—that’s narrowing the kind of travel, but even that’s kind of a big category. How about frugal travel tips for young families? That’s narrowing the target audience. You could mix and match given who you are, what you’re drawn to, and the people you want to reach. Maybe you want to offer frugal travel trips for big families, or frugal travel tips for retirees. Or singles. Or maybe you want to focus on camping for big families. You see how you can narrow the topic and the audience or reader? That’s niche-ing down. To illustrate how this will work to your advantage as a blogger or writer, consider this: If I want to find an article about frugal camping tips for big families, am I going to be more inclined to dig into a lifestyle blogger’s website that has high-end photography tips and craft beer recommendations as well as three or four camping articles under their broad “travel” category? Or am I going to spend some time digging into the resources I find at a blog offering all kinds of camping tips for big families? Chances are, I’m going to bookmark that second website and return to it. I’m going to pin their stuff on Pinterest and share it on Twitter. That’s the power of narrowing or niche-ing down—the people who need that specific information, and the people who care about a certain subject or the people who are captivated by certain types of stories, will come to you: the one writing exclusively about it. If You're Feeling Constrained A frustration I’ve heard is that this narrowing feels constraining to some writers. It’s like I’m asking you to be a bookseller crammed into a tiny rented space squeezed in next to a barber shop with barely enough room to sell just one category of books, like mysteries. But you do it. You’re fascinated with mysteries, so you limit yourself and get to know mysteries really well and put them on the shelves that line your tiny space. But you're fascinated and captivated by all kinds of books.

Your writing platform will have a lot of elements, but it starts with you, the writer, and what you’re about or what’s your thing, your topic, your niche. We’ve talked about establishing an online home, because you want to have a place to welcome people who are searching for your niche or your name. When people arrive, they should have some idea of your focus. “Ah, I see that Alice Author writes about the Arts.” The visitor—whether editor or reader—won’t be surprised to find the image of a painting or a still shot of a stage production on Alice Author's home page. Nonfiction Ned writes about leadership. His website will offer some clues through design choices and content—maybe taking inspiration from leadership book covers or from websites like Fast Company and Entrepreneur. Let’s say Ned decides to narrow his niche from leadership to leadership for entrepreneurs in the startup phase. That’s his niche. And Alice writes not just about the Arts in general but about introducing children and families to the Arts. If you’re like Alice and Ned, narrowing your niche, you want to ensure you love it enough and can write enough about it without getting bored. How will you know you’re able to sustain interest in this to write about it over the long haul? The Temptation of Trends Resist the urge to pick a topic because it’s trendy—it’s tempting to think If it’s working for others, I'll increase the odds it’ll work for me, too, and I’ll find plenty of material from others to inspire and inform my own posts. But that’s their thing. Is it really your thing? Maybe. But remember that you need to be fascinated, captivated, and energized by it now and long into the future. So just be sure before going in that direction. The Temptation of Popular Posts It’s also tempting to pick a category because you’ve been writing about all kinds of things for a while and happen to find some success with one topic—an article went viral or you got hundreds of comments on one particular post. This could be a clue, yes. Maybe that is pointing to your narrowed niche. But it might be a random post you wrote that happened to hit people the right way, and you would never sustain interest in it longer than a dozen posts. If I’d made a decision about my narrowed category—my specialty, my niche—based on the popularity and response to a post or article I wrote, I’d have a blog devoted entirely to oatmeal. And while I do like oatmeal, I don’t like it that much. Confirm Your Niche But back to you. When you think you’ve got some narrowed topics in the running, pick one. Just one, for now. The top contender. The narrowed-down category that makes you smile because you realize you think about it all the time. You read about it all the time. You talk about it all the time. That’s a good place to start. Step One: List Subtopics Make a list of subtopics related to this narrowed category. Let’s say it’s Ned’s leadership for startup entrepreneurs. He starts thinking about all the startups he’s consulted with and realizes he could write dozens of case studies, interview entrepreneurs, ask if they want to guest post. He could talk about organizational tools for startup teams, communication skills, startup statistics, recommended conferences, top leadership books. His mind goes wild as he thinks of all the subtopics he can explore. Alice, who loves the Arts, starts thinking of how families can begin to engage with the Arts, so she lists all the museums she’s visited with her family, all the Broadway shows she’s seen, the concerts and operas she’s attended, and what she did to prepare her children to understand and appreciate it all. She looks into virtual tours she can link to and starts listing educators who might offer guest posts, courses people can sign up for online to learn about art, individuals she could interview—from actors and artists to docents and curators. Now it’s your turn. Think about your main category—photography,

Last week on my blog I shared an excerpt from Mary Pipher’s book Writing to Change the World: I left it up to readers to decide what it meant for them, but I did hope her thoughts would encourage us to listen closely, to realize the power of our words, and then, when we choose to use them, to use our words well and use them for good. The Power of Poetry On Friday, I wrote a post for Tweetspeak Poetry that highlighted the healing power of poetry. I shared an interview with Gerda and Kurt Klein. Kurt was an American lieutenant who arrived at a concentration camp just after it was liberated. Gerda had been imprisoned in the camp and brought the lieutenant into a factory where female prisoners lay on scant beds of straw, sick and skeletal, many with the look of death, barely moving. Kurt recalls his first interaction with Gerda, where she made a sweeping gesture over the scene, and quoted a line from the German poet Goethe, “Noble be man, merciful and good.” Kurt said, "I could hardly believe that she was able to summon a poem...at such a moment. And there was nothing she could have said that would have underscored the grim irony of the situation better than what she did." I was struck by the power of poetry in that moment, for Kurt, for Gerda. In the midst of suffering, she had that line ready. She connected with Kurt. As he said, she “underscored the grim irony of the situation” with one phrase, one line. Turn to Poetry When you don't know what to say, try poetry. It's what we can turn to when our own words would fall flat. As Emily Dickinson reminds us, it gives us a way to tell all the truth, but tell it slant. An article at Vox suggests we turn to poetry, because “[a]rt can help us express what is otherwise too difficult to stomach. It can help us bear witness actively, and it can strengthen our souls for the work we need to do.” The Atlantic also noticed how many people turned to poetry in recent days and interviewed Don Share, chief editor of Poetry magazine, about this phenomenon. He responded: What poetry does is it puts us in touch with people who are different from ourselves—and it does so in a way that isn’t violent. It’s a way of listening. When you’re reading a poem, you’re listening to what someone else is thinking and feeling and saying...It says, "Here’s what it’s like from my point of view.” The poem is a catalyst where you’re bringing two different kinds of people together. And at its best, when it works, there’s a kind of spark, and everyone comes away illuminated by what the spark has ignited. Poetry: A Prescription for Adversity Though Megan Willome and I already knew each other, a poem of mine created a deeper connection for us. She included it in her book The Joy of Poetry, setting it up like this: The following poem was written after a tragedy the poet didn’t feel ready to talk about. That information is not in the text. But a year or so later, when there was a national tragedy, she reposted the poem on her blog, realizing it might have value for other people in their moments of heartbreak. Maybe they didn’t want to talk either. Maybe they were standing in a kitchen, breaking eggs to make a pie. [You can read the poem at this link or hear me read it in the podcast.] Willome offers some observations you can use in your own poetry. The poem makes great use of the sense of touch. It uses words like cradle, palm, jagged, and soft. This pain of mourning the poet feels—it’s tactile. The other sense explored is sight, but everything is translucent. The sun is “filtered.” The windowpanes, “Streaked.” The light is “muted.” Nothing is clear. When something catastrophic happens, our world becomes unclear. Our glasses are gone. We reach out raw hands to feel our way through. My favorite part is these three words without any punctuation: smooth/fragile/broken. Yes, that’s how it feels when life cracks. Willome concludes with this:

This week I want to encourage you to dip into memories and memoir. Even though this veers from the more obvious platform series we’ve been in, it may, eventually, reveal more about who you are and what you want your platform to be about. I believe it’ll be time well spent. Think back to an event that seems small, yet feels packed with emotion. You don’t have to fully understand it all. Just remember it. Something changed due to that event. It may have been subtle or seismic, but you emerged from it a different person. When you remember and then write these scenes or episodes or events, you are exploring the territory of memoir even if you aren’t working on a long-form memoir project. As you compose these scenes from your past, you’ll learn from them. Future readers may, as well, if these end up as essays or poems that could be submitted, but that’s not the main reason to undertake this project. It’s about mining for material in your own mind. And none of these ever needs to be published. They are first and foremost for your own personal growth. I wrote a short scene in this style that Tweetspeak Poetry published. It lives there under the Memoir Notebook category with the title “Writing the Fragile." Click the link below to read it, or use the podcast player at the top of this page and listen to me read it. http://www.tweetspeakpoetry.com/2015/02/13/memoir-notebook-writing-fragile/ This memoir project, however simple and short-lived it may be for you, can reveal more than you expect—you may not even realize the meaning of a piece until it’s completed. I encourage you to write these scenes as a regular creative writing practice—the practice of remembering. Compose them in a private writing journal or memoir notebook. You will likely turn out some of your best, most interesting material. More importantly, you’ll get to know yourself better. When you get the stories down, you can look at them, ponder them, and learn more and more about the writer—the person—you really are. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: Memoir Notebook: Writing the Fragile * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. ____________________ Is your writing life all it can be?   Let this book act as your personal coach, to explore the writing life you already have and the writing life you wish for, and close the gap between the two. "A genial marriage of practice and theory. For writers new and seasoned. This book is a winner." —Phil Gulley, author of Front Porch Tales

When building a platform, we might be told to build our email list or increase our social media numbers, so we're tempted to do a lot of things maybe before we’re ready—some people advise writers to buy a bunch of Twitter followers or set up an Instagram account even if we don't like taking pictures. We get so busy trying to follow somebody else’s plan, we forget that before any of those steps, we need to get the basics down. We need to have a solid idea of the main Whos involved. The First Who…Is You! In the last episode, I encouraged you to embark on a memoir project regardless of whether you write memoir or nonfiction of any kind. Even if you write science fiction or romance, if you write, you’ll write better if know yourself well. And one powerful way to get to know yourself is to reflect on the events that formed you in big and small ways—moments when you felt a shift or an insight, moments when you changed. As I’ve said, these personal pieces don't need to be shared publicly, although they could if you felt one would benefit other people. Most importantly, they help you know yourself—you get to know who you are as a person and a writer, continually deepening your understanding of self, even as you evolve. From that place of knowing, you can write with an authentic voice. Make sure that first “Who”—you—is the real you. Know yourself as best you can. Know who you are. Who Are the Other Whos? You can call it your ideal reader. The cool kids call it your avatar. It’s your target audience or target market. Today, for simplicity, I thought I’d just call this your “Who.” Not the Whos down in Whoville, but the Whos for whom you are writing. Who is your Who? When you write, some Whos are out there you're hoping to reach. Right? I mean, that's why we write something and "ship it," whether we submit our work to a publisher or click “publish” on our blog or write Christmas letters that we stamp and mail. We're wanting to reach a reader. Who is that reader? For most of the content you create with your most important message, who are you trying to reach out to? Who are you talking to? Who are you writing for? Who are you helping, encouraging, entertaining, informing, or persuading? Picture those people—real people: a man, woman, young adult, teen, or child. Who do you imagine reading your words? Some writers will say, "Everyone!” They want to write for everyone in the whole world. And I appreciate the longing to appeal to the widest possible audience. You can try, but most likely, you’re going to be writing for a narrower audience just as you will, most likely, need to narrow your topic, your focus, and find your niche. A case in point: I know a lot of people who enjoyed the novel I just finished listening to, All the Light We Cannot See. One could argue it’s written for anyone and everyone to read and enjoy, but I know people who didn’t really like it—it wasn't their style. The Hunger Games had wide appeal beyond the young adult readers it was written for, but some people didn't want to even consider a story with so much violence—even the concept of the book was too disconcerting. It's not for everyone. People read books that aren't written with them in mind all the time, like The Hunger Games, but no book is really for everyone. Even if our book or blog post or poem enjoys unexpected reach, we really do write for a segment of the population. If nothing else, you probably write for an English-speaking audience or you wouldn’t be listening to an English-speaking podcaster. Most of my listeners and readers are located in the United States. See how that’s a natural narrowing? Identify Your Who How can we figure out who we’re reaching and who we want to reach? Consider some of these questions to help you begin to imagine and identify your ideal reader—your Who: Who do you connect with most naturally in day-to-day interactions? Who comes to you for advice in regular life?

In this season of giving, it seems apt to talk about our writing as a gift. "Hold on, now," you say. "I was kinda hoping to make some money at this whole writing gig, so are you saying we have to give our words away?" Whether we're paid or not, isn’t viewing our words as a gift…isn’t that how we begin the process of connecting with people? We toil over our message and send off something for a reader to consider. “Here. I wrote this for you.” I recently published a blog post about the longing we writers have for applause—not for how amazing we write or how heroic we might be for sharing the depths of our heart or pain, but to hear the sound of someone responding to the words we've composed and offered. We long to build a bridge from writer to reader. To connect. Author, poet, and essayist Scott Russell Sanders explains his motivation. In an essay entitled “The Singular First Person," he says, “I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to me a door through which others might pass” (p. 8, Earth Works). If we share that mindset, we write to solve someone’s problem or ease their pain or show them we know what it’s like, how it feels. And in writing that down as best we can, we build a door “through which others might pass” or a bridge over which a reader might cross. We create a threshold. Or a safe passage. A gift. All of our writing in that sense seems to be a gift, even if we receive payment for it. Now the funny thing is, literally giving away our work for free can have a literal payoff. Science fiction author Cory Doctorow partnered with Litographs in an article published on Medium, where Doctorow writes, "I’ve been giving away my books ever since my first novel came out, and boy has it ever made me a bunch of money…” When the print version of his first novel was published, he made the electronic text available for free at this website as a digital download—a gift—and within a day he saw 30,000 downloads. People “met” him through that free copy—it introduced them to his work. He created an instant audience that suddenly knew him and wanted their friends to know him as well. “My problem isn’t piracy," he explains, "it’s obscurity, and free ebooks generate more sales than they displace.” Getting known by readers is a challenge for all of us; obscurity is indeed a problem for those writers trying to build a platform. Giving away some of our work to introduce ourselves could pay off in the long run. So if you’re kinda hoping to make a little money at this whole writing gig, never fear. View your work as a gift to the world—as a bridge built to create connection or a door opened wide through which others might pass. Pour your heart into it, knowing you might make a difference in someone’s life. You can sell it. Absolutely. Or you can give it away, expecting no particular gain. Either way, you're holding it out to the world, to a reader, as a gift, saying, "Here. I wrote this for you." Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: What Do Writers Dream About? Why Give Away Your Work for Free? (Medium article featuring Cory Doctorow) Your Writing Platform episode collection Earth Works: Selected Essays, by Scott Russell Sanders (includes "The Singular First Person") affiliate link * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. ____________________ Is your writing life all it can be?   Let this book act as your personal coach, to explore the writing life you already have and the writing life you wish for, and close the gap between the two. "A genial marriage of practice and theory. For writers new and seasoned. This book is a winner."

At a writing conference a few years ago, I attended a panel discussion that included acquisitions editors from several publishing houses and a couple of literary agents. I’d been wanting to meet one of the agents, so after the session, I stood in line to introduce myself. I told him I was a writing coach working with several authors who were developing book proposals. These authors had questions about platform. “What kind of numbers are agents and publishers really looking for?” I asked. “And how would I know if I have an author you might be interested in?" He said he couldn’t speak for all agents or publishers, but as an example of the platform size he was looking for, he would only consider authors with a minimum of 10,000 Twitter followers. Platform: Numbers Matter I asked another literary agent the same question recently, especially regarding platform. Though she didn’t commit to 10,000 as the ideal, she said numbers do matter. “It’s not me,” she said. "It’s the publishers. They’re the ones asking for us to bring them authors with significant platforms because they want to guarantee a certain number of sales.” Authors as Business Partners Chad R. Allen, editorial director for Baker Books, said in an interview that when he’s reviewing book proposals, he always has three things in mind: "concept, platform, writing.” After he looks at the book idea to see if it’s a fresh, marketable concept, he then turns to the author bio, to learn about the author "not only in terms of how good a writer they are, but also in terms of what are their connections, what’s their platform, what is their ability to bring exposure to their own book.” He says, "Authors are artists–we all know that–but they are also business partners, particularly when they sign a book contract.” Chad said, "The #1 reason we turn books down is no platform or lack of platform.” Definition of Platform So we can’t ignore the need for platform, but still…what is it? Chad offered a quick definition when he said he wants to learn about a writer’s connections and their ability to bring exposure to their own book. Literary agent Chip MacGregor says essentially the same thing: "a platform is simply the number of people you can reach with your words.” He then lists several ways you can reach people: through speaking events, a blog, articles in other publications, television or radio appearances, leadership positions that would give you influence over a large group or organization. Chip says, "All of those are points of contact with potential readers…[A]dd up the audiences for all the ways in which you reach out, and that’s your platform." That’s what it comes down to: How do you reach people with your words and can you reach more of those people? Does Your Platform Reach the Right People? Literary agent Rachelle Gardner emphasizes that "the key to platform is your target audience and what you are doing to reach them.” In other words, who cares if you have 10,000 Twitter followers if they aren't the target readers of your next book? If I plan to publish a cookbook for backpackers but have been building a huge connection with business professionals focused on developing powerful speaking skills simply because I have an interest in both of those topics…I may need to rethink my strategies and find ways to build up a following among outdoor enthusiasts, campers, and, well, backpackers. I could write articles for Backpacker Magazine and join forums that talk about gear and destinations and food as some platform-building efforts. Or I could write a different book. About speaking techniques for business professionals. The point is: build a relevant platform. If you think you know what your book will be about, focus on how to reach readers who will love that book. Rachelle added the realistic, if sobering, reminder: "It’s smart to begin building your platform well before you hope to be published—years, even.”

