Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

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.

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: Get to know Charity Singleton Craig

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.

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.

“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,

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 ...

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 firs...

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. 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. 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. 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. 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. 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.” 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, that’s when I know I need to find my way back to my sweet spot, and find energy and motivation by capitalizing on my strengths.

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,

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.

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?

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

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,

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 ...

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. 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.