My family occasionally prays down by the Mississippi River with the Nibi walkers, a group of Indigenous women and water-tenders. Water is life, so we plant our feet in the sand and offer thanks. One morning, the Anishinaabe elder Sharon Day translated her prayer for us: “Great Spirit, Gitchi Manitou, have pity on us.” At her feet was a quilt, a copper bowl of river water, a shell cupping burnt sage. Behind her the river eddied and flowed. “All of creation existed without us,” she explained, “and will exist after us. We are dependent on creation. We’re dependent on the web of life. It is not dependent on us.” Humans are mighty, yes, but also small and helpless, and remembering this is good. 

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Before writing for teens, I worked with them as a high school educator. Though I left teaching to focus on raising a family, the guiding principles I relied on as a teacher continue to inform my approach to writing and editing for young adults: authenticity, respect, and hope.

Before we get into specifics, a quick reminder: while young adult literature is popular among college students and older adults, teens are your target audience. If you’re writing or editing a YA novel, they should be top of mind. Growing teens face physical, mental, social, and emotional changes that can often feel confusing and overwhelming. Teens’ schedules are also increasingly busy, as is the very real pressure to perform - a pressure that’s only increased with the advent of social media.

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I was born in the city but grew up in the country where I discovered that words could take me beyond my five senses. That insight began on a hike in the woods with my father. We had stopped to watch bees buzzing around wildflower along the trail. I knew the bees were gathering honey but wondered what else was going on. When we got home, my curiosity led me to a library where I discovered it wasn't a one-way affair. Those flowers were gathering pollen from the bees. It was fun to watch bees buzzing from flower to flower, but it was reading words in a book that transformed my watching into understanding. Bees do things to flowers, flowers do things to bees, and words do things to me, so I want to do things with words.

Now, with the years piled on top of each other like pages in a book, I'm more aware of why I write and why it matters. Some reasons are personal and some are public, but they all stem from my desire to do something with words. And knowing the reasons helps me identify my intended readers and how I can reach them. Each of my reasons has a different audience—me when the reason is personal and others when the reason is public.

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I am the introvert; she, the extrovert. She is your friend as soon as you meet her. We were born across the globe from one another, me in a city among gray buildings, she surrounded by nature. I grew up through the storm of a communist-born dictatorship, that of Ceaușescu in Romania, and she experienced the childhood freedom in the States. Yet we had so much in common, my mother-in-law and me. We both loved to explore. We just started from different places; me from the inside of myself, she from the outside of herself, and we rescued each other from the limbo of wanting to write a message to the world and the fear that it may not be good enough for anyone to care about it. 

Rhona (my mother-in-law) is a caregiver,She feels stuck at home sometimes, as her mother can’t leave her bed anymore, so she finds refuge in her happy childhood stories. When she shared them with her friend, a primary school teacher, Rhona noticed that she may not be the only one who would relish her past adventures.  Once she started writing, the stories practically wrote themselves. The hurdle came afterwards, when no one seemed interested in reading them. She did not know what to do for a long while until she saw something I posted on my blog, and felt inspired, recognizing  a fellow writer. And yet, it still took several years until she dared show me these stories. She was not worried about rejection as much as she was about asking too much. She loves her son, her first-born, and until it came to challenging her core values manifested through a voting choice, she had always tiptoed around us, always worried she may upset the balance - but she couldn’t change her identity just for my sake.

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Several times a day, I find myself at a loss for words. Meaning gets caught unformed behind my teeth, or I puzzle through an avalanche of sounds whose hidden significance refuses to emerge. 

I’m in this fix because in midlife I moved to a place where I’d never learned the language, trailing after my German-speaking Swiss husband and hoping for the best. As an American in Switzerland, I’m a one-language person in a land where everyone else seems comfortable with least three or four. For as long as I could remember, English had been my superpower. Now I’ve lost that strength and had to start over, inarticulate as a newborn. 

In an earlier stage of life, working in editing and communications, I was proud of my knack for correct spelling, my wide vocabulary, my ability to fine-tune manuscripts to better express what their authors wanted to say. I’d been on a quest for perfection in words; these days, when I open my mouth to speak, I can be happy if I come up with any words at all. 

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One of my most helpful writing practices is not writing at all—rather, setting the pen (or keyboard) aside and doing handwork. Some writers knit, some carve wood, some paint, some throw pots. I coil pine-needle baskets.

First, I must leave my writer's desk and go outdoors. I head for a park or forest in search of long-needle pines, then gather a sack of dry brown needles from beneath the trees. Ponderosas are best, and since there are few near my home, I am always on the lookout to find them—yes, like keeping an ear out for a ‘just-right’ word, a good line, a story concept. Sometimes you find them where you least expect them. A neighbor’s yard. An empty lot. 