Last time we talked about our writing as a gift to the world, but our writing can be a gift in a more specific, focused way when we write for individuals we know and love. When our writing is sent out to the world, it's usually enjoyed by one reader at a time, so in a way, all of our writing is for individuals. What I mean here is you can sit down and write for someone in particular—an individual who will be the only intended recipient of a given project. Maybe you write a long letter to a family member, or you compose a children’s story for your child or grandchildren, or you write a love poem to your significant other. You might write a note to a soldier stationed in another country, a person in prison, or a sponsored child. One project, for one person. This is where writing is personal. Sure, the projects we send to publishers are important, offering the potential to reach into circles we might never have connected with on our own, carrying our message far and wide. And yet the people who have been part of our lives all along, the people who like your posts on Facebook and look for your letters in the mailbox—the person you'd send a sympathy card to? Those people treasure your words. If you write a gift of words specifically for and to them, you're sending a powerful present. It’s likely your gift of words will be held closer than any book you may write in the future because the book is for many, whereas the gift of words you crafted is a present for that one person alone. Anne Lamott explains in Bird by Bird how she wrote "books that began as presents.” In her case, they were initially a project for one person and did end up being much more—they were published as books for anyone who might enjoy them. But when she initially sat down to create, she had one reader—one recipient—in mind. One book was a present to her father and the other, to her best friend, Pammy. Both were people Anne loved; both were people who were going to die (185). Motivated by love and a sense of urgency, she wrote a present for each of them. She explains: I got to write books about my father and my best friend, and they got to read them before they died. Can you imagine? I wrote for an audience of two whom I loved and respected, who loved and respected me. So I wrote for them as carefully and soulfully as I could—which is, needless to say, how I wish I could write all the time. (194) We can work on our platform and stick our deadlines when we write on assignment, but when we write for someone we love and respect—when we write out of love—we are giving an inimitable gift. Stay on track with your professional goals. And if you feel inspired, write someone a present. But whatever you do, as much as possible, write as carefully and soulfully as you can. Isn’t that how we wish we could write all the time? Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: What Do Writers Dream About? Ep 80: Your Writing as a Gift Your Writing Platform episode collection Bird by Bird: Some Instructions on Writing and Life, by Anne Lamott (affiliate link) * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player. ____________________ Writing is solitary work—but why not include others in aspects of the writing process? Join the Group Coaching Winter Session I'm facilitating a five-week group coaching opportunity for nonfiction writers. Starts January 7 (cart closes on January 5 or when ten people have signed up) Learn more at this link: Winter 2017 Group Coaching

There’s a proverb that says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” It’s true of so many things, isn’t it? We would be in such a different place if only we had started years ago. Building a platform might feel a little bit like that, but it’s not too late. If you haven’t already begun, the best time to start is now. Most of our platform-building efforts are like dropping coins and stuffing the occasional bill into a jar to save money for a vacation. Some actions don't feel like they are adding much—you drop in a couple of quarters, a couple of dimes, a dollar bill. You pick up the jar and shake it and just a few coins jingle and jostle against each other. Man, at this rate I’m not going to make it to Florida for another five years! Then you do something—or something just happens—making a bigger impact. It's like stuffing a $20 bill in the coin jar. You see that and you think, Okay, okay…maybe this trip isn’t just a fantasy. Maybe I can get there if I keep at it. So you keep at it. A tweet might be a quarter in the jar, but then someone with a big following retweets you and a dozen new people click like, read your post, and share it. The quarter turned a $5 or $10 "profit" and all that goes in the jar. You record a YouTube video, and a few people watch it. Maybe that's like a $5 bill going in the jar. You post another, and it gains traction. Soon, people are eager for the next, and the next. In time, with these efforts, your name is known by more and more people. They're paying attention to you. They're finding you in Google searches. Someone interviews you on a podcast. You get a speaking gig. You contribute a chapter to a book. You keep tweeting, you keep recording videos—whatever your main outlets are, you keep those going. It builds. It grows into something substantial. Your website and social media accounts represent opportunities. A good practice might be to take some action of some kind each day. Some days are busy, so you tweet something. Some days offer you a chunk of time, so you write a short blog post or pitch an idea for a guest post somewhere. You share a link on Facebook and Pinterest. You upload an image related to your brand on Instagram. You'll meet people in these places. You'll interact. You'll like something they’ve posted that relates to your work, or you'll read their post and share it. That's how it starts. That's how it continues. That's how it adds up. Now, let me caution you not to grab a handful of coins and hurl them out willy-nilly. For example, don’t sign up for every social media platform and dive in full force. My examples might have implied you have to be at all those places all the time, which isn’t the case. Pick one that makes sense to you—one social media platform you’re already familiar with, where your target readers hang out, where you might already be seeing success. For example, if you have some speaking skills, think video and don’t worry about Twitter and Pinterest right now. If you love photography and you’re already enjoying Instagram, start there. Get to know it. The sweet spot is when you find something you love doing, and your target audience loves it, too. Don’t give up if you don’t see results right away. In the beginning, you’re just tossing in nickels, dimes, and quarters. It takes a while when you’re only seeing coins. But, as I said, over time you’ll start to see the efforts accumulate. At some point, you'll hit a tipping point and cha-ching! Your efforts no longer feel like you’re just flinging a coin into a fountain and making a wish. It starts to feel meaningful as you interact with people and start to see the kind of content and support and stories they respond to. You tweak your content to best serve those readers, listeners, or subscribers. You write Facebook updates with intention and energy, and you tweet in your own voice. Small investments over time pay off when it comes to ...

It’s that time of year when everyone is working on their annual business plans, intentions, resolutions, habits—or even big, hairy, audacious goals, those BHAGS. Or “stretch” goals. A lot of writers are thinking through their goals for the year ahead. You may be measuring and drawing out calendar grids in your bullet journal or shopping for a bright, new, fresh yearly planner. You’re organizing and reorganizing Evernote tags and Notebooks. You’re trying out productivity apps. You’re going to test run a new social media platform. Maybe you decided this is the year to write your first book, so you set up a Word document or Scrivener file with the working title, as a promise to make progress. You can imagine that as a coach, I love all of that dreaming, all that energy, all that desire and hope. I’m so happy you’re making plans and experimenting—maybe setting out to launch a new project. Go for it. Make those plans. Set those goals. Write out your intentions and resolutions. Stretch and get a little audacious. And then, before you lock everything in, may I make a suggestion? Run it through one more grid. Because I’d hate for you to get deep into the second quarter and realize you can't possibly keep up with the pace you set for yourself. You can’t turn out the daily word count you set up, or you were unrealistic about how fast you could land a byline in a national publication. I encourage you to look ahead with the idea of sustainability. The word “sustainable” traces back to ideas of being able to last or continue over the long haul. But its root word, “sustain," means to give support or relief to, or to supply with sustenance or nourish. I find that to be a satisfying way of looking at our work. So with those ideas of sustenance and nourishment in mind, let’s consider four ways our writing can be sustainable: 1. You can sustain your writing plan if you have enough ideas to keep going This first idea is obvious. Your writing plan is sustainable only if you have enough ideas. If you set out to publish a blog post five times a week or three times a week, you need enough content to keep that up. In episode 76, I did some math for you—and believe me, I’m really invested in you to do math for you. In that post, I figured out that to publish twice a week for three years, you’ll need 312 ideas. I was suggesting you brainstorm and see if you can generate a big number in one or two sessions because that would confirm you have plenty of content to keep writing in your niche. Well, it’s the same principle as you move ahead with your writing plan for the year ahead. You want to be sure you have plenty of content to supply and support the plan. If you have 312 ideas, you’ll have no problem continuing—you’ll be able to move ahead with two articles per week. If you have only 75, perhaps you should reduce your frequency to once a week or broaden your niche so you can generate more ideas. In any case, the concept here is that if you’ve set up a goal that requires a steady supply of content, make sure you have enough on deck to sustain it. 2. You can sustain your writing plan if the schedule isn’t brutal This is closely related to the first sustainability challenge, except that you could have 700 ideas ready to go, but if writing still comes a bit slow for you, or if you’re working full time and writing is still a side gig, or if you face other complicated scheduling challenges, those ideas are just going to sit there. Even efficient writers need time to write and prep content for a blog or freelance submissions or as pieces of a bigger project like chapters for a book. If you don’t have much writing time available, you can have all the ideas in the world and it doesn’t matter if you can’t get them written. Be realistic about what you can produce in your current schedule. Now that’s not to say we shouldn’t push ourselves at times to meet those BHAGs and stretch goals.

Last week I volunteered to serve at a speech and debate tournament for junior high and high school students. One of the women I served with asked if I thought writers were expected to speak more than ever before, whether through all the video options that are popping up like Facebook Live, or in person at events. I thought back to the late 1990s, when I was pitching my first book to a publisher. The editorial team took me out to lunch, and someone on the team asked if I would consider speaking as a way to help sell the book. If you've read On Being a Writer, you know I practically choked on my sushi, because I always thought of myself as a writer, not a speaker. I couldn’t imagine speaking, and I didn’t think about that being part of the marketing plan. I knew the right answer was "yes," but I panicked at the idea of standing on a stage speaking. The editor waited for me to turn from my California roll to look him straight in the eye. He said, “Something compelled you to write this message and share it with a broader audience. Right?” I nodded. "I would simply ask,” he continued, “couldn’t you see speaking as another avenue to share that same message? Your words—your message—spoken?” That makes sense, I thought. I felt strongly about my book and I could see speaking as another way to spread its ideas. “I’ll do it,” I said. “I’ll do all that I can.” A few weeks later they gave me a contract. And I did begin to speak…mostly in small venues, but occasionally in larger settings. I’ll be honest, I did feel panicky at the first few events, but I got a little more confident and comfortable each time. Obviously, I gained more and more experience and learned how I like to prepare. That editor was right. Speaking gave me a new way to communicate with people. Interacting with audiences of all sizes gave me immediate input—impossible to get through the written word. I could test out new ideas for future articles and books. I could meet people and make connections. And, to the publisher's delight, I could sell books. I would never have pursued speaking if that editor hadn’t asked. But I’m glad he did. To swing back around to the question I was asked at the tournament, I think publishers—and maybe people in general—do expect writers to speak, though I think they've expected it of us for many years. They expect it, or at least hope for it. I think publishers hope that writers will open themselves up to the idea because it’s a tremendous opportunity to connect with people who care about your topic or story. What's new are all the ways we writers can get our message out there as speakers. I think any writer building a platform should—whether asked or not—consider looking for ways to speak, including taking advantage of all the technology available to record and distribute our messages. For live events, you can find opportunities locally: See if a friend would host a coffee where you could read from your work-in-progress or your published pieces. Try recording a short reading on Facebook Live, where no one expects it to be perfect. See if a local civic group would appreciate a short talk. Ask at your place of worship if an upcoming retreat or conference could use a breakout speaker. Offer to lead a small workshop at your local library. Whether in person or through a recording, people love to hear directly from authors. They love to hear a writer’s voice. They love to see how their eyes light up when they talk about something related to the story they wrote or the topic their book was about. I think some people love getting the information or story through the spoken word not instead of but in addition to the written word—if it’s a podcast, for example, people have the option of listening as they exercise or drive. If it’s a video on YouTube, people can watch facial expressions and see gestures. Give it a try. You may panic. You may hate it.

When people talk about building a platform, they often think immediately of social media. I suppose it’s because the word “platform” is often used to describe them: Facebook is a social media platform, Twitter is a social media platform. It’s referring more to the technology that makes it possible for that service to run. But no wonder it’s confusing to talk about our writing platform and to toss the words “social media” into the mix. We can build a writing or author platform in many ways unrelated to social media efforts, but today I’d like to suggest first steps you can take to launch your social media presence as part of your platform-building strategy. Explore the Possibilities of Social Media Because just think about it. We have, right at our fingertips, avenues to reach out into the world to anyone with Internet access. We can meet people, share information and resources with them, participate in a group discussion, offer encouragement and support…all while sitting at home or a coffee shop. It’s kind of crazy when you think about it. And it would be crazy to not at least explore the possibilities. And possibilities? Oh, man, there are so many new social media options popping up, it’s hard to keep up. We’ll have to see what’s next and what audience it best serves. Maybe we’re bold enough to be an early adopter to a new upstart and just when we get used to how it operates, it evolves into something unrecognizable from what we’ve known, or fades and simply disappears. Others stay strong. At the time of this recording, Facebook doesn’t seem to be going anywhere, Pinterest and Instagram are expanding, YouTube and LinkedIn continue to serve a strong purpose, Twitter is still in the game. Avoid Social Media Overwhelm It’s tempting to jump into several at once—either we resolve to learn it all or we’re pressured to do so by industry experts who insist we’ve got to have a presence here and there, on this and that platform. You click around and try to understand how they all work and end up confused, struggling to keep up, overwhelmed by the activity required. Instead of going slow, you’re spent. You’re sick of it. Nothing seems fun or friendly. Forget it. Listen, if you’re like me and you’re a one-man or one-woman show, you will feel overwhelmed if you try to tackle it all at once. It’s too much to juggle every area of social media on your own and sustain efforts over time—especially while you’re busy trying to pull off all the other aspects of writing and pitching and whatever else your writing efforts require. So take a deep breath. We don’t all have to be Gary Vaynerchuk, who's on every social media platform out there. First Steps to Launching Your Social Media Presence I want you to stay curious, creative, and productive, and if poking around and testing the waters on Twitter and Instagram feels like fun, go for it. But if you lean toward being overwhelmed at the thought of continual activity and that sucks the life out of you, there's no need to rush. Instead, let me offer a simple approach that positions you to expand later if you choose. Establish a bare-minimum presence at several social media platforms by simply setting up your username and profile at the places you think sound fun or useful and where you think your readers will hang out. Many writers—probably most writers—are building a brand or online presence based on their name, so that’s a good place to start. See if you can snatch your name when setting up your profile at these social media services. This may take a few days because you’ll want to read about how each of the services works. Fill out the bio section. Add your website and whatever contact information you're comfortable sharing with the world. Almost all of these—Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest—will grow best when we’re actively adding content and interacting with people. And as I said, I don’t want you to be completely overwhelmed,

In episode 86, we discussed first steps you can take to launch your social media presence. I suggested you could start simple and slow by establishing a bare-minimum presence at each of the big social media platforms. I encouraged you to secure your avatar, your handle, your username—ideally using your author name—and fill out your profile or bio at the places you think sound fun or useful for the writing you do (and where you think your readers will hang out). All of this was in the context of building a writing platform and using social media as one tool to do so. But consider this. Something motivated you to want to write and publish a book that would require a platform—and part of what motivated you was surely the reader. Not a reader named Shirley, but you know what I mean. Part of you must want to write for an actual person who will open your book and take in the message or story in its pages and be affected by it, changed in some way, maybe even transformed. If you write nonfiction, maybe you have ideas to share or problems you can solve for the reader. If you're a science writer, you might be assembling research to pass along so readers can be better informed. If you write fiction, maybe you want to connect with the readers' emotions and make them laugh and cry and feel shocked or jubilant. Here’s the thing: you can start impacting readers right now. Through social media, in small doses and with creativity, you can press “publish” and make a difference in people’s lives without waiting two or more years for a book release. Isn’t that exciting to think about? Poetry on Twitter Instead of writing entire poems, submitting them to multiple literary magazines and waiting months to hear back, you can wake up one morning struck by an interaction or scene. Jot out just a line or two, marry it with an image, and share it on Twitter. Just like that, you’ve shared beauty with followers who happen upon it. While your fully developed, polished poems are under consideration via Submittable, you can still be practicing the art in small ways, enjoying the satisfaction of publishing snippets of your own work as they come to you in your everyday life. Nonfiction on Facebook If your passion about a topic has led you to research and outline a nonfiction book that you plan to pitch to a publisher, why not share tiny tidbits on Facebook—maybe an excerpt from an interesting study that helped you see the subject from a new angle. You could share a quote. You can microblog about the material as your long-form project comes together, getting people to think about this topic, generating interest, demonstrating your knowledge, passion, and understanding. Maybe one of your Facebook updates will contain and convey exactly what someone needs to know. You can help people. Right this minute. Fiction on Instagram You’re a novelist, let’s say. Why not tell your story in installments on Instagram? You’ll be like a modern-day Dickens, publishing serially. Others have done this or are in the midst of their stories. Rachel Hulin wrote Hey Harry Hey Matilda on Instagram. Another author, Adam Hurly, draws sketches to go with each installment of his story on Instagram. In an interview, Hurly said: My goal with this is to create more opportunities and to show people that there are ways, innovative ways, to tell the stories you want to tell. There are ways to find an audience, you just have to be ahead of the curve with it. Why wait for a publisher to green light your project? Write some great short stories, coupling installments or scenes with images, and publish them on Instagram. Be ahead of the curve. Mix and Match Genres with Social Media You can mix and match, of course. Poets love Instagram, and memoir is Facebook or Instagram-ready. A young woman named Caroline Calloway went off to Cambridge. She shared her adventures in one Instagram post after another, like micro-essays, and seems to have a memoir in the works.

As you go about the work of writing, and the business of writing, don’t forget to study the craft of writing. Find ways to continually learn and improve. A lot of writers feel a strong urge to enter an MFA program to do this. If you feel compelled to pursue that, by all means, research it and see if that’s the right next step for you. But what I’m suggesting is you set out to invent a kind of self-study writing course using resources readily available online or at your local library. You'll learn efficiently when you develop a self-study writing course that includes practice and study pertaining to your biggest areas of struggle or weakness. Novelist James Scott Bell wrote an article about how to strengthen your fiction the Ben Franklin way. He explains how Ben Franklin came up with his own self-study course to grow in virtues. Franklin made a grid and evaluated whether or not he was successful in his pursuit of a given virtue each week. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father concluded he did not attain perfection, as he had hoped, but "was, by the endeavor, a better and happier man than I otherwise should have been if I had not attempted it.” James Scott Bell proposes the fiction writer identify key areas to develop into a stronger writer much as Franklin identified his list of virtues. Bell calls these key area "critical success factors," or CSFs. He explains: Business and sales folk have been using Franklin’s system for decades to improve their own performance. Not via Franklin’s virtues, but by determining their own areas of competence. These are called critical success factors. Bell goes through each CSF a fiction author would want to develop and points to related resources: if the reader wants to learn about scenes, voice, or other aspects of fiction, Bell provides links to articles or books that can address each of those. By tapping into these resources, the writer develops his own self-study course. You can do the same. You can make a list of what you feel are your personal CSFs—this could be something like organization or productivity or time management. Then list CSFs of whatever writing you do. In this way, any of us can identify an area to improve in and find instruction pertaining to that exact skill or technique. For fiction, you could check out James Scott Bell's list in that article, where he cites the seven key elements a fiction writer could focus on plot, structure, characters, scenes, dialogue, voice and meaning (theme). You could make a list of CSFs for nonfiction writers. This might include research, idea development and organization, grammar skills, or something as focused as transitions. You could list key skills a poet or essayist could work on to improve your craft. Consider some of the areas you’d like to grow in first, and then find online courses, books, articles, webinars, and podcasts created to address those key skill sets. Work through them, over time, as a self-study program custom-made for you, and by you. When you realize you've learned all you can from that phase of study, fully absorbing and applying what you found, you can revisit and reconsider those CSFs, and see if there's a way to ramp up your training, as if you're ready to move up to the 300- or 400-level courses, or grad-level understanding—even though these are all your own lifelong learning efforts as an autodidact. In this way, you can and will improve. You can and will grow. You can and will gain confidence. You will arrive at some level of success. And if you feel you aren't as successful as you'd hoped, you can look back and see that by this endeavor, you're a better and happier person than you otherwise should have been if you had not attempted it. Click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below to listen to the full episode. Resources: The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, page 41

In chapter 7 of On Being a Writer, my coauthor Charity Singleton Craig highlighted what L.L. Barkat calls the “Fifteen Years of Writing for Your Grandmother Rule” (On Being a Writer, 86). Charity included this excerpt from Barkat’s book Rumors of Water: It is not uncommon for writers to seek a large audience too early in their writing journeys. The idea of being published is a dream promoted by a cluttered market of writing books, writing conferences, and vanity publishers…. I love working with new writers but am often surprised at the desire they have to pursue a publishing dream when they haven’t yet put on a small-time cooking show, so to speak. (ibid, 86-87) Your Small-Time Cooking Show Charity goes on to explain the "small-time cooking show.” It was a little project Barkat’s daughter set up in their home—a cooking show she put on for her grandmother, “where she acted out her aspirations long before she’d ever attempt to be an actual chef.” Just as her young daughter was logging hours as an amateur before going pro, L.L. Barkat herself reflected back on her “small-time cooking show” years, before she was a professional writer, when she would write letters to her own grandmother and "write book reviews for a local newsletter” (Rumors of Water, 107). From Rumors of Water, Barkat says: "I’ve heard it said that most successful writers put in about fifteen years of small-audience writing before they begin to work with larger audiences” (ibid, 108). Where are you staging a cooking show for your grandmother? How long have you been whipping up meals for just a few hungry patrons? What smaller audience is receiving your words as you learn your craft? Sharing Smaller Pieces on Smaller Platforms In episode 87, I encouraged you to consider creative ways to use social media to publish on a small scale or at least in short form—micro-form, if you will. When you share smaller pieces on smaller platforms for smaller audiences, you gain lots of advantages, like instant feedback and the fun of experimentation without such high stakes. These are places to set up your cooking show. That is, you get to learn the craft and skill of writing with friends and family as your readers—your audience. You share your work with people who truly enjoy your stories, your ideas, your style. They look forward to the next piece you push out there on that small-scale stage. Fast-Tracked Writers or Rushed Writers Now, you may end up being one of the exceptions who can bypass the 15 years of small-scale writing and you may plunge directly into writing for larger audiences. It’s happening. Bloggers are getting book deals, and self-published authors are being picked up by agents and mainstream publishers. But most of us put in our time. Most of us are showing up to write faithfully in smaller outlets for modest-sized audiences. If that’s you, don’t rush your desire to publish. Find your small audience and set up your cooking show. Take joy in producing your best work on that stage. It’ll give you time to grow as a writer and help you solve problems and develop your voice in a more relaxed setting. The Time to Learn During this season of your writing life, you can create a self-study course, as I recommended in episode 88, and as you learn new techniques you can apply them in the next installment of your memoir published once a week on Facebook. You can improve your use of dialogue in the short story you’re tossing out scene by scene on Instagram. You can try a cinquain or haiku on Twitter. Don’t try to speed up the process too much. During this era, you’re growing your audience and, more importantly, you’re growing as a writer. One day you’ll publish something for a larger venue with a larger audience. You will have waited until the timing is right—you’ll have put in your time and realize that, yes, you’re ready. After five, ten, or fifteen years, your writing is truly ready for prime time.

Christian author Eugene Peterson wrote a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. He explains where he got that phrase. Christians, he says, are looking for quick results, but shortcuts don't lead to Christian maturity. Peterson writes, "Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, 'The essential thing 'in heaven and earth' is . . . that there should be long obedience in the same direction; there thereby results, and has always resulted in the long run, something which has made life worth living." Peterson argues that the world discourages this "long obedience in the same direction." Commit to a Long Obedience in the Same Direction Anything worth doing will ideally be something that also makes life worth living. I’ve concluded writing is worth doing and is part of what makes life worth living. I don’t want to waste my life. I don’t want you to, either. So if anyone tells you a writing life is a wasted life, don’t listen to them. Resolve, instead, to a long obedience in the same direction—write and keep writing, and see where it leads. You may very well find positive results, and I hope you will. Will you get exactly what you hope for? Maybe, maybe not. It depends on what you hope for. If you hope for bestseller status and seven-figure advances, that may not be where your obedience takes you. Even the dream of seeing a single book in print one day is not guaranteed by a long obedience in the same direction. I do believe, however, your faithful work as a writer will give you a life worth living. The writer who stays faithful—showing up to write the stories, to steward the message, to pass along the truths—will find that she can look back on her life with satisfaction regardless of the results. And yet you very well may find that your efforts lead to success in a short time frame—if so, I’m happy for you! Just be careful, though, because it can be tempting to sort of sit back and feel you’ve arrived or to fear you’ll never achieve such impressive results again. I urge you to avoid either of those responses. Don't rest on your laurels or fear you got your 15 minutes of fame and that’s it, time’s up. Stay Faithful: Keep Showing Up, Keep Writing Instead, build on that early success and if for some reason, you don’t see continued success, write anyway. Stick with that long obedience in the same direction. Keep at it. Keep showing up. Keep writing. The world praises quick results and discourages long obedience in the same direction. Someone or some message will try to convince you it’s not worth it to stick with this writing life over the long haul. They’ll point you to a shortcut that leads to a dead end. They'll tell you to hang up your pen if you don’t see fast results. Stop dreaming, they’ll say. You’re not experienced enough or talented enough or clever enough or savvy enough. Stop wasting your time, they’ll say. But you’ll know. You’ll know that writing is worth sticking with, day after day—that "there thereby results something which has made life worth living.” Ann Patchett says, “Writing is a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. It is better than anything in the world.” A long obedience in the same direction, for a writer, is hard work. And at times it can be a miserable, awful business. Stay with it. And you can join with Ann Patchett and countless others, and attest that writing is better than anything in the world. You’ll find that faithfully showing up today, tomorrow, and the next day and the next week and the next month and the next year to write and share what’s written . . . was never, ever a waste of time. It was, instead, worth every minute, and gave you a life worth living. To listen to the full episode, click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below. Resources: Eugene Peterson's book A Long Obedience in the Same Direction (affiliate link)

Style, for example, is not—can never be—extraneous Ornament…. [I]f you here require a practical rule of me, I will present you with this: ‘Whenever you feel an impulse to perpetrate a piece of exceptionally fine writing, obey it—whole-heartedly—and delete it before sending your manuscript to press. Murder your darlings.’ (Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch, in the 1916 book On the Art of Writing) Writing Needs Revision When I taught composition and creative writing to high school students, many of them felt that the first draft they spit out was enough. Boom. Done. They did not want to go back and revise. But writing needs revision. So they learned in my class that writing is a process. Now, it’s true that they had, at that point of arriving at a first draft, successfully worked their way through several stages of writing—from pre-writing and development stages to the first draft. But they weren’t done yet. No, they needed to go through editing, revision, proofreading and peer review stages—which might lead to more revision and proofreading—before ever submitting their project to me. That’s how it worked in Mrs. Kroeker’s writing class. Because that’s how it works in the real world. I wanted to train them to take a second, third, and fourth look at their writing. I can’t remember the last time something I wrote came out perfectly the first time. Probably never. I fiddle with emails and Facebook updates, so you’d better believe I fiddle with my writing projects. I want them to be the best they can be for any editor or agent—and eventually, of course, the reader. So I revise. I expand in some places and murder my darlings in other places. And at various stages, I get input from others, because an objective set of eyes is like gold to a writer. We get so close to our projects we stop thinking or seeing clearly. We miss glaring errors and tiny blips. We think it flows, but our first readers find it choppy or confusing. Don Your Editor Hat Before I pull in others, I start with my own eyes. I can edit as I go a little bit, but toward the end, I actually don my editor hat—I don’t literally don a hat, but I could if I wanted to. I have a nice Maxwell Perkins-ish fedora on hand, should I need to fully focus on editing. When we wear this figurative—or literal—hat, we start reading more critically. We look for hot spots and trouble zones. We read to discover how well a section flows or how believable our characters are. We address the glaring errors and try to spot and fix the tiny blips. Reform Your Work Alice LaPlante in her book The Making of a Story (affiliate link) quotes Raymond Carver: It doesn’t take that long to do the first draft of the story, that usually happens in one sitting, but it does take a while to do the various versions of the story. I’ve done as many as twenty or thirty drafts of a story. Never less than ten or twelve drafts. LaPlante herself goes on to say, “First drafts are for learning what your novel or story is about. Revision is working with that knowledge to enlarge and enhance an idea, to reform it.” Don’t be afraid to go back into your work and reform it—to revise it. The word “revision" comes from Latin, meaning to “see again.” When we stick the editor hat on, we’re trying to maintain an objective eye and see our work afresh. Try This to See Again Step away from your project for a while—as long as you can manage. Come back to it and read it aloud. Flag any spots where you stumble over a word or have to re-read a sentence. Maybe you stop or pause because you didn’t include appropriate punctuation. If you realize a scene doesn’t seem clear or a character’s dialogue feels unrealistic or a point in your essay is underdeveloped, look at it again. Can you expand your point with a story or statistic? Could you swap in a simpler word for the one that tripped your tongue? Does It Sound Like Writing? In the April 22, 1985 issue of Newsweek, Elmore Leonard said,

Before we revise, we need something to revise. We must compose the perfect first draft. How? We write without worrying about every comma splice or misplaced modifier. We write with abandon and get the story down. The Writer Hat During the prewriting and creation stage, we must consciously separate the writer self from the editor self. It’s as if we need to wear two hats—literally two different hats you can wear at the appropriate times. In episode 91, I mentioned my literal editor hat: a Maxwell Perkins-style fedora. The writer hat—especially needed during that first draft creation stage—is more like a baseball hat popped on backward. That image comes to me from Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote: My muse wears a baseball cap, backward. The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, “Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking for a day job.” (High Tide in Tucson, 96) Don’t stop the momentum and start fiddling with the words when knocking out that draft. Pop on the baseball cap as a reminder to keep the words flowing. When that hat is on, we’re in a no-judgment zone, building the piece, keeping the creativity flowing, not second-guessing ourselves. Just get ‘er down and git ‘er done. “Crummy” First Drafts Another memorable source to turn to regarding first drafts is Anne Lamott. Countless writers have found freedom to write wild and free and without judgment thanks to a chapter in Bird by Bird (and I paraphrase), “Crummy First Drafts.” “All good writers write them,” Lamott says. “This is how they end up with good second drafts and terrific third drafts” (21). As readers, we see the final versions of books. We pluck them from library shelves and marvel at their quality, their genius, their lyrical style, their page-turning power. We forget that every short story, poem, memoir, and novel started as an initial draft. Every writer had to get that first draft down—and that first draft was likely rambling, riddled with errors, and downright crummy. Write Like It’s Child’s Play Lamott gives another freeing image to take us into our project's initial writing stage: The first draft is the child’s draft, where you let it all pour out and then let it romp all over the place, knowing that no one is going to see it and that you can shape it later. You just let this childlike part of you channel whatever voices and visions come through and onto the page. If one of the characters wants to say, "Well, so what, Mr. Poopy Pants?,” you let her. No one is going to see it. (22-23) When we write our draft like it’s child’s play—free and even fanciful—she says we may end up with one line in a paragraph buried deep on the sixth page…a line that captures our imagination, and perhaps our heart. It’s a line “you just love,” she writes, “that is so beautiful or wild that you know what you’re supposed to be writing about, more or less, or in what direction you might go—but there was no way to get to this without first getting through the first five and a half pages” (23). Write Without Judgment Quiet the voices and write without judgment, without fear, without hesitation. Like a child scribbling her story. Free. I’ve never been able to confirm the original source, but Jane Smiley is attributed as saying, “Every first draft is perfect because all the first draft has to do is exist. It's perfect in its existence. The only way it could be imperfect would be to NOT exist.” Don’t let perfectionism hold your words hostage when you’re working on that first draft. Let it all out. It’s perfect for what it is: the first draft. To listen to the full episode, click on the podcast player above or subscribe to the "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" podcast on Spotify or Apple Podcast. Resources:

I didn't publish a single post last week. I volunteered to serve at a four-day tournament, and my commitment left no free time. I couldn't write anything new, and I had no blog posts or podcast episodes in reserve. So last week, I published nothing. May I serve as a cautionary tale? Work Ahead on Content If you're a blogger or regular guest columnist for another publication, I urge you to do what I failed to do: write several articles or blog posts and store them up—better yet, prep and schedule them—so you'll have content for the weeks you head off on vacation, catch the flu, or volunteer to serve at a four-day tournament. If you don’t, you'll end up like me and have no choice but to recycle something from the archives or simply take the week off. Now, taking a week off is certainly an option. But your readers like hearing from you. They look forward to your updates. They appreciate your solutions to their problems. They're entertained by your stories. They show up looking for whatever it is you write and when you and your words aren't there for a week or more, they wonder what’s going on. They hope nothing's wrong. I wish I'd worked ahead, so I could have offered great content to help you reach your writing goals—and have fun. We missed a week when, together, we could have been more curious, creative, and productive. It Takes Grit to Work Ahead I know it's possible to work ahead, because I pulled it off last year when I was going to be gone for several weeks. The month before I left, I got up early and stayed up late to double the work, writing one piece for the week I was in and another for a month out, when I would be traveling. My pace was nutty—unsustainable, really—but I pulled it off and felt great having a month's worth of content finished, prepped, and scheduled. It took grit; I had to push to get ahead. But what freedom! And the beauty is that once you're ahead, you can revert back to a normal schedule, producing only one piece at a time knowing there’s a safety net. If you fall behind one week, you’ll still have something to publish. I wish I'd kept it up and maintained that work-ahead advantage. But I didn’t. And that’s why last week, I did not record a podcast or write a blog post. And that’s why this week, I’ve resolved to work ahead. Write When Productive to Have Content When Blocked The work-ahead advantage is a great gift not only when you're busy, like I was, but also when you hit a creative lull. Call it writer's block or call it a dry spell. Whatever it is, writers often enjoy mega-productive seasons followed by weeks of meager output. If you can manage to write extra when words are flowing freely, you'll accumulate essays, articles, blog posts, or poems you can continue to send out even if you enter a phase when you're unable to produce polished pieces. What Season Are You in Now? If you’re in a mega-productive season, write. Write a lot. Write more than you need. Write until you have a month’s worth of material or more. Make hay while the sun shines and all that. If you're in a dry spell, hang in there. Read some great literature and relax into it. Underline phrases that generate a sigh or laughter. Copy into your commonplace book sections that seem significant and deserve further consideration. Take long walks. Sip tea. Exercise. Write in a journal. During that lull, maybe—hopefully—you’ll have some extra content on hand that you can send out or publish. If not, that’s okay. Call it a hiatus or a sabbatical or something. At some point, the muse will return and you'll feel that surge of energy. Ideas and inspiration will once more flow through your fingers and onto the screen. Once again, you'll produce content. Once again, you'll feel the joy of creativity. And once again, you'll have the option of working ahead, writing two or three or four more articles, poems, blog posts, or essays so you can set some aside for safekeeping.

If you’re new to writing, you may be unaware of the fierce debate among writers, editors, teachers, and grammarians over the use of the serial, or Oxford, comma. If you’ve been around the world of words a while, you know the tension, the arguments, the passion associated with this tiny punctuation mark used—or not used—in the specific scenario of a series. The Oxford Comma The serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma, is the last comma you’d use in a list that includes three or more words or phrases and a coordinating conjunction. The comma would be placed just before the final “or” or “and.” For example, if I said, “I love articles, essays, poems, and podcasts,” a serial comma would be the comma you’d place just after “poems” and before the word “and.” It's often referred to as the Oxford comma because, as Oxford Dictionaries explains, "it was traditionally used by printers, readers, and editors at Oxford University Press.” The AP Stylebook vs. The Chicago Manual of Style Style guides tend to fall into two camps on the use of the Oxford comma. The Chicago Manual of Style, for example, often used by book publishers, “strongly recommends” its use in every series—use it by default, they urge, because it prevents ambiguity. The Associated Press Stylebook, usually referred to as the AP Stylebook, is used by many newspapers and magazines. This style guide prefers using the serial comma only when clarity is needed. Otherwise, leave it out by default. It’s a space-saving measure, for one thing, and leaves the page one stroke cleaner and less cluttered. Both philosophies agree that the use of the comma achieves the goal of avoiding ambiguity. The difference is that The Chicago Manual of Style argues that using it by default will avoid an oversight. So if you or the place you write for says to use the serial comma all the time—even if the sentence would make sense without it—you or the place you write for falls in the “Oxford comma” camp. How Can a Missing Comma Cause Confusion? What kind of ambiguity or confusion could be caused by leaving out one little bitty comma? Mental Floss offers up several examples of confusion caused by leaving out that key comma. One is a book dedication that may have been invented. It reads: “To my parents, Ayn Rand and God.” It’s missing the serial comma that The Chicago Manual of Style would urge adding directly after Ayn Rand. With the Oxford comma missing, the dedication implies that this person comes from an implausible but unforgettable lineage—that his or her parents are Ayn Rand and God. You can poke around online and find numerous examples of how the Oxford comma helps avoid combinations that would lead to confusion or at least bizarre images. And, as I said, the AP Stylebook would agree to include it to avoid confusion. In that respect, we’re all on the same page. But it’s worth our time to consider the implication of leaving it out when it really ought to have been included. A week or so ago, a United States Court of Appeals handed down a ruling that hinged upon a missing comma. Maine’s overtime statutes include a list that leaves out the serial comma so that you could read it two different ways: one interpretation would combine two actions to be one, and another interpretation would separate them to be two different activities. Including the comma would have cleared things up. A dairy in Maine interpreted the meaning of the phrase one way, and its drivers interpreted it another way in a case involving overtime pay. And with that, we all saw that serial commas are serious business. Smithsonian Magazine provides a brief explanation of the case and quotes Judge David J. Barron: “For want of a comma, we have this case.” Small Stuff Matters No matter where you fall on this usage philosophy, I hope you agree we must at some point and to some degree concern ourselves with commas. Don’t let confusion or fear of comma placement keep you from churning out your fir...

Last time we talked about commas. In particular, I brought to you the serial comma, or the Oxford comma. I emphasized the fact that details—even commas—really do matter to writers. This was on my mind because of that court case ruling hinging upon how workers, an organization, and the state of Maine interpreted its statutes as a result of a missing Oxford comma. As I warned at the end of episode 94, however, this is a detail-level edit. Don’t let concern over comma placement stall the writing of your draft. You have to write with freedom and abandon when you’re in the writing stage. Comma concerns come later, in the editing phase, when you pop on your fedora and dig into that draft. Even then, though—even when editing—comma concerns are not your first concerns. They're important, no doubt—I mean, I dedicated an entire episode to a single type of comma—but the first time you revisit that draft to consider edits and changes, the commas are not the first thing you tackle. Focus on your high-level edits first. Before you worry about sentence-level changes or stylistic flair you can add—that’s that jazziness that Ayn Rand called it in The Art of Nonfiction. In episode 69, I quoted her saying: "The first absolute is: be clear. Drama, jazziness, color—which can be added later—are never as important as clarity.” Clarity before commas, high-level concerns before proofreading, high-order concerns before low-order concerns. High-Order Concerns or High-Level Edits That last set of phrases traces back to academia. When I taught composition to high school students, I kept encountering that terminology: “high-order concerns,” or “HOCs” and "low-order concerns," or “LOCs.” I used this with my students, reminding them to focus on HOCs first, then spend time on the LOCs. In the publishing world, you might hear the high-order concerns, or HOCs, referred to as: high-level edits big-picture edits developmental edits structural edits substantive edits global edits macro concerns It doesn’t really matter what you call this stage or level of editorial input. Just make sure you and anyone else involved understands what you mean and joins you in attending to these types of evaluations and recommendations first. Focus When you’re focusing on your high-level edits, the HOCs, you’ll be examining the overall focus of the piece. You’ll look at the big idea and the theme. You’ll need to be sure of your intended audience—make sure you know who you’re writing for. What are you wanting to share with these readers? Can you state in one sentence what your piece is about? If you can't, you may need to revisit the big idea or thesis of your project and figure out what you’re really trying to say. Have a friend read the opener of your nonfiction project and without letting him read further, have him try to tell you what it’s about. Did he get it? If not, figure out what needs to be brought out more and refine it. And then write the rest of your piece to match that opening explanation. You may find in that evaluation process that you need to narrow your focus or tighten it up if you’re trying to tackle too much. Or, it's possible you’ve narrowed your idea so much that you actually need to expand it a bit or dive more deeply into it. These are all high-order concerns—the macro concerns for the developmental stage of your project. Organization or Structure The organization and structure of the piece also need time and attention at this stage. We make choices as writers about how to present our information or story. In fiction, this could be the point of view or the tense we choose to tell the story—is it first person and present tense? Is that working well for the story? In nonfiction, it may be the way you order your ideas and how those ideas or concepts build. Or it could be the way you group and present your content. You, the writer, and any editor involved may decide upon a second or third reading tha...

Let’s say your writing group or an editor has given you the high-level editorial input on your content that we talked about in episode 95. They’ve offered structural and developmental edits for your piece. And you’ve incorporated those recommendations—deleting, rewriting, and rearranging material as needed so that your overall idea or message is stronger than ever. You’ve revised per their suggestions, and the organization of the piece reads more smoothly than before. It feels complete and clear. What’s next? It’s time to move to the next level. Next-Level Edits: A Closer Look It can be a bit discouraging to realize you aren’t done yet, but your project will always need another look—a closer look. Now it’s time to refine your style through a careful reading. In this stage, you and anyone you invite to offer input can consider your work at the paragraph and sentence level, listening for pace, tone, and voice. You're watching for usage issues. This is the stage when we consider each word choice and eliminate cliches. We pore over every semicolon and comma, watching for grammar and punctuation errors. We fact check. This is the time for copyediting, line editing, and, eventually, proofreading. I’ll link to some articles that distinguish among between these types of edits: the copyediting, line editing, and proofreading. As you learn about these labels, you’ll better understand the kind of attention your project needs at these stages. HOCs then LOCs You’ll be reminded how the high-order concerns, which I introduced as HOCs in episode 95, are high-level edits addressed first, and then come the copy edits and line edits, which fall under LOCs, known as lower-order concerns, or “later order concerns.” And I like that label—"later order concerns”—because it suggests that we do need to tackle such details as comma placement at some point. They aren’t “low” on the totem pole. Punctuation is important. When LOCs are known as later order concerns, it reminds us that attending to those details simply comes later in the process. 5 Ideas for How to Dig into Next-Level Edits Yourself While enlisting the help of someone experienced with editing during this stage will provide an objective eye, you yourself can return to your work and attempt some self-editing. Try these five simple techniques to gain as much perspective and objectivity as possible when revisiting your draft: Set it aside If you have the luxury of time and you’re not working against a tight deadline, set your project aside for a while: a day, a week, a month. Come back to it with fresh eyes. Print it out I hate using paper when I don’t have to, but I almost always find mistakes on a physical copy of my writing that my eye or my brain would fill in or correct when viewing it on the screen. Also, I can stuff a printed copy into a bag or backpack and take it with me to mark up while I’m out and about. Read it aloud I always read my work aloud and make notes directly on the copy as I seek a more natural expression of my ideas. If you can’t hear the glitches and hiccups as you read it yourself, consider recording it and listen back to take notes. Or have someone else read it to you and listen to where they struggle to work their mouth around the words—could be a clue to play with the phrasing or word choices in those spots. Create a master editing checklist Keep a list of your pet words and phrases and use the “search” feature in Word, Scrivener, or Google Docs to track them down methodically. Revise as needed to rip them out and use fresh phrasing. Add to that master editing checklist Expand your personal list to include other useless words that might slip into your work. Diane Urban’s list of words you should cut from your writing immediately is useful. As a sample, she warns we should eliminate qualifiers like “really,” “very,” “rather,” and “quite.” Collect words like these—words that at best add nothing and at worst steal strength...

Now that we’re down to later-order concerns, examining our work at the detail level, I thought we might talk some more about punctuation. We’ve already covered the serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma. Let's cover yet another comma: the direct address comma. The direct address comma will be review for many readers, but it’s a fun one to offer as a refresher. Friends, we cannot neglect this comma or leave it out of our stable of punctuation. With it, we save lives. Without it, the unthinkable can happen. What do you mean, Ann? This comma offers clarity in its own way. And you can lock in its purpose is with the now infamous phrase: “Let’s eat, Grandpa.” The comma after the word “eat” is the direct address comma. With the comma, I’m directly addressing Grandpa, issuing an invitation for Grandpa to join us for dinner. Without the comma, Grandpa is dinner. Some people have been advised to read their work aloud and wherever they pause is a good place to add a comma. This helps a little, but sometimes we don’t pause when we say things. I don’t think I’d naturally pause when calling out to Grandpa to let him know the table is set. I think I’d just say it quickly and my ear would tell me no comma is necessary: “Let’s eat Grandpa!” In print, though, it is needed. Obviously, we will get context clues. The sentences preceding and following that sentence will help us understand that this is not a story about cannibalism. But to avoid giggles and possible confusion—or horror—it’s best to include the direct address comma whenever and wherever it’s needed. A quick review: If the name of the person you’re addressing launches the sentence, the comma follows the name: Nancy, bring your computer tonight so we can work on our book together. When the name falls in the middle of the sentence, surround the name with commas: If you insist on writing that memoir, Sam, at least change my name and hair color. And if the name falls at the end of the sentence, you need one comma preceding it: I would love to write a review on iTunes for you, Ann. Just joking! Although if you have time, I really would love your positive review on iTunes so others can find this podcast. How about this example, instead: I hope your book launch is a huge success, Deidra. So, friends, that’s a quick reminder of how the direct address comma can avoid the unthinkable. Use it—you might just save a life. To listen to the full episode, click on the podcast player above or use subscription options below. Resources: Ep 94: Grammar Matters: Why Concern Ourselves with Commas? Ep 96: When You Really Need Next-Level Edits (next-level edits, lower-order concerns) How to Write a Review in iTunes Higher-Order Concerns (HOCs) and Lower-Order Concerns (HOCs) (Purdue Online Writing Lab - OWL) All podcast episodes * * * You can subscribe with iTunes, where I'd love to have you subscribe, rate, and leave a review. The podcast is also available Stitcher, and you should be able to search for and find "Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach" in any podcast player.

You may be tired of comma talk, but I want to toss one more punctuation post out to you before I move on to other topics. This one’s about the comma splice. To fix a comma splice, you first have to know what it is. A comma splice occurs when you connect or “splice” together two independent clauses with a comma. As a reminder, an independent clause can stand on its own as a sentence, with a subject and verb. For example: The writing conference invited my favorite author. That’s an independent clause. She spoke for an hour about her muse. That’s an independent clause, too. A comma splice would occur when you connect those two independent clauses with a comma so it would look like this: The writing conference invited my favorite author, she spoke for an hour about her muse. This must be fixed, or your editor might pluck her hair out in small handfuls each time she encounters one. Save her this painful experience by fixing the comma splice yourself. Five Easy Ways to Fix a Comma Splice: 1. Period Use a period and let each stand alone. These independent clauses are strong enough. They can do the work of a sentence: The writing conference invited my favorite author. She spoke for an hour about her muse. Boom. You’re done. 2. Semicolon Your next option for fixing a comma splice is to use a semicolon, but some people feel antagonistic toward semicolons. Kurt Vonnegut declared we should not use them. "All they do is show you’ve been to college,” he said. I suppose if you use semicolons liberally you might seem pretentious to someone, but I find them to be useful—especially to fix a comma splice. You can use a semicolon in place of a comma if the two ideas are closely related, and I think they are in our example. With the semicolon, the example would read: The writing conference invited my favorite author; she spoke for an hour about her muse. 3. Em Dash Another option is to use the em dash. I'm rather fond of the em dash and find it often works as a substitute for the semicolon when fixing a comma splice—again, when the two ideas are closely related: The writing conference invited my favorite author—she spoke for an hour about her muse. 4. Coordinating Conjunction Another quick fix is to keep the comma and add a coordinating conjunction. Did you learn the memory trick to help recall the coordinating conjunctions? It’s FANBOYS. F-A-N-B-O-Y-S Each of those letters is the first letter of one of the coordinating conjunctions: for, and, nor, but, or, yet, so Sometimes this will give you the best effect: The writing conference invited my favorite author, and she spoke for an hour about her muse. 5. Revise A more involved fix is to revise the sentence if for some reason you don’t like the other options: For example: I attended a conference where my favorite author spoke for an hour about her muse. We have no comma at all in that rewrite. Or: At the writing conference, my favorite author spoke for an hour about her muse. Avoid a Negative Response: Eliminate Comma Splices Some writers like to bend this rule. They think the unobtrusive comma fits their style and flow. It feels conversational or seems poetic—or they see another blogger or writer doing it, so they think they can follow suit. If you leave in comma splices, industry professionals may wonder how many other ways your manuscript will stray from The Chicago Manual of Style guidelines—it might be a red flag to a conservative editor. Why risk a negative response to your work when you have so many other ways of constructing a sentence? Especially if you’re in the early stages of your career as a published writer, I recommend you eliminate comma splices. After all, see how easy they are to fix? Resources: Ep 94: Grammar Matters: Why Concern Ourselves with Commas? The Man Who Hated Semicolons (Kurt Vonnegut's quote)

You’ve written something, edited it, polished it, and decided to send it out. Depending on your project, you’ll be shipping it off to a literary journal, magazine, agent, or publishing house. When you do, you risk rejection. You’ve probably heard about Stephen King’s rejections from his book On Writing. He says, “By the time I was fourteen...the nail in my wall would no longer support the weight of the rejection slips impaled upon it” (29). You Must Risk a No to Get a Yes Rejection is part of the process of writing and submitting our work. Nicole Rollender says she’s gotten to know several poets through social media, and when she congratulated one of these writers on her full-length acceptance, the poet told Rollender "it had taken her five years and 80 rejections to get her acceptance.” Most people aren’t posting about their rejections, Rollender observes, so this story can remind us that "behind every acceptance are a lot of rejections." Lacerations of the Soul But I won’t lie to you—rejections hurt. I’ve heard “No,” and it stings. Rejections mess with your mind. They awaken the voices that taunt us, questioning our right to write. When you get that first response back, and it’s a rejection…you’ll have to fight the temptation to draw an extreme conclusion. Some new writers and sensitive writers feel that sting and think, “Why did I ever think I could write?” Isaac Asimov expresses the pain a rejection delivers this way: “Rejections slips, or form letters, however tactfully phrased, are lacerations of the soul, if not quite inventions of the devil – but there is no way around them.” Sylvia Plath offers an alternative view. She wrote, “I love my rejection slips. They show me I try.” Try If you want to get published, try. And keep trying. Keep writing and sending out your work. And when you get a rejection slip, tell yourself this: “One editor at one publication doesn’t want this one piece on this one day.” That’s all it means. Believe that. Then you can walk through a rejection ritual, which we’ll talk about in more detail next time. After that, the next step will be a little different depending on whether you're working on a book proposal, a magazine article pitch, or an essay for literary journals. If you’re an essayist, you could revisit your piece and see if it needs revising—maybe have someone else take a look at it, too. Make any changes you deem necessary, then send it out to the next journal on your list. Don’t Let Rejections Take You by Surprise When you know in advance that you will receive rejections, you can deal with them a least a little more rationally. Knowledge of the inevitable won’t make the rejections any easier, but at least they won’t take you by surprise. The only way to avoid rejection completely is to stuff your work in a drawer or let it languish in a digital file, and never, ever send it out. Or you could get in the game. You could start sending out your work and learn and grow. You’ll get more experienced writing cover letters and researching literary journals or magazines. Rollender pointed out that “[i]f a journal receives 1,500 submissions of five poems a year, and they have 80 poem slots in their four annual issues, that’s 80 out of 7,500 poems. So a rejection” she says, "isn’t a referendum on your work.” Again, it simply means that one editor at one publication doesn’t want this one piece on this one day. Increase Your Rate of Submission An article in the September 2016 issue of The Writer magazine presented stats on the rate of acceptance based on number of submissions to literary journals. Author Keysha Whitaker tracked her submissions and at the time she started calculating, she was getting submissions at a rate of 10 percent. She started asking other writers their rates, and most of them had never calculated it. The first woman she asked had a 9 percent rate. Another person came in at 4.9 percent,

In the last episode, I urged you to send out your work even though it means you’re risking rejection—because to get a yes, you must risk a no. I even offered a case for embracing rejection as your goal, especially in the realm of literary journals, because by setting a rejection goal, you’re increasing your odds of an acceptance. A Plan to Process Rejection But you might need a plan for how to process those rejections. You can laugh it off as part of your master goal, but it'll still sting. And it hits hardest when your writing expresses deep struggles or raw pain. Writing like that requires great emotional risk, so to be brave enough to send it off should be applauded. To risk all of that and hear “No, we don’t want this” can leave a writer shaken, even shaky. We are not impervious to the pain of a rejection, nor should we be. We will open that email and feel the wave of nausea. As Isaac Asimov said, “Rejections slips…are lacerations to the soul." You have every reason to react in whatever honest, human way you need to. My hope is you’ll find a way to feel without ending up paralyzed—you’ll figure out how to bounce back after an editor turns you down. To carry on and continue the work of a writer, you will at some point need to step back into some kind of system or plan to move forward again. You Need a Rejection Ritual I recommend a Rejection Ritual to process the emotions. Some writers have found that their response to rejection loosely parallels the stages of grief. This may be a bit over-the-top, but no doubt you’ll struggle. You may even grieve. Don’t be surprised at how hard it hits. You may feel sick to your stomach. You might cry. You may need to throw a tantrum or stare into space. Just don't get stuck there. Design a ritual that makes sense to you, that recognizes the disappointment and pain while encouraging closure. When you complete the ritual, I hope it leads you back to a creative, productive place. Yours can be a five-minute ritual or an all-day ritual. Make sure it's relatively healthy and relatively brief; I don't recommend going out and getting stoned, for example, nor do I advise dragging it out beyond a full work day. 11 Simple Rejection Rituals Consider if one of these simple rejection rituals could fit your personality. Get yourself a nice treat for every rejection. Kim Liao says she saved all her rejection slips in a box and propped a handwritten note from an editor on her window frame as "a talisman of encouragement." Write an angry poem to work through your feelings. It doesn't have to be about writing rejection—it could be about other types of rejection. It can even be metaphorical. If you're feeling more depressed than angry, make it a sad poem. The goal is to get your feelings out. Write an angry poem in someone else’s voice. Choose the voice of an adolescent or young child overreacting to a rejection to tap into thoughts and images you might not find on your own. Print out the rejection emails and impale them onto a spike. Or burn them in a metal bucket in the back yard. Take out your frustration on an inanimate object. Do something safe but a little violent, like hammering a nail into a board for every rejection—that allows you to pound something in frustration without hurting anyone, including yourself. You could hammer those nails and add something beautiful. You could tie or weave ribbons around the nails to remind you that acceptances happen in the midst of rejections. A client went to a craft store and bought a round fish bowl and plastic beads that look like pearls and diamonds. She drops into the bowl a shimmering bead for each rejection so she can see something beautiful is growing throughout the process. Carolyn See recommends writing a handwritten thank you note to the editor immediately after receiving a rejection. Tell yourself: “This rejection simply means one editor at one publication doesn’t want this one piece on th...

My brother memorized the poem "Jabberwocky" when he was a teenager, and I thought that was so cool. At the time could not think of anything to memorize other than "The Purple Cow," so I decided to copy him. I memorized "Jabberwocky" with its Bandersnatch and the slithy toves and that vorpal blade. I thought I was so cool. Not long ago I heard Neil Gaiman recite it, and I thought he was so cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDLac7sAFsI So you see, poetry can be cool. It can be weird and funny and surprising. It can be serious, sad, and sobering. Poetry, if we let it, can seep into us and change us with its funny, surprising, and serious ways of processing life and ideas. My friends at Tweetspeak Poetry know this well. They invited people to join them in the challenge (and fun!) of memorizing poetry during the month of April. Sandra Heska King not only committed to memory "The Stolen Child," which was the poem the Tweetspeak community tried to memorize together, but she also continued work on memorizing T. S. Eliot's The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock. Yes, the whole thing. Poetry for a Lifetime I was chatting with my mom about Tweetspeak's challenge and Sandra's big memorization project, and all of sudden she launched into "Corinna's Going a Maying" by Robert Herrick—partly because it was May 1st and partly because she'd slept in and likes the line "Get up, sweet-Slug-a-bed, and see." Who doesn't want to be a sweet-Slug-a-bed? Then she continued with "Who is Sylvia? what is she?" from Shakespeare's Two Gentlemen of Verona. Shortly after that, "The Sugarplum Tree" by Eugene Field and "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost, "Although everyone knows that," she said as if it were no big deal to recite it from beginning to end with barely a pause. She memorized them all in college in the 1950s, and recited them for fun to my brother and me when we were kids, and revisited them randomly over the past few decades. In other words, she didn't need a daily review to keep them locked inside. She memorized while she was young and carried them with her for a lifetime. It's in there. The rhythm, the rhyme, the vocabulary, the meaning. Mom's retention demonstrates the power of memorizing in our youth, whereas Sandra Heska King shows us we can take the challenge at any stage of life, even as an empty nester. What Poem Might You Take to Heart? Think about a poem you'd like to memorize. You might be surprised how the words and phrases sink into your mind and influence your work in unexpected, delightful ways. In poetry, you'll find freedom from some of the mechanics expected in prose, such as proper comma placement. In poetry, you'll find fresh phrasings that throw your brain off its expected track and into novel ways of thinking and imagining. This can happen when you read a poem, but it works best when you take it to heart. When my kids were young, we read a fair amount of poetry aloud and memorized a few, mostly cute children's poems ("Mice" was a favorite). I worked on two Frost poems at the time, and I can still pull off "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" with only a couple of prompts...although I guess that's not such a big deal, according to my mom. A high school student memorized "The Raven" in the writing class I taught a couple of years ago and won a speech competition with a creative interpretation of it. One of my daughters memorized "Over the Misty Mountains Cold" from The Hobbit and has entertained her college friends by reciting it beginning to end. Why don't we all memorize more poetry?  Fill Up on Poetry An article entitled "A Year of Living Poetically" includes an excerpt from In Defense of Memorization, by Michael Knox Beran: The student who memorizes poetry will internalize the rhythmic, beautiful patterns of the English language. These patterns then become part of the student's language store,

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King You’ll hear that advice a lot. You want to write? Read a lot and write a lot. Simple as that. But is it that simple? Do we simply open the book, read and enjoy the story or helpful ideas, and automatically absorb the content? Or do we need to read with a plan or a strategy of some kind? Is there a way to take in and retain the content, be inspired by the style, and learn methods to apply to our own work? Is there a writerly way to read? I think there is. So do many others. Let’s start with the content. How do we grasp it, absorb it, retain it? Plagued by Lack of Retention? Someone asked me the other day if I’d read Great Expectations. I had. I read it and remember enjoying it. But I couldn’t recall much detail at all. There's Pip, right? And Miss Havisham sitting around in that ratty old wedding dress? That’s about all I could dredge up. I've read lots of books—I was an English Major, for crying out loud! So I read and wrote response papers about gobs of great literature, countless classics, over the course of my studies—but my recall? After years of academic effort, it feels like only shadowy memories flit across my mind for many titles I was assigned, maybe a scene or an interaction between characters—that tattered old wedding dress of Miss Havisham’s, for example. I wish more works were locked in in their full glory, the plot, themes, and characters remembered more accurately, beginning to end. Make a Book a Part of Yourself: Write in It As a young adult, post-college, I encountered Mortimer Adler’s How to Read a Book written with Charles Van Doren and subtitled “The Classic Guide to Intelligent Reading.” Adler wrote: Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself, and the best way to make yourself a part of it—which comes to the same thing—is by writing in it. (49) Full ownership of a book only comes when you have made it a part of yourself…and yourself a part of it. How do we make it part of ourselves? You heard it. Adler insisted that to “own” a book, we must write in it. Resistance to Marginalia My parents never let me write in a book. The mere thought of marking a page was an abomination. Sacrilege. Verboten. My parents love to read and have strong retention, yet they never marked up books, at least not that I saw. I had been taught what Anne Fadiman calls a “courtly love” of books. They insisted I treat the book itself—the printed book and its pages—with the utmost respect. Leave the pages clean and free of marks for your next reading or for someone else’s. Let them enjoy it without any marginalia to distract them. Our family's books are pristine. In Ex Libris, Confessions of a Common Reader, Fadiman explains the attitude of the courtly, Platonic love of books versus a carnal love of them: The most permanent, and thus to the courtly lover the most terrible, thing one can leave in a book is one's own words. Even I would never write in an encyclopedia (except perhaps with a No. 3 pencil, which I'd later erase). But I've been annotating novels and poems—transforming monologues into dialogues—ever since I learned to read. (Fadiman 41) In college, I struggled to highlight and underline key passages and information, even though I could plainly see from the used textbooks I purchased that everyone did it. Eventually, I caved and with pencil lightly marked passages I thought I should note for tests and papers. Each time I underlined a passage or circled a word or wrote a comment or drew an arrow, I felt…naughty. Dialogue with Authors But I needed to dialogue with the authors. I needed to enter the conversation. I needed to write in books. My first attempts at marginalia helped me read with closer attention and increased interest. My faint, shy marks documented my simplistic questions and chronicled my confusion; they reflected my ad...

I heard Seth Godin interviewed on a podcast. He said: The fact that the market is noisy is not the same as the fact that your work is mediocre. Mediocre work is mediocre work! And we have a choice instead to dig super deep and bring stuff to the table that is worth talking about. And it’s not easy and it won’t happen right away. It’s hard to take time to dig deep and bring to the table writing that’s worth talking about. Excellence doesn’t usually spill out of an untrained, undisciplined, inexperienced artist, so we have to find ways to grow as a writer. One way is to surround ourselves with excellence. Surround Yourself with Excellence I used to regularly crank up "Bring on the Night," a live album for which Sting pulled together several top jazz musicians, including Branford Marsalis on sax. Part of Sting's genius for that concert and much of his career has been to surround himself with excellence. For various projects over the years, he's brought together gifted artists to join him, and they performed at a level of complexity and energy he might never have achieved on his own. Sting has the means to do this, presumably leveraging fame, friendship, and money to convince people to accompany him on a recording project or concert tour. I don't have those same means at my disposal to convince the top names in writing and publishing to join me on a project, yet I see how the principle of surrounding oneself with excellence is key to advancing in just about anything. And I’m determined to make choices to advance my writing in hopes of avoiding mediocrity. Look for the Masters I look for where I see mastery modeled so I can stop settling for my current best and push for more. From masters, I seek to learn new techniques, methods, and skills in hopes of one day achieving the same level of excellence. How can a writer with limited means surround herself with excellence? We’re in an incredible time in history. We have access to libraries with just about every book we could ever want. We can read classics online for free. With the click of a button, online, we can meet or at least greet gifted writers who live across the country or on the other side of the world. We can read interviews and essays and poetry. The possibilities of engaging with excellence are all around us, but so is the temptation to interact with mediocrity. So we need to go look for excellence. Track it down. Expose ourselves to it. Here are some ways to go about that. 1. Read the best Don't waste time on fluff. Fill the library of your mind with the best work available. Turn to the most respected authors of both current and classic literature. Immerse yourself in quality composition. Study writing styles, taking note of a turn of phrase that captures your imagination, a passage that stands out, or dialogue that flows fluidly. These authors can be your mentors, because they share your love of the English language and demonstrate how to use it well. 2. Listen to the best I've participated in some lighthearted dinner-table debates about audiobooks. If you listen to a recorded book, can you say that you've "read" it? I say, technically, no. The person who lent his voice to the project read the book, while you listened to him read it. It's a different verb, a different action. To read, by definition—at least in my personal dictionary—involves using the eyes. Listening is a different skill. At the same time, I promote listening to books as a means to invite the rhythm and language of great writing into our minds by a different sense. When we hear dialogue and descriptive passages, they sink into our brains differently than merely reading the words with our eyeballs. I'm primarily a reader in the technical sense of the word, but audiobooks offer excellent literary input. 3. Locate a mentor My friend Ruth Vaughn is an author who has long since retired from writing, but she advised me over the years.

Memoir depends upon memories, yet memory is a living thing—a slippery, unreliable thing. In her book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr describes memory as "a pinball in a machine—it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off" (Karr 1). How can we trust this tilting machine to deliver something whole and wholly reliable? If we want to incorporate even short memories into our work to serve as illustrations, Karr says, “even the best minds warp and blur what they see…For all of memory’s power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time” (5). She sends copies of her manuscripts to people who appear in her books because she doesn’t trust her “wiggly mind” (5). This week is my grandmother's birthday. If she were alive, we'd be celebrating her 121st birthday. And when her birthday comes around, even though she’s been gone for decades, I still remember the coo of mourning doves in her small Midwestern town, and the sensation of walking on cool linoleum in her kitchen, and the taste of soft sugar cookies with gumdrops pressed in the center. My parents would drop me off to spend a week with her in the summertime, and I loved sleeping in the front bedroom under fresh sheets spread taut and tidy over the big double bed with its high and regal ornate wood-carved headboard—part of a set she’d inherited from a cousin. Grandma would fold a loosely woven “summer weight” blanket over the sheets, and for a long time I felt like the best of summer was somehow linked to that pastel blanket. In the narrow, horizontal window of that bedroom, she displayed a collection of colored glass bottles. Light streamed through the blues, yellows, pinks, purples, and greens—morning magic. I blinked myself awake, rested and safe. In my memory I can still walk through every room, from the baker's cabinet in the corner of the kitchen to the daybed along the dining room wall; from the collection of gardening books on shelves in the living room, to the glass jar of leftover yarn balls sitting next to a chair in Grandma's bedroom. I wander out the screen door and hear the squeaky stretch of the spring that pulls the wooden frame shut behind me with a solid "thunk." Under the grape arbor, I pluck a Concord grape, manipulating the skin off with my teeth to suck the sweet, cool insides and chew the sour skin for a few seconds before spitting it out. In my mind, baby's breath still blooms white behind the garage and orange daylilies line the side of the house. My grandma made rag rugs on a loom set up on a small porch. I can see its threads and recall how she’d slide the shuttle across the strings and pull the long wooden beater forward to bind the strips of cloth snug and firm, her feet pressing pedals as the strings shifted to weave. When Grandma passed away in 1987, the house was sold, remodeled, and turned into a rental after the possessions were divided among my mom, uncles, cousins, brother, and me. Though the structure remained, the home as I knew and loved it had been gone since I was young. Why, then, did it hurt so much to hear from my mom that the house burned down in 2010? It sat derelict for months. My mom and dad drove to visit the cemetery on Memorial Day a year later. Mom snapped a photo of the beloved house, her childhood home, and sent it to me. At first, I couldn’t bear to see the house like that—one glance at the scorched brick and I grieved my grandmother and that space all over again. Then I forced myself to look, to remember. I stared at the snapshot for a long time. Weeds grew tall and gangly and the grass was high and uncut. But next to the porch where the loom once sat, under the window that had framed the gleaming display of colored glass, a pink rose bush bloomed. Eudora Welty in her book One Writer’s Beginnings wrote: [T]he greatest confluence of all is that which makes up the huma...

We stepped inside the cave entrance and followed our guide down narrow passageways to see its wonders. The Mark Twain Cave, a national landmark just outside Hannibal, Missouri, was the cave Samuel Langhorne Clemens explored in his youth and used as inspiration for the cave featured in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom Sawyer and Becky Thatcher separate from the group that had scampered up the hill to play hide-and-seek inside. Our guide kept us moving along a corridor coined Grand Avenue, shining his flashlight down side passages to give us a glimpse of areas we weren’t allowed to explore. We could see how easy it would be to get turned around and lost, especially if we were like Tom and Becky, carrying candles when a hundred bats flocked down, darted at the light, and struck out the flame with their wings. We heard that Jesse James used this cave as a hideout and signed his name on the wall, as did thousands of other visitors. We saw the signatures dating back to the 1800s, when tourists smoked their names onto the cave’s ledges and walls. In the book, Clemens describes “a place where a little stream of water, trickling over a ledge and carrying a limestone sediment with it, had, in the slow-dragging ages, formed a laced and ruffled Niagara in gleaming and imperishable stone.” We saw that. He mentioned "rather over-descriptive names” of the cave's features, one of which was “Aladdin’s Palace,” and we saw that, too, with its curvy opening revealing a pool of water. After the cave tour, we drove into town and stopped for coffee in an old building on Main Street, where we could look up and see the big sign for the Mark Twain Hotel. Just a block or so away, we walked to the edge of the river where the Mark Twain Riverboat awaited tourists, near a park next to the railroad tracks. We toured the Mark Twain Boyhood Home on Hill Street—next to it stood a fence like the one Tom Sawyer's friends paid to have the privilege of whitewashing. Across from his home is the Becky Thatcher House, where a girl named Laura lived, who served as the model for Becky. Next to that was the office of Judge Clemens, Justice of the Peace. Behind the houses, we stepped through a white shack reconstructed to represent Tom Blankenship’s home—Huckleberry Finn is based on this Tom. These were the places Samuel Clemens knew best during his formative years. The town of Hannibal is where he learned to read and write. It’s where he collected sights, sounds, and smells. It’s where he met and got to know people who would populate his books as fictionalized versions of themselves. Spending time in his world reminded me of Flannery O’Connor’s quote, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days” (Mystery and Manners, 84). Samuel Clemens survived a sickly first few years of life to enjoy a small town youth that gave him enough information about life to last him the rest of his days and fill many of his works. The rooms in the Clemens' humble home on Hill Street feature life-size figures of the author, unpainted, posed as a sort of ghost-like presence in each space. Posters display quotes from Twain’s work. In a bedroom, the Mark Twain figure stands at a window and looks out at the town, and on the accompanying poster is an excerpt from Life on the Mississippi: After all these years I can picture [it] just as it was then: the white town drowsing in the sunshine of a summer’s morning…one or two clerks sitting in front of [the] stores, with their splint-bottomed chairs tilted back against the wall…hats slouched over their faces, asleep,…a sow and a litter of pigs loafing along the sidewalk,…two or three lonely little freight piles scattered around the ‘levee’…[and] the great Mississippi, the majestic, the magnificent Mississippi, rolling its mile-wide tide along, shining in the sun…. For two days, I was in his world,

A brief word of warning: this is a longer-than-usual episode. Instead of falling within the typical five- to eight-minute range, this episode clocks in at over 11 minutes. Are you a carnivorous reader? Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer: I’ve heard the way a writer reads described as “reading carnivorously.” What I’ve always assumed that this means is not, as the expression might seem to imply, reading for what can be ingested, stolen, or borrowed, but rather for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned. It involves reading for sheer pleasure but also with an eye and a memory for which author happens to do which thing particularly well. (31) When we learn from the best—the greats—they become mentors. We do this by reading with an analytical eye and carnivorous mind to gain insights into what works and apply principles and actual techniques to our own projects. In Episode 104, we talked about interacting with texts by writing in a book's margins, annotating as we go, which engages us at various levels with an analytical eye. It's an excellent practice to begin and continue with books you own. Another way to read analytically for the purpose of improving as writers is to follow Benjamin Franklin’s method, which aligns nicely with Francine Prose’s description of carnivorous reading, or reading for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned. Realizing Your Writing Falls Short Early on, Benjamin Franklin’s father noted his son's “bookish inclination” and apprenticed him to Franklin’s brother, a printer, where Ben quickly learned the business. This new situation gave Ben access to books he borrowed through a friend, exposing him to greater variety, including poetry, which he began to write. Benjamin’s father discouraged the poetry, warning that “verse makers were generally beggars.” Ben shifted to prose and explains in his autobiography how he improved his prose-writing skill. He’d debate with a good friend of his and always found this other young man was "naturally more eloquent, had a ready plenty of words, and sometimes, as I thought, bore me down more by his fluency than by the strength of his reasons." They wrote each other when his friend couldn’t meet up in person for some reason, continuing to take sides on an unresolved argument, and Benjamin's dad happened to find the letters and read them. Franklin reported that his father noted: though I had the advantage of my antagonist in correct spelling and pointing (which I ow'd to the printing-house), I fell far short in elegance of expression, in method and in perspicuity, of which he convinced me by several instances. I saw the justice of his remarks, and thence grew more attentive to the manner in writing, and determined to endeavor at improvement. The Ben Franklin Method To expand his vocabulary, grow more eloquent, and express himself more fluently, Ben devised a method. He bought a magazine called the Spectator, read it, and enjoyed it. He explains: I thought the writing excellent and wished, if possible, to imitate it. With this view I took some of the papers, and, making short hints of the sentiment in each sentence, laid them by a few days, and then, without looking at the book, try'd to compleat the papers again, by expressing each hinted sentiment at length, and as fully as it had been expressed before, in any suitable words that should come to hand. Then I compared my Spectator with the original, discovered some of my faults, and corrected them. This simple system is easy to follow. As you can see from his explanation, the first steps are to find writing you admire and make "short hints of the sentiment in each sentence.” My kids followed a writing program geared for K-12 students that introduced Franklin’s method. It comes from the Institute for Excellence in Writing. Students read a source text, or "mentor text," then return to the beginning of the piece and write out two or three keywords per sentence...

Children used to be assigned copywork so they could practice penmanship and be exposed to great poetry, sayings, and passages from literature. But copywork’s not just for kids. You may recall from Episode 106 that Ben Franklin’s method is similar to copywork: He picked an essay or article he read and admired, took a few notes on each sentence—just a word or two—set aside the original, and some time later tried to recreate the original using the hints he had written down. Like I said, it isn’t exactly the same as copywork, but it’s close. Copywork is more meticulous than that. Like the scribes of old, a person devoted to copywork seeks to create an identical copy of the original text—an exact replicate. Why bother with copywork? You may ask, why would any ambitious, 21st-century adult writer bother with copywork? It may seem like a childish activity. Why revert to past-century elementary-school training when we’re adults seeking to produce a creative, contemporary body of work? Well, one advantage is that copywork forces close reading—it requires attentiveness to avoid skipping a word, missing a comma, or losing our place. That attentiveness is key to understanding a writer’s decisions. Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer: Every page was once a blank page, just as every word that appears on it now was not always there, but instead reflects the final result of countless large and small deliberations. All the elements of good writing depend on the writer’s skill in choosing one word instead of another. And what grabs and keeps our interest has everything to do with those choices. (16) As a writer, then, we're making decisions with each word choice, each exclamation point, each series of three phrases that produces the rhythm we want to achieve. We can pick up some of this simply by reading, as Prose herself does. She says, "I read closely, word by word, sentence by sentence, pondering each deceptively minor decision the writer had made" (3). But when we copy out someone’s work, it’s even better, closer—we don’t miss a thing. We see it all, each and every decision, as it emerges in our writing notebook. Copywork documents the work of another writer so that the copyist is naturally, organically mentored by the original author. Prose points out that close attention to a text offers "the excitement of approaching, as nearly as you can hope to come, the hand and mind of the artist. It’s something like the way you experience a master painting, a Rembrandt or a Velasquez, by viewing it from not only far away but also up close, in order to see the brushstrokes" (30). By copying out the text, we're practically holding the pen of the author, forming letters as if we’re tracing the originals, to learn. That’s the goal: to learn. Who bothers with copywork? A website called The Art of Manliness claims that several well-known authors practiced copywork. They mention Jack London, who trained himself to be a better writer by copying out passages from Rudyard Kipling’s work. They report: For hours at a time, and days on end, he would make it his assignment to copy page after page of Kipling’s works in longhand. Through such feverish effort, he hoped to absorb his hero’s rhythmic musicality and energetic cadence, along with the master’s ability to produce what one contemporary critic called “throat-grabbing phrase.” They quote London as saying: As to myself, there is no end of Kipling in my work. I have even quoted him. I would never possibly have written anywhere near the way I did had Kipling never been. True, true, every bit of it. Self-taught by copying out the words of a writer he admired, London found his own voice and his own place in history. Copywork from memory You can take copywork to the next level following Robert Louis Stevenson’s method, which was similar to Ben Franklin’s, but more strict. It required a quick memory. He’d find a passage and read it twice, carefully.

As we seek out mentor texts to imitate or emulate, we encourage the mindset of comparison. When I suggested you search out writing you admire, you’re going to be drawn to a writer you look up to, whose work dazzles when you compare it with your own. Naturally, this writer naturally seems superior to you in some way—otherwise, why would you select this author to learn from? It’s appropriate to admire skilled authors, which is why Ben Franklin's method and straightforward copywork help us learn from the techniques employed by more experienced writers. But as soon as we starting thinking in terms of better or worse, superior or inferior, more or less advanced, more or less prolific, more or less famous…we’re using the language of comparison to label who's better or worse than us at something. And that’s when we teeter on the edge of unhealthy comparison. Comparison: The Good Before we get to the not-so-good, let’s start with the good. The good news is that there are benefits to comparison. Really! Aspirational Comparison When we read people we admire, we see what’s possible—we aspire to write as well as this author or that blogger, this poet or that novelist. One day, we think, maybe I could write something as sharp and clear and scintillating as that. And thanks to aspirational comparison, we might set a word count and get to work in hopes of improving and moving toward that level of excellence. That’s a good thing. Discover Ideas and Solutions Comparison leads to another good thing: When we compare ourselves to other writers, we look to their text to figure out how they handle the very things we struggle with. We get ideas and solutions from the mentor text we choose—maybe they handle flashbacks with ease, for example, and know just went to end a chapter or stanza; they integrate ten-dollar words without sounding pretentious and make humor look easy. So we compare their strengths with ours, spot their techniques, and decide if we can apply those to our own efforts and improve so that our own transitions seem more natural and our own chapters make the reader turn the page. By comparing their approach with ours, we see how to improve as a writer. Critical Analysis Helps Writers Improve Comparison really isn't a problem when we see ourselves as students seeking to improve, as professionals taking our work to the next level. MFA students read and analyze mentor texts all the time as part of their study. They discuss the strengths and learn how to apply similar approaches to their own work. We don’t have to be in an MFA program to compare one short story or poem to another—or to our own—in hopes of improving. Critical analysis is essential to growing as a writer and represents comparison at its best as we learn from excellent texts. Comparison: The Bad When you started thinking through writers you admire—writers you’d like to emulate—did a range of thoughts and feelings squirm inside? Did you realize you don’t just admire those writers—you actually felt something negative as a result of reading and reviewing their work? Maybe you started to compare their work with yours and felt inferior, like you’d never be able to write as capably as they do. You feel inadequate. You begin to doubt yourself and wonder why you even bother writing when others do it so much better than you ever will. This is comparison gone bad. When Comparison Diminishes Us Comparison that leads to self-doubt and an inferiority complex can leave us frozen, unable to put another word down on paper. With social media, we compare followers and likes and shares and feel very small and insignificant compared to that writer with a major following or that author with a bestseller. When we feel we don’t measure up to the talent that’s out there—that our work will never be as memorable and beautiful as all the books and stories and poems that have already been written—we end up veering off course, drawing ridiculous conclusions,

My mom, a journalist, was talking with a friend. She beamed at my brother. “Charlie, he’s the writer of the family. And Annie? She’s…” Here, I felt my mom hesitate. Then, “Annie’s the athlete.” My brother excelled in everything involving words—from composing song lyrics and essays to dominating Scrabble games and inserting witty comments into conversations at just the right moment. I played softball and ran track. And I rode my yellow Schwinn ten-speed down country roads stretching between corn and soybean fields, past herds of Black Angus cattle and silos filled with grain. The labels fit, though deep down, secretly, I wanted to be a writer, too. Three years after Charlie graduated high school, I sat in Miss Flint’s Senior English class. Miss Flint told us we would keep a journal chronicling our senior year, creating at least five entries per week...She held up three examples of some of the best she’d ever seen—journals from past students whose work she adored. One was Charlie’s. I recognized it immediately, having gazed at it many times while he worked on it during his senior year. She passed them around for students to flip through. When Charlie’s came to me, I opened it, noting his handwriting—a combination of big printed letters and rounded cursive. The content mingled light humor and occasional sarcasm with spot-on descriptions of people and situations. For one page, he cut letters from newspapers to compose an amusing ransom note. I studied the pages, wishing I could copy his techniques. Then I passed it to the person behind me. At the end of my senior year, Miss Flint didn’t ask to keep my journal. Stuck in a Fixed Mindset You can read the rest of my story in a two-part series, but I share this excerpt to illustrate how I grew up with a fixed mindset. I was labeled the athlete, not the writer. The natural ability—the gift—of writing was bestowed on others in my family, not me. Therefore, with a fixed mindset, I concluded I could not become a writer. But I was hungry to learn and grow in as many ways as possible in life, even if I never wrote. A natural autodidact, I loved the library, filled as it was with mentors, coaches, and teachers available to me for free, in the form of books. I scoured the place in search of satisfying my curiosity, gravitating to the nonfiction selection a bit more than fiction—even though I loved stories—because I wanted to learn. I'd check out stacks of books, gleaning what I could in two or three weeks' time, getting answers to my questions, then returning those books a couple of weeks later to pile on another stack of information to take home and devour. I'd follow my interests and whims, pursuing a wide-ranging knowledge base, much of it practical. I wanted to learn to bake bread, crochet, tie friendship bracelets, build a kite, draw cartoons, catch wild rabbits, make yogurt (which I never did, but I learned the basics from books). I was interested in macrame and running and photography and sewing and, secretly, writing...even though it was fixed in my mind that I wasn't a writer. A Natural Growth Mindset Despite the fixed, unchangeable reality that I would never write, I seemed to exhibit a growth mindset in just about every other way, seeing no limits to the kinds of skills I might acquire or experiments I might attempt. I didn't care if my coil pots turned out lopsided or my drawing of Snoopy needed more rounded ears or even if a few crickets escaped from the cricket habitat I set up in my bedroom. Plants in my terrarium died. A duck egg I found, never hatched. I didn't understand all the vocabulary in a book about volcanoes or the space shuttle, both of which captured my interest for a season, along with a hundred other things, but that was okay because I learned enough about them to answer my basic questions. As for the uneven stitches in the scarf I knitted, that was fine by me, because I was a little more skilled and confident than the day before,

The publishing world is evolving, and no one knows quite when it will end and what it will look like. As a writer, you've probably been spotting new trends, new entry points, new expectations, new leaders, and new technology, wondering how you can possibly keep up with all that change. Well, you’re not alone. Everyone’s seeing all that new—all that change—and wondering how they can possibly keep up with it all. There’s only one way to have a chance at keeping up—and it’s the same way any of us has a chance at gaining an advantage and keeping an edge, and that’s... To learn something new every day. I know it’s frustrating to hear that when all you want to do is write. “I don’t want to be figuring out fancy software and spending all that time on social media,” you’re thinking. "I don’t want to maintain a website and read about the industry all the time. Why can’t I just be a writer who, you know, writes?” And it’s true that a legal pad and a Bic pen should be more than enough to keep a writer churning out words, hitting daily word count goals, avoiding distraction. And I absolutely agree that a writer must write first and foremost. But if you want to try to get in the game—if you want to try to submit to literary journals or see your byline in a magazine or run a freelance writing business or pitch agents—you’ll have to learn some new things. I daresay it’s best to learn a little something new every day…at least on average. The Growth Mindset Helps Learning If you have a growth mindset, like we talked about last time, you know that nothing's fixed and forever. You and I can learn new skills and grow if we set our minds to it and implement or integrate what we learn. So that shouldn’t a concern—you can teach an old dog new tricks. The Curious Lifelong Learner Loves to Learn It helps to be a lifelong learner who's curious and creative, because with those traits, you’ll follow the spark of curiosity to dig for the information and training you want or need and follow up when you unearth another layer of skills you can develop or knowledge you can gain. You’ll poke around to figure out who to ask. You’ll research which is the best free or paid course to sign up for. You’ll subscribe to podcasts with the best information and watch YouTube videos with easy-to-follow tutorials. You’ll get books to read in line at the post office and audiobooks to listen to on a long drive or while exercising. You’ll save up to attend a premier conference or an intimate writing workshop. You'll apply for a grant or fellowship. In doing this, you’ll learn a lot of different things. If you read and learn about the industry, you’ll discover ways to respond to those changes as a writer. You won’t waste time on old methods—you can quickly “pivot,” as they say, and adjust your plan to suit what editors, agents, and ultimately readers are looking for. This doesn’t mean you abandon your vision and write for the market, but it’s good to be aware and thoughtful about what you see around you. Learn Something New About Content Learn in the area of content and you’ll collect ideas for your nonfiction projects. If you write on a nonfiction topic, you’ll have a chance at becoming an expert in your field. If you write fiction, there’s no end to what you could learn because characters need jobs and hobbies; they need to visit interesting places and struggle with illnesses. You can learn about almost anything and pull it into your work. Learn Something New About Craft You’ll write better when you learn more or different techniques and implement them each time you put a pen to paper. When you’re making lists of things you want to learn, add craft to your list and develop your own personal writing course based on skills you want to gain. Learn Something New About Technology Technology scares a lot of writers. If you pick the thing you feel will make the biggest difference in your life as a writer, though,

You may already use a system to collect emails so you can communicate directly with readers who want to hear from you. If you’re unfamiliar with email marketing systems, they offer a powerful way for you to interact with your audience. If you have a new book coming out, for example, these are the people who would want to know about it. If you’re doing a poetry reading, you can send a note and readers in that city will be glad to hear about it and might make plans to attend. If you have a special price on an e-book, you can let them know about the sale. If you haven’t started yet, I highly recommend you begin building an email list comprised of ideal readers. Start List-Building with MailChimp I started out with MailChimp and used it for years. MailChimp was free, and free sounded like a good place to start. I liked MailChimp’s option to pull content from my website’s RSS feed so people could automatically receive my latest blog posts. I chose from one of their many templates and tried to tweak the code, but messed it up. I read articles and watched videos in their vast knowledge base to try to fix my mistake, but even when I stop-started the video to break down each tick of a box or tap of a character, I still ended up with something wonky. I lost hours trying to solve my problems. Attractive templates ended up looking goofy. I limped along with MailChimp by choosing a simple template and avoiding any customization. I didn’t want to touch any code for fear of breaking something. I stayed in set-it-and-forget-it mode for years, with MailChimp automatically sending emails featuring nothing more than my blog content. Over time, I realized I wanted to send emails more a personal tone. And, if possible, I wanted a simpler system that made more sense to me. I periodically tried to tweak my MailChimp templates only to mess them up again and have to start over from scratch. Then I heard about the new kid on the block: ConvertKit. It’s not new any longer, but at the time it sounded like it might offer almost all the features I wanted without the elements that troubled me in MailChimp. The Pros and Cons I saw in ConvertKit and MailChimp Every system comes with its own set of pros and cons. Here’s what I observed at the time I was deciding. Templates ConvertKit didn’t offer a wide variety templates like MailChimp did, so if I wanted pretty emails, I'd have to get creative. But I wanted to send simple emails anyway, so that wasn’t a huge concern. Emails Generated from RSS Feed ConvertKit draws from a blog’s RSS feed to generate an email, but doesn’t automatically send it like MailChimp does. You have to go in and manually send it. I thought that was a weakness when I first signed up, but now I see it as a strength because I actually want to look at the email before sending it, to personalize it. It supports my reason for having an email list in the first place: to interact with people, encourage them, and support their writing goals. Unsubscribe System One big drawback of ConvertKit was its unsubscribe option. If readers click on the link in the footer, they're immediately unsubscribed and removed from the system. They don’t have any way to manage their subscription; they're just out. I didn’t like that. Stats ConvertKit didn’t show much in the way of stats at the time I considered it. That, too, made me hesitate. I wanted to know how many people were signing up and through which pages or forms. MailChimp did well with that. Simplicity Compared to MailChimp, though, ConvertKit was lean, clean, and simple both visually for the reader and behind-the-scenes in the dashboard. That was a plus. Subscriber-Centered vs List-Driven ConvertKit takes a subscriber-centered approach, whereas MailChimp organizes by lists, and a single person may be on multiple lists. I found that list-philosophy harder to manage and organize. I could easily tag a subscriber in ConvertKit to indicate the things that reader is inte...

I once asked a photographer the best camera to use. Before he shared his opinion, he said a common answer to that question is, "The best camera is the one you have with you." In other words, it doesn't matter how fancy your equipment is if, at the moment a hawk lands on a fence post next to you, your Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is sitting in the trunk of your car. At that moment, you slowly lift up your smartphone and, as quietly as possible, snap the photo with the equipment you have on hand. I think we should view our writing tools the same way. It doesn't matter if a program installed on your desktop computer at home is loaded with bells and whistles, if inspiration hits while you're on vacation. If you're in the mountains with an extra two hours to write, that fancy program back home isn't going to do you much good. Instead, grab a notebook and pen and capture those thoughts with what you have on hand. Don’t Wait for Ideal Circumstances The other day I was trying to prepare notes for a podcast episode I needed to record, edit, and prep for release the next day. I was running behind, so I grabbed my cheap bluetooth keyboard purchased online for something like 15 bucks, and while my mom was getting physical therapy, I paired the keyboard with my Samsung phone, opened up Google Keep, which is a free note-taking app, and tapped out a draft. In just those few minutes, I was able to slam out a sloppy copy and store it in a program I could open on my laptop at home. I didn't wait until I had time and atmosphere or access to a robust program like Scrivener. I used what I'd shoved into my tote bag. Sure, it's easier to use my setup at home, but I had a deadline. If I'd waited, I wouldn't have finished on time. Just a smartphone and a tiny keyboard got the job done. So let me run through the tools I use for various scenarios. Your life might be more predictable, scheduled, and localized than mine; if so, so you could pick just one combination and use it at all times in your main workspace. But take note of an inexpensive, flexible, mobile option, as well, because you never know—you might get the idea of a lifetime on a cross-country road trip. Writing Tools for When I'm On the Go Smartphone + Bluetooth Keyboard + Evernote or Google Keep https://www.instagram.com/p/BVKg4lXgh_a/ The leanest system I've used so far is pairing my inexpensive bluetooth keyboard with my Android smartphone. Even though I usually travel with my laptop, sometimes it's handy to pull out the smaller, subtler combination. My keyboard is a ULAK brand purchased through Amazon, but the exact model is no longer available (comparable brands can be found with other companies). I bought a travel case for the keyboard with a zippered side pocket where I could store extra batteries. Happily, I could slip the phone itself in that pouch, too, for a lightweight grab-and-go writing system. With this simple setup, I can type up notes as I think of them; write journal entries; compose drafts of short pieces like blog posts, poems, essays, or podcast episodes; and preserve notes from books, magazines, and online articles I read. An important element in this system for me is the app. I want to input the text into an app that syncs with all my devices, so that when I do get back to my desktop computer or laptop, I'll be able to find the draft and use it to craft a final version. I can be offline while typing my draft, and when I get to WiFi, the system logs on and updates. For this, I've used Google Keep and Evernote, both of which are accessible when I open my laptop later. Smartphone + Tablet (Kindle Fire) + Evernote or Google Keep A variation on that leanest option is to substitute a tablet for the smartphone. The biggest advantage of this switch is screen size. If I need to do something more involved than write a draft, like prep a post for WordPress, for example, having a bit more screen to view a bit more content as I work is nice.

Ideas pop into my head all the time: while walking, doing household chores, waiting in a carpool lane, sitting poolside, or even as I'm just falling asleep. If I have paper and pen, great. I can write them down. Or if I have time to pull out my bluetooth keyboard and type them up, cool. We discussed some of my favorite writing tools last week. But if you have a lot of ideas or a rich, detailed memory comes to you, wouldn’t it be nice to record it fully and quickly, before it evaporates or you’re distracted by something else? If you write fiction and the outline of a short story or an entire scene for your novel comes to you—I’ll bet you’d love to have some way to rapidly, easily stash it away. Well, you can. Grab your phone and press record. You can save your ideas easily and quickly if you write with your voice—it’s a solution for any writer with big goals and little time. Voice-to-Text Most phones—iPhone or Android—have a microphone icon on the keyboard, allowing you to speak your thoughts into just about any app. In the last episode, I mentioned the beauty of working in the apps that sync on all devices, like Evernote, Google Keep, Google Docs. You can leverage that same advantage of capturing on the go, but you can use your voice to do the writing. I’m sure you’ve found this microphone and used it for voice-to-text. I see people using it all the time…just not for writing. My husband, who is bilingual, discovered he can even switch the globe on his iPhone keyboard to French and dictate notes and thoughts, and it’s worked well…if he wanted to, he could write a love poem in his native tongue without having to remember where all the accents go. Another iPhone advantage: you should have not only that little microphone-on-the-keyboard option—you also have Siri, who can take dictation for you. Speak Slowly, Clearly Though I tend to think most effectively through my fingers, typing my best thoughts on a keyboard, I’ve used voice recording options many times, especially to get out some notes and ideas or even the start of a draft. And I’ve learned to work on my elocution. You as the writer might be brimming with ideas that spill out at record speed, but for dictation or transcription accuracy, it helps to speak slowly and clearly when using transcription tools of any kind. Google Voice Typing In the last episode, I focused on ways to type out ideas. At my website, where the show notes live, I received an excellent comment from Susan, who wrote: "You can also dictate your written notes (or thoughts off the top of your head) right into a Google Doc." She talked about its Voice typing feature. I'm so thankful Susan took time to mention that. This dictation device—or, I guess it’s more of a voice-to-text technology/software—allows you to dictate straight into a Google doc so that your notes or a draft is waiting for you when you’re able to get behind a keyboard. Just click on Tools, then “Voice typing.” You’ll get a big popup microphone icon. Click and start talking. It’s a great way to think and then speak your ideas. Google Keep’s Voice-to-Text Recorder Susan pointed out that Google Keep also has a voice recording option. "Just tap the microphone at the bottom of the screen.” Google Keep records a segment and then instantly transcribes it, giving you the option of saving the audio recording or deleting it after you have the transcription it produces, which is pretty nifty. Evernote, Voxer Evernote and Voxer have similar features. If you have Voxer Pro and you’re an English-speaker, you can use their voice-to-text transcription. Evernote can record your voice and save that as an audio file, or you can use the keyboard microphone, as I mentioned before, to capture dictation directly into a note. It’ll be saved in a note for you to open later. Transcription Services Another approach to capturing content using your voice, is to record an audio file on some kind of recording devic...

Have you ever sat down at the computer when you finally carved out time to write, only to discover you have no idea where to start or what to say? You end up wasting a lot of precious time if that’s your approach. In times like that, it’s nice to have a plan, a process, a system of some sort, that helps you take your projects from start to finish. The Writing Pipeline: Taking Your Projects from Start to Finish I’d like to recommend you develop a writing pipeline: a process with phases or stages that take a writing project from initial idea to final product…including the step of shipping it out into the world. I'm not suggesting your writing turns into an assembly line, churning out uninspired content to meet quota or deadlines. Not at all. In fact, a piece you’re working on might live in the draft phase for long stretches while you noodle it. So while a pipeline process might make you become more efficient, it’s not only about efficiency. Whether you formalize the process or not, any given piece of writing hits various phases along its journey. By identifying where something is in the pipeline, you can work on it and move it along, knowing where it’s at and what’s left to do before it’s ready to ship. Phases of the Writing Pipeline Any given writing piece moves through several phases, not including prewriting activities, which would be mainly reading and research. Let's take a look. Prewriting Is Pre-Pipeline Reading and research activities precede and transcend the pipeline, as the books you’re reading and quotes from experts might apply to any or all or none of your projects. I’ll mention them briefly, though, because while they don’t always represent the start of a project, reading and research can have their own storage systems that support the pipeline stages. Prewriting: Reading and Project-Specific Research I read widely, just for fun or to follow my curiosity. But I also purposely seek out and store articles, excerpts, quotes, and interviews that might contribute to a particular project. I have an Evernote folder labeled Research where I can drop articles and things to read, and I also use the app called Pocket. In it, I save articles to read when I have time. And of course I read books of all kinds—e-books, printed books, and audiobooks—knowing in any of these I may find content to include in one of my projects. Prewriting: Notes and Quotes My bookshelf, Pocket, and my Research folder are like giant hoppers I continually fill with inspiration and potential. I pull from the hopper to read and curate the best quotes and ideas. Those need to go someplace different, set apart from the jumble. I put them in a Notes and Quotes folder—I can tag a note with keywords in Evernote, making it easier to search and sort as needed. But I also use a folder, even though a lot of people have abandoned folders in Evernote. I often dip into this Notes and Quotes folder when projects are in the draft stage to integrate the nuggets I gathered. Those are some of the prewriting activities. Now, the Pipeline itself. The Pipeline Stages I’ve identified five stages or phases in a writing pipeline. In Evernote, I actually drag and drop a project file into the next folder and the next in the pipeline as it progresses. You can easily adapt the pipeline concept to many other systems—even a physical system with file folders or a three-ring notebook, moving from hanging folder to hanging folder or divider to divider. 1. Ideas Any project starts as an idea, so I have an Ideas folder. In the ideas folder, I have one master file I can open and add any idea I think of. I might write them as headlines or as a one-sentence summary (or both). If I scribble an article or essay idea on an envelope in the car, I copy it into this file. I also drop in headline templates just for fun or keyword lists that interest me. Those live in their own files within the Ideas folder. 2. Drafts The Drafts folder holds any and all works-in-pr...

Last time we discussed a writing pipeline, representing the phases or stages a project moves through, from the initial idea to completion—including when it's been published and you save it in a portfolio. Now let’s talk editorial calendars. Life Without an Editorial Calendar For years I got by writing on the fly. I'd have a few minutes free, think up an idea, whip out a draft, and with just a little more time that night or the next morning, I could edit the piece into a solid article to send out to a magazine or publish on my website. My approach worked in the early days, when my publishing aspirations and expectations were as small as my kids. As my kids grew, however, the possibilities seemed grander and I realized this random, last-minute approach was not the way to live a creative, sustainable, productive writing life over the long haul. If I wanted to produce a body of work, I'd need to be a bit more intentional and organized. A tool to support all that and remind me what to do next was an editorial calendar. Life With an Editorial Calendar Whether I’m planning the timing of short pieces like blog posts or long-form projects broken into smaller tasks, I’ve come to rely on an editorial calendar of some kind, even if it’s rudimentary. Over the years, I've tried everything from printed calendars to online apps. No matter what I use, it boils down to deciding when I want to publish or submit something. Then I simply write that down somewhere—preferably somewhere I’ll actually look. Integrating the project due dates on a calendar I’m already using for other appointments helped me value the work as highly as other obligations. It showed up as a priority in my life and helped me view myself as a working writer. I hope life with an editorial calendar improves your own work habits and productivity so that you’ll prioritize your writing. And when you’re picking out the editorial calendar to use, start with what’s most normal and natural for you to avoid overcomplicating things or introducing a big learning curve. Paper Calendars My first editorial calendars were simply monthly calendars I printed off. I’d think about the frequency I wanted to write and publish for my own website along with content I created for other organizations and magazines, then I’d pencil in projects with the deadlines. It helped me learn my capacity and pace by experimenting with work load and frequency. Without a calendar, I’d just be winging it; with a calendar, I could begin to see the weeks I’d scheduled too much. Bullet Journals If bullet journals existed at the time I was printing off calendar pages, I would have dedicated a page to an editorial calendar. As with a printed calendar, I’d mark articles scheduled on certain days for my blog posts or podcasts as well as articles promised to magazines and online organizations. I currently use a bullet journal to plan out ideas, but I’m loving technology options these days for my editorial calendar. Google Calendar I first transitioned from printed calendars to a simple Google Calendar. You can name each calendar, so I gave mine the unforgettable name: Editorial Calendar. I already used a Google calendar to manage the rest of my life, so this was simply adding another layer and I liked that integration. Sample entries of the kind of thing you could include on an Editorial Calendar In Google Calendars, you can click calendars on and off to look at one at a time or have all of them layer on top of each other so you can see schedule conflicts. This was perfect, because it layered my entire life and I could see busy weeks when writing wouldn’t be possible. I could move around project goals to accommodate other obligations in life. Another nice feature: scheduling alerts to remind me to to write, edit, and send off my projects for a hours or days ahead of time. When a notification popped up on my phone or desktop,

In her recently released memoir, Hourglass, Dani Shapiro says she used to teach her students that writers need distance from the event or events they intend to explore in memoir. I was quite certain that we could not write directly from our feelings, but only the memory of our feelings. How else to find the necessary ironic distance, the cool remove? How else to shape a narrative but from the insight and wisdom of retrospect? (93) Distance Leads to Fading I've heard this same advice from many sources but struggled with it in practice. Certain experiences in my life have seemed like perfect fodder for memoir, but I waited to write. Time has passed. Years. At this point, critical details and insights have faded—and, yes, even the feelings. That "cool remove” she speaks of seems more like evaporation. Shapiro says her thoughts on the timing are shifting, though. She now sees that "[e]ven retrospect is mutable. Perspective, a momentary figment of consciousness." To me, her new approach feels like a much better way, enlivened by real-time action and energy and all the rich texture of now. Tell the Story While Inside of It She writes: "If retrospect is an illusion, then why not attempt to tell the story as I’m inside of it? Which is to say: before the story has become a story?" I wonder how many stories have mutated as we wait. It happened to me—to a story I thought I might write. I guess I was waiting for perspective before writing it down. Well, and time. I didn’t have time to write as I navigated the memoir-worthy events, but had I been savvier and recognized the power of snatching the story while it was fresh—while the feelings surged with the most intensity, I would have done it. I wish I'd jotted more notes, saved more texts, recorded more observations with my smartphone’s voice recorder. Blogging in Real Time The way people used to blog seemed to follow this approach. Those who wrote from their lives seemed to blog almost in real time, attempting to tell their stories while they were in the midst of them. Journaling in Real Time Those committed to keeping a journal, like Anaïs Nin, a faithful—some might say obsessive—diarist, wrote, "It was while writing a Diary that I discovered how to capture the living moments.” Telling a Story as Memoir in Real Time Capturing those living moments is the work of a diarist and perhaps some journalists, and Dani Shapiro’s comment makes me wonder if it's also the work of a memoirist when we capture them in real time and write inside the story. Diaries and journals and this idea of a real-time memoir help us look at life even as we’re living it. Again, Anaïs Nin said, “We write to taste life twice, in the moment and in retrospect.” We write to remember the moment, the feeling. We write to document the way it changed us. Is there a story here? Or just a series of snapshots? Was this a passing emotion or a transformative event? Capture the Living Moments Try it. One way or another, whether or not it’s a story of transformation, capture the living moments. Try to tell the story as you're inside of it. Record the songs that play and the color of clothes on the day you receive life-altering information by email. Take note of the way the old 90-pound dog heaves himself up from his nap and moves through the house and down the hallways on creaky joints to greet the college kids when they walk in the door. Listen for the woodpecker tapping the maple tree as you talk on the phone with your father. Don’t decide yet if it matters; write inside the story that has yet to be a story. After all, if not now…when? Don't Wait If you wait to write until after the old dog dies, you might forget the way he cuts a corner and slides his side along the doorframe in his hurry to greet the girls. If you wait, you’ll forget that “Fire and Rain” was piped through the McDonald’s sound system, that your father asked if someone was at the door when he heard the tap-tap...

Last time we talked about taking a cue from Dani Shapiro and attempting to tell the story as we’re inside of it—potentially before the story has become a story. This requires us to write about life as it’s unfolding, trying to find the story in the actions and interactions that take place. We begin “capturing the living moments,” to borrow a phrase from Anais Nin. What if the events we want to write about took place long ago, before we thought about writing anything down? What if we must rely entirely on memory for material? It's in Us After all, most formative experiences smack us, scar us, and sink into our core in the early years. As Flannery O’Connor said, “Anybody who has survived his childhood has enough information about life to last him the rest of his days" (84, Mystery and Manners) And Willa Cather said in an interview, "I think that most of the basic material a writer works with is acquired before the age of fifteen. That's the important period: when one's not writing. Those years determine whether one's work will be poor and thin or rich and fine.” If that’s true, all that we need to write short- and long-form memoir is in us. Somewhere. How to Dredge Up Memories How do we get to those long-ago memories? How do we bring up the sensory details that will help us recreate scenes? How can we reach the names of the people with us that day on the farm or what color the wallpaper was in the room where an argument took place? Is there a way to recreate sequence and timelines? Can our minds still hear the tap of a pencil against the desk? Or was it a pen? Dorothea Brande's 30-Minute Memory Break and Artistic Coma One method for dredging up memories you want to write about is to set aside time to recall. Recalling allows us to draw from our reservoir of memories, those moments when we’ve noticed and retained something in the past—something worth revisiting. Dorothea Brande suggests a simple way to engage memory: [S]et...a short period each day when you will, by taking thought, recapture a childlike “innocence of eye.” For half an hour each day transport yourself back to the state of wide-eyed interest that was yours at the age of five. Even though you feel a little self-conscious about doing something so deliberately that was once as unnoticed as breathing, you will still find that you are able to gather stores of new material in a short time. She also recommends an “artistic coma,” and these two ideas could work in tandem—lie down for about 30 minutes and let go of all distractions. That quieted, almost comatose, state can create receptivity to the images, sounds, textures, and people of the past. When that material emerges during the quiet—some of it stepping out of the swamp of the past, dripping with muck—it’s time to write. Write fast. Write everything you’re given, because those slippery memories will slip away again again if they aren't captured. Bill Roorbach: Write to Release While Brande recommends a time of recall to tease out memories followed by the act of writing, Bill Roorbach says memories can bubble to the surface as we write. In his book Writing Life Stories, he claims: One of the many curious things about the act of writing is the way it can give access to the unconscious mind. And in the hidden parts of consciousness lie not only hobgoblins and neurotic glimmers, but lots of regular stuff, the everyday stuff of memory. The invisible face of your grade school bully is in there, somewhere, and the exact smell of the flowers on vines in your grandma’s backyard, along with most everything else. (19, Writing Life Stories) With this method, start writing and trust that the memories hidden in the recesses of your unconscious mind will rise up as your pen covers the page or your fingers fly across the keyboard. Try Both Try both methods of recalling the past. You can start with Roorbach’s method as soon as you’re done reading this piece.

Young people graduate high school or college, apply for positions, and get stuck: no one will hire them because they have no experience, but they can’t get experience because no one will hire them. So they get a job at Starbucks to pay bills, gaining experience with cleaning espresso machines, still unable to land the job they really want and still unable to gain relevant experience because no one hired them in their preferred field. If only they could gain experience, they would be marketable, successful, confident... If only we could gain experience… People often want to write—to become writers—but they lack experience. Regardless of their age, they feel like that young graduate stepping out into the world eager to work but lacking what they need to do the work. As a result, those writers end up stuck, sometimes paralyzed. Without experience, can they even enter the ring? They hold back, doubting themselves or fearing the door’s going to shut in her face. "Is there room in the market for the newbie, the rookie?” they wonder. "Should inexperienced writers even bother trying when so many more experienced writers have established themselves online and in print?” Some writers even worry they’ve passed some invisible point in time and it’s too late. They’ll never be an experienced writer. We Can Get Experience Now Every minute we sit around wondering if there’s room for us at the table, wishing we were more experienced, is a minute we could have been doing something meaningful and productive that contributes to our growth as a writer. It is not too late. And don’t waste any more time thinking it’s too late. We writers have an advantage over the graduate on a job search—we can actually gain experience in our field every single day. We can write right now and grow in knowledge and skill. We may not be ready to write for top-tier publishers, but we can always be improving, moving closer to our goals. While writers with very little experience might go a bit slower in the pursuit of landing a book deal, let’s say, there’s no reason to delay for another moment your growth as a writing professional. In What Ways Do You Feel Inexperienced? Writing Skills? Technology? Navigating the publishing industry? How to approach marketing, publicity, social media? Figure out where you feel you lack and you can fill that gap. For example, you might feel inexperienced in everything, but in reality you’re a talented writer—maybe you studied creative writing! Now you’re feeling the draw (or the push) to write online, but your lack of confidence with technology causes you to suddenly question everything about your abilities. Or maybe you are technologically savvy and jumped into blogging with exuberance, but never received training in writing, so you lack writing skills and confidence with conventions like grammar, capitalization, and punctuation. Identify the areas where you are or you feel inexperienced, and make a plan to address each of those areas. Develop a Personalized Course If you feel lacking in writing skills, for example, you can create your own course of study based on the things you feel you don’t understand: Practice marginalia and copywork to introduce you to techniques. Read books about the art and craft of writing. Track down college writing handbooks and work through the lessons. Sign up for courses online. Hire an editor to review some of your work—ask him to mark the issues and explain why they’re a problem so you can literally learn from your own mistakes. Address specific areas of weakness: if you write fiction but your dialogue seems stilted, study authors who handle it well; if you write poetry but resist form, give yourself the assignment to write a sonnet or sestina. Learn the Lingo A simple thing to feel more experienced with the industry, whether it’s the world of literary journals or book publishing, is to learn the lingo—to pick up the jargon.

In Rumors of Water, L.L. Barkat recommends a book to her daughter. Barkat is out in the garden with her girls, who are pulling weeds, and one of the girls, Sara, has decided she hates Bishop’s Weed. Barkat tells Sara, “It’s your nemesis…Every gardener has a nemesis.” She continues with her own reflection on the impact of having a nemesis—a garden nemesis or otherwise: It’s not going to cause psychological distress and end up in her memoirs. But it’s not going to go away either. She’s going to need to work around it, dig it out, ignore it, accept it, if she wants to grow lettuce and peas in this garden bed. (41) She recommends to Sara a book by Michael Pollan that has a nemesis—maybe a gopher. I, being rather lowbrow, thought of Caddyshack instead of Michael Pollan, and then of Seinfeld and Newman: Jerry... Newman. The Writer’s Nemesis You probably don’t have a Newman in your life. In fact, I hope you don’t have any actual nemesis—that is, a flesh-and-blood writer who steals your ideas or steals your thunder. But Barkat suspects every writer does indeed have some kind of nemesis. Maybe it’s The Censor, she says, “a prohibitive voice,” or The Market, “always demanding writing that’s saleable." Maybe it’s The Procrastinator, which is “keeping us from writing.” In his book The War of Art and Do the Work and countless articles and interviews, author Steven Pressfield presents the idea of Resistance. It’s his way of talking about a nemesis. Resistance is the root of all manner of evil and issues, as it includes trouble like fear, self-doubt, distraction, timidity, self-loathing, ego, and perfectionism—any force working against us and our creative efforts. Resistance is an enemy, a nemesis. Pressfield practically personifies it by capitalizing the word Resistance when he writes about it. What's Your Nemesis? What's your nemesis? What hisses at you when you sit down to write? What threatens to grind you to a halt, causing Resistance to your creative work? You’ve got to know your enemy…name it if you can. That’s a good first step in order to fight back and be free. If you know You might already know your nemesis. You may have identified it long ago and immediately blurted it out the minute I asked the question “What’s your nemesis?" It’s procrastination! It’s jealousy! It’s fear of success! It’s fear of failure! If you know, write it down. Knowing it—and naming it—can help you recognize it when it knocks at the door, blusters into your writing space, and sits there staring, glaring, boring a hole in your confidence. If you don’t know If you don’t know your nemesis, it’s time to explore. L.L. Barkat sends writers off with a bit more instruction. She recommends working through a book like The Artist’s Way to explore what’s hindering us. She also recommends studying other writers’ processes to hopefully see ourselves more clearly and pay attention to “our frustrations and our joys with writing” (42). Once you know it and name it, how can you be free of it? How to Be Free of a Nemesis If your nemesis is fear, Elizabeth Gilbert has quite a bit to say. In talking about the kinds of fears that keep us from our creative work, she says, "Your fear should always be allowed to have a voice, and a seat in the vehicle of your life. But whatever you do — don't let your fear DRIVE.” Write fear a letter She also recommends letting that fear write a letter to you. In a Facebook update a year or so ago, she recommended we ask fear what it wants, what it doesn’t want, and why it’s holding us back. And then, after “fear” writes that letter, read it, she says, with an open mind and heart. And then she says we should write back to it. Make sure that this fear understands you have a new plan—one in which fear cannot touch the steering wheel. Focus on the Dream Steven Pressfield suggests that we overcome Resistance by identifying the dream that may have stirred up Resistance in the first place.

In fiction writing, we refer to plotters and pantsers: those who like to outline their plot and write in an organized manner, the “plotters"; and those who write-by-the-seat-of-their-pants, the "pantsers.” Each approach reflects when and how you do your thinking. I know every writer has specifics to his or her approach, but here’s the general idea. Plotter, Pantser The plotter is imagining his characters and thinking through their struggles up front, before he writes a single word, planning out the story’s plot. The pantser has a basic idea and a main character or two, tosses them into a setting, gives them a problem, and starts writing—because he’s thinking as he writes and the story unfolds before him. Nonfiction Plotters and Pantsers While nonfiction writers and poets don’t technically have to plot out anything, I suspect writers in all genres can identify with one or the other of those general approaches. Maybe you’re a plotter-type who outlines essays and articles or works from a template for blog posts. You refer to that outline and fill out the template before tapping out the draft. You probably started with a list of topics or a mind map to think, and then figured out how to organize all those ideas that popped into your head. Only then—only after you organized the themes, subtopics, and examples, shaping them into some kind of structure—did you attempt to write a draft. Maybe you’re a pantser, generating a big idea and then running with it, letting the subtopics reveal themselves while you write. You might make a short list to get the creative juices flowing, but then you just put pen to paper and started freewriting to unearth everything you can on a topic, trusting your mind to flow in some kind of logical pattern, finding connections and stirring up thoughts, quotes, and ideas you’ve tucked inside some mental file. The Plotter-Pantser Continuum As with many things, however, this is not a binary choice; we’re probably not either a plotter or a pantser. I see it more as a continuum, where pantsers like to have an idea of where they’re headed or maybe they write plot summaries for the next segment they’re starting to work on. And, yes, plotters will stay open to new ideas, willing to erase or rearrange ideas in the outline when some new thought arises or a bit of research sends them off in a new direction. You might be amused to know that some people who see themselves somewhere in the middle of this continuum call themselves “plantsters” (or "plantsers") a combination of both. Which Way Do You Lean? But even a plantser will tend to favor one end of the spectrum or the other. Figuring out which way you lean can help you do your work more confidently from day to day. If you know you like to be a little more organized and prefer a sense of where you’re going before you write, you’re leaning at least a tad toward the plotter end and you'll be able to write drafts with greater ease when you’re prepared. That’s cool. Don’t let someone who leans toward the pantser side tell you that’s uncreative or uninspired. You’re being creative at the beginning of the process instead of the middle of it. If you’re a little more loose about where you’re going, eager to explore your idea or characters as you write, don’t let the person who relies on an outline look down on you. You have to find your way as you go—it’s writing as discovery. If you’re a little more on the pantser side, you’re letting your thoughts and ideas evolve through the writing process. No Right Way to Write It seems like Twitter and Instagram are filled with writing quotes that suggest one way is better than the other. Facebook updates link to articles that elevate one approach over the other. Plotters look down on pantsers for being unorganized and undisciplined. “Poor things. They’re wasting so much time! They’ll be doing so much more work during the editing phase!" Then pantsers criticize plotters for being too rigi...

Writers have to churn out content of all kinds, from blog articles and guest posts to magazine pitches and book proposals. You never want the well to run dry, yet you may have faced days when you opened your laptop and stared at the screen without a single idea. It’s kind of scary. You think, “That’s it. My career is over. I’ve used up the creativity I was allotted in life. Now I need to go flip burgers at Mickey D’s." No, no, no. Let me assure you that’s not how it works. The well never needs to run dry. Thankfully, whether you need ideas for blogging, essays, creative nonfiction, poems, short stories or novels, ideas abound. You can find things to write about all around you, just waiting to be explored, developed, and written into existence. With a little experimentation, you’re sure to find least a few things to write about next time you open that laptop. Evening Reflection One of my favorite methods for churning out ideas is "Evening Reflection.” I first heard about this a couple of years ago via Mike Pesca of The Gist, when he interviewed professional storyteller Matthew Dicks. The podcast was titled, “Where to Find the Best Stories.” Dicks shares a daily exercise useful for training attentiveness and generating ideas. At bedtime, he says, think of the one story from the day that has the greatest meaning—something that made that particular day different from all the rest. Take just one to five minutes to write that story down. This refines our lens, he says. He writes the stories in a spreadsheet to force him to keep it short. He stretches the column about three quarters of the way across the screen and limits himself to that space. Be warned: the people who fail at the exercise and give up tend to write too much. It’s so tempting to write the whole thing out as a story, but in terms of idea-generation, your goal is to simply capture the essence in a few phrases so it can serve as a prompt later. Do it daily for only five minutes or less, and you’ll have material to last a lifetime. I’ve begun this practice, and it trains me to be attentive as I faithfully reflect on and record the most meaningful event of that day. Not only do I have ideas to write about—I end up with a succinct record of my days. Ideas from Your Day Another method is to gather ideas throughout the day. Let’s say you’re trying to come up with article ideas for your website or to pitch to magazines. Write a list of how-to posts—make some of them ridiculous enough to stimulate your imagination. Write them as headlines that reflect activities in your day. You’d write the headline similar to how you came up with the 50 Headlines I’ve talked about in the past, but you’re letting the day itself and the things you do and the people you meet get you making connections and dreaming up possibilities. Let’s try a few. Wake Up So first thing you do in a day is wake up. As you smack the alarm, you realize you could at that moment start thinking up some relevant titles: “6 Tasks to Tackle First Thing in the Morning” or “How Early Risers Will Save the Planet” or “Make Your Bed and Remake Your Life.” Others may have written about this, but you could offer a personal angle or interview a friend for content. Morning Ablutions You brush your teeth and look down at bristles. Add to your list: “What Your Toothbrush Wear Pattern Says about Your Personality.” Get Dressed You look in your drawers and see how neatly you’ve folded your sweaters and you remember you started folding them this way after reading Marie Kondo’s book about tidying up. So you go big—after all, maybe you can interview three people who fit these results? “How the KonMari Method Saved My Marriage, Got My Kids into Harvard, and Propelled my Book to the Top of the New York Times Bestseller List.” Breakfast You fix breakfast and you’re someone who writes about creativity, so you think up: “Best Breakfasts for Active Artists.” And so on.

In Monty Python and the Holy Grail, we follow the saga of King Arthur and his knights when, at one point, they encounter the Keeper of the Bridge of Death. Arthur explains that the Keeper of the Bridge of Death asks each traveler three questions. He who answers the three questions may cross in safety. Sir Robin asks, "What if you get a question wrong?” Arthur answers, "Then you are cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril,” which appears to be a fiery, hellish pit shooting up flames now and then for effect. Sir Lancelot courageously agrees to go first. “Ask me the questions, Bridgekeeper. I'm not afraid.” The questions turn out to be: What...is your name? What...is your quest? And what...is your favorite color. Lancelot answers each question easily and crosses directly. “Right, off you go," says the Bridgekeeper. The next knight, excited that the questions are so easy, rushes up to take his turn. The Keeper of the Bridge of Death asks, "What...is your name?" "Sir Robin of Camelot." "What...is your quest?" "To seek the Holy Grail." And then the Bridgekeeper asks, "What…is the capital of Assyria?" Sir Robin exclaims, "I don’t know that!” He flies into the air screaming, as he is cast into the Gorge of Eternal Peril. What Is a Gatekeeper? A gatekeeper, like the Keeper of the Bridge of Death, has the authority to grant (or deny) you passage into the next stage of your publishing journey—perhaps one of the final stages: that of landing a book contract or getting a byline in a coveted journal. Traditionally, we writers seeking publication have to enter a system and gain entrance from someone in order to be published. A gatekeeper might be the acquisitions editor you meet at a conference, who listens to your pitch and asks to see your full proposal. It’s the agent you query in hopes he'll represent you to publishers. If you’re hoping to land an article in a periodical, the gatekeeper is the editor who reads and responds to your query with a yes or no regarding your idea. It’s the person who receives your poems, essay, or short story through Submittable and decides if it will find a place in the spring issue of a literary journal. Generally, it’s someone who is in a position to green light your project or at least get it to the next stage. Gatekeeper as Decision-Maker Gatekeepers may or may not be the final decision-maker, depending on how a company is structured and how big the staff is. But especially someone you meet at a writing conference is there, representing the publishing company, and has been granted the authority to say yes or no on the spot, allowing you to move on to the next level with them if they say yes or ask for your full proposal...or move on to another publisher or publication if they no. Most gatekeepers have been in the business a long time—long enough to recognize quality art when they see it; they can sense that certain something that sets one project apart from the rest. They can tell if it pops, if it sings. And they know it from the business angle, too. They know what sells. They know their publishing company’s standards and style and whether your project is a good fit. Gatekeepers are people who have the power to invite you in or turn you away. If you’re turned away, you move on. You approach another gate and stand before another gatekeeper. New Gatekeepers Brooke Warner writes that the gatekeeper role is more complicated these days than in the past. As a former gatekeeper, she knows firsthand what it’s been and is noticing what it’s becoming. At her website, she writes, “[T]he role gets falsely propped up by supporters of traditional publishing and completely dismissed by those who favor the indie space.” Gatekeepers as Cultural Heroes In that article, she excerpted a Slate article by Random House editor Daniel Menaker, who estimates that about 20 or 30 gatekeepers—he says these are New York editors and publishers, publicists,

A lot of my clients are preparing nonfiction book proposals to send out to agents and publishers. One of the sections they have to think through is their primary audience or target reader. We have to identify who this book is intended to impact. It’s a must for any writing project, big or small. We must know our audience to use the best language to connect with them. To understand what they already know about our topic—and what they need to know. To build a relationship with them and continue to connect with them over time. If we don’t know precisely who are primary audience is, we’re capable of generalizing and writing in a distant, unfriendly, unnatural voice. Identifying Your Ideal Reader But who is this unseen reader? Who's clicking on the article you publish at your website? Who reads your tweets? Who subscribes to your newsletter? Who will read your future book? It’s enough to make your head spin, trying to identify your ideal customer, your target audience, your target reader, your avatar. People advising writers are using terminology like this, and it’s helpful because they're pushing us to go specific. For example, they won’t necessarily let you settle for simple demographics like, “My ideal reader is a 30-something mom with young children.” Instead, they insist on a more detailed persona, something more like this: My ideal reader is Cara, a 32-year-old mother of three kids—a second-grader, first-grader, and preschooler. Cara does yoga in the morning, then feeds the kids homemade muffins before loading them into her Honda minivan to drop the older two off at the private elementary school. She then swings through Starbucks with the preschooler, who is dropped off three days a week at the church-based program at 9:00. And it goes on. You figure out what she does when she’s alone, and the problems she encounters, and the questions she has throughout a day. This approach helps a writer—especially the nonfiction writer—come up with articles and content that can address or completely solve this avatar’s problems and answer her questions, one after another. It’s sort of a creative writing exercise to write a character sketch of this fictional person, fleshing it out with enough detail to make him or her completely real to you as a writer. Does the Fictional Persona Help You Write? But for a lot of writers, fictionalizing the person you’re writing for never quite works. Instead of forging a confident tone and close connection, it all feels sort of contrived. Even if you can go out in the neighborhood and see a person who fits that description, or you can find that kind of person online in a Facebook group asking questions you imagined your avatar asking, it’s still sort of distanced and fabricated. Maybe even a little forced. For Real Copy, You Need Real People I like an approach Chase Reeves described in an episode of The Fizzle Show podcast. The Fizzle team was talking about writing copy and how hard it can be unless—unless—Chase says, "you know exactly who you’re writing to and what you need to tell them.” Creating a fake persona or avatar is a step in the right direction in that you’re trying to speak to a specific person, but he takes it to a super-practical level. Here’s Chase’s trick. He opens up Gmail and starts writing an actual email to an actual person he knows really well in his life—someone who fits the type of person he’s hoping to reach with his content. It’s often his dad. So he opens an email, types in his dad’s email address, taps out a subject line, and prepares to communicate directly with his dad, a real person he knows really well. As Chase is preparing to write the subject line, he wonders, What would surprise Dad? What would interest him? What would be the take that would make him curious? He’s talking to one specific person—one real person he knows really well. Writing Comes Easy When You Write for Friends and Family

I hear it all the time. It doesn't seem to matter what stage of life we're in or what part of the world we're from. Regardless of age or gender or personality type, everyone says it: "I want to write, but I don’t have the time." Time Management Systems Only Part of the Solution You might think the only solution is to quit your job or hire a nanny. More likely, you’ve given up. Well, I guess that’s where you’re finding yourself if you’re someone who wants to write but doesn’t because of time…or lack of it. I don’t think you have to quit your job or hire a nanny. I also don’t think you have to give up. I could offer project management and time management solutions to help you eliminate some things from your schedule, plan your days efficiently, streamline your processes, and make the most of your time. And we could discuss distraction and motivation and nemesis and Resistance and procrastination. Because chances are, more than one thing is keeping you from writing, not just lack of time. It Can Be Done: You Can Write I want you to prove to yourself it can be done—you can write even when you think you have no time at all. Here’s a simple solution that's worked for me. In the next article I’ll share another. You can try one or the other, or both together for even more momentum. This first solution is especially powerful if it’s been a while since you’ve written. Kickstart Your Writing with a Time Block I urge you to kickstart your writing with a block of time devoted to nothing else but your words. If your schedule is insane, this may seem like a counterintuitive suggestion or a contradiction—“If I don’t have time to write, how will I find a block of time to write?" Have you taken a vacation in the past year or two? It could be a one-day escape to a nearby tourist attraction, a weekend retreat, or a week-long getaway. You made it happen, didn’t you? So you know it’s a hassle to step away from life and work, but it can be done. If you want it bad enough, you’ll find a way to set aside the time and make it happen. Same with this writing block. If you want it, you’ll find a way. And like a vacation, it’s not a regular thing. Just one block of time. I want you to love yourself and your writing enough to say, “I’m doing it. I’m making this happen. I’ve waited long enough—it’s time to kickstart my writing." Can you find a block of time? Can you escape the busyness that’s been holding you back? Can you leave it behind for an afternoon, a day, a weekend, or longer, so you can write for an extended time and make a dent in your work-in-progress—or the work that hasn’t even begun? How Long? You don’t have to go far, and you don’t have to be gone long to make a difference. Remember, this is a kickstart, not a completion—you don’t have to write the entire novel or finish the complete essay. You just dedicate a block of time to writing to give it a strong start or build out its bones. Surely you can find an afternoon and evening? Or a full Saturday? Where? For a week or weekend getaway, you could head to a nearby retreat center or a local bed and breakfast or a campground cabin. If you only carved out a day or an afternoon, head to the library or see if a local co-working space offers an inexpensive day pass. Depending on your project, you might want to find a location that doesn't offer Wi-Fi. Without that distraction, you’ll get more words out. Just make notes in brackets directly in the text to remind you to look up details later. You can tackle that research some day when you have just a few minutes between appointments. Kickstarting your project means you need to set down words, lots of words, so don’t get distracted confirming the street name in your home town. Just write. Keep the Writing Pipeline Flowing You’ll make the most of this time by setting up your writing pipeline if you haven’t done that already. I introduced the writing pipeline in episode 114.