I take the needles home, remove the debris, wash them and set them out to dry. I study the needles' conditions, their lengths and colors, and begin to imagine a basket design. I liken this to sorting ideas before writing—so many notes, fragments of ideas, bits and pieces, thoughts to sort out.

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Tim O’Brien wrote in The Things They Carried, “I want you to feel what I felt. I want you to know why story-truth is truer sometimes than happening-truth.” 

This always made perfect sense to me. And when I  taught high school English, the students would erupt in debate when I would introduce this book.  

If it’s not true, it’s not true!

If you say it’s true, and it’s not, then that’s lying. 

It’s black and white. 

But here’s the thing: It’s anything but black and white. Our society embraces binary thinking: Pick a side, it’s either this or that, etc. And the enigma is our society simultaneously loves coaching one another on “speaking your truth.” 

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When I see my teenage sons lounging in front of the TV, I sometimes marvel at how much the experience of watching television has changed in one generation. At the risk of sounding like the world’s youngest curmudgeon, they have it much easier than I did.

When I returned home, I discovered that my own doctor was on a month-long vacation. I could only see a doctor who was unknown to me. She examined me, took my history of this situation, and concluded that I had something called Polymyalgia Rheumatica. She put me on Prednisone. Later, I saw a specialist who said I had Arthritis, but the treatment was the same. 

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Once, after participating in a panel discussion on sexuality and faith at a local university, I was approached by a student with the usual request to sign her copy of my book. But when she handed it over, I was shocked. The soft-cover bristled with post-it notes. Pages were dog-eared, the text striped with fluorescent highlighter, the margins crammed with handwriting, and the cover ripped. She might have run over it with her car.

 I certainly didn’t receive training in my two MFA programs on how to wait or hope for a warm human response. “How to not check your Submittable account twenty times a day” wasn’t in the curriculum. It’s something we endure privately during the boom-and-bust periods of our careers. What I've come to realize is that I don’t have writer’s block; I have reader’s block. To clarify, I don’t mean a failure to reach an audience. Readers’  blocks don't correlate with the number of published titles or level of acclaim. Just as writer’s blocks are caused by mindless mishandling of the present moment at the desk, reader’s blocks are glitches in our mindset after work is ready for publication. 

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More than a year ago, I found myself, a professional writer, stuck. 

I’d been stuck before. Definitely after my first book, The Choices We Made: 25 Women and Men Speak Out About Abortion, foreword by Gloria Steinem. Random House sent me all over the country to talk about the book, especially about the harrowing experiences with pre-Roe illegal abortions that people I interviewed like Whoopi Goldberg and Rita Moreno had. It was a heady time, but when it was over, I crashed. 

I didn’t get stuck after my second book, which came out 10 years later, Good Catholic Girls: How Women Are Leading the Fight to Change the Church. I still had more to say about the Church. I had occasionally gotten stuck at other times on other particularly demanding projects, but it had been a long time since I felt stuck like this.

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With alacrity, I read Hank Phillippi Ryan’s essay Paying It Forward, one of the stories in  In Chicken Soup for the Soul: Inspiration for Writers: 101 Motivational Stories for Writers – Budding or Bestselling – from Books to Blogs. This well-known mystery author made points that resonated with me. 

First, she emphasized how it was mere grit and persistence that landed her a job as a TV reporter at age 25, with no experience or real qualifications for the job. She found a mentor. Walt, a veteran photographer, showed her what to do. Within three weeks of following his instructions, she felt confident about her reportage.  Grateful, she vowed to pay it forward, which meant that if she could ever help newbies or wannabe writers, she would. Ergo, Hank helped a young girl Sally, an intern. Sally confided she wanted to be a producer someday. In her spare time, Sally composed a book. She got that book published. Well, Hank wanted to be a novelist, too. Sally ended up mentoring her. Roles reversed.

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I’m lying in bed, curled in a ball, whispering to my ankle under the covers. More specifically, I’m whispering to my new Apple Watch. It’s 2AM, the time when the best ideas come. I must capture them before they dissipate into the ether. 

We writers are used to a flurry of inspiration arriving in the middle of the night. We receive the Muses’ whispers in that twilight state so well that creatives like Thomas Edison covet it. To take advantage, he would nap with balls in his hands — when the balls fell, he’d hear them, wake, and immediately jot notes while the ideas were fresh in his head. 

Historically, we writers struggle to take notes in the night. Turning on a light might wake anyone with whom we share the room. Leaving the room abandons any hope of retaining the inspiration. My strategy involved grabbing the inevitable paper and pen on my nightstand and scribbling keywords while blinded by the dark. Within moments, the thought would be jumbled by consciousness. 

How, then, did this paper-and-pen writer end up whispering to an Apple Watch on her ankle?

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As a writer living in a small town, you sometimes feel you don't have much of a contribution to make to community life. No, not as a person—every resident has that opportunity—as a writer. If you were a painter, you could paint the firehouse. If you were a plumber, you could fix the old furnace in the school. But what’s a writer to do?

For many years, I was a writer in a small town; actually, in a poor and tiny northern Vermont village. A calamity there made me think about the role of the write.

Small-town calamities are the worst kind. Whether it’s fire or flood or frantic parents desperately searching for a bone-marrow donor for their daughter, you either know the people involved or your next-door neighbor does. If you were born there, you're probably related to them. In a small town, all tragedy is personal.

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What do you do when faced with a nasty bout of writer’s block? What do you do when all those fabulous phrases, adorable adverbs, and perky paragraphs just dry up like that once-red geranium sitting on my kitchen windowsill? But unlike the care of the geranium that I admit to neglecting, I’ve nurtured my muse: I read good literature, studied writers’ websites, journaled, poured over guideline pages.

Still, my muse Bob is gone. Perhaps he left me for a younger writer. That often happens to women in my age group. That’s right - maybe Bob wanted a TROPHY writer. Someone who’s flashier, someone who’s fancier, someone who TikToks! Maybe someone who’s writing true crime novels or podcasts. Those seem to be all the rage nowadays. I gave my muse the best years of my life only to be left at the curb like a bag of nonrecyclable packing peanuts! He didn’t even think about the ‘progeny’ he left behind - all those articles and stories we sweated over late at night. I thought we shared something meaningful. The times we laughed together over pieces we finally completed after weeks of sweating over them, cried together over heartless form rejection emails. I know I won’t get any consideration, any compensation from Bob. Maybe he’ll send a few crumbs here and there, like a particularly snappy phrase or a germ of an idea at dawn, while I hover between wakefulness and sleep, it becoming only a vague, nagging itch the next morning on fully waking.  

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Twenty-two years ago, I spent the first few weeks of my daughter’s life carefully following the advice given to nursing mothers in the hospital: no pacifiers, no bottles, feed on demand. Add to that the advice of parenting books: no co-sleeping, nothing plush in the crib, put the baby on their backs to sleep. It all added up to no fun, no sleep, and lots of crying (for all parties involved). 

A year later, I was pregnant again. On the one hand, I was overwhelmed by the work I knew was ahead of me. But, with a year of parenting behind me, I also felt I knew what to expect. 

“This time,” I thought, “I’ll know what I’m doing.” Surely, it’d be easier the second time around, right? No. 

But…   

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This past March, I pulled off something many indie authors dream of: I paid my mortgage with the month's royalties. Yet I wasn't filled with joy. I didn't feel proud of my accomplishments, my work. Worries digging away in my head undermined the pride I deserved to feel.

When I returned home, I discovered that my own doctor was on a month-long vacation. I could only see a doctor who was unknown to me. She examined me, took my history of this situation, and concluded that I had something called Polymyalgia Rheumatica. She put me on Prednisone. Later, I saw a specialist who said I had Arthritis, but the treatment was the same. 

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Okay, so where’s the truth? You’ve been sitting there pounding out word after word of what makes sense to you, but it seems like just another string of words that almost anyone could write. Have you ever considered that you may be writing from everyone else’s truth and not your own? Truth is an elusive little devil that can whack the serifs right off your words, blindside and pummel all those well-intended phrases and words that claim to come from honesty but are actually other people’s thoughts and ideas disguised as your own. Why not make them your own?

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After a newspaper article appeared about my first published book and I received an invitation from a local school to speak to kids about literacy,  I realized that I would have to transition from the proverbial shy writer to charismatic speaker. 

No pressure. 

From the guy that was comfortable in the shadows to someone who would eventually speak at writer’s conferences, schools, and libraries throughout the US, no one would have ever told me the transition would come as easily as it did. 

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The Library of Alexandria burned down in 48 BC, and 40000 scrolls were lost. In 1986, a fire in the Los Angeles library destroyed more than 1 million books. I wasn’t there for either of those events, but the pain of those losses must live loudly within my heart, because I take every opportunity to buy more books. When I was twelve years old I had a bookshelf in my bedroom, and one day, just to see if it was possible, I took every book off the shelf and used them to build a wall across my room that was over two feet high. I am fifty now and I have enough books to line the walls of my bedroom from floor to ceiling.

Like most booklovers, I have purchased my fair share of books from Amazon or eBay or Barnes and Noble, but my favorite book-buying experiences have been in used book shops. There is one particular book shop in my home state of Minnesota where five dollars will allow you to fill a paper bag with as many books as you can carry. When I see a garage-sale sign it is nearly impossible for me to not pull over to check out their book selection. These have all been delightful experiences, but, by far, my favorite book-buying habit is to browse the bookshelves at Goodwill.

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Writers, before submitting your fiction and nonfiction for feedback or publication, check your work for two common issues. 

Zombie Words Must Die

While wonderful phrases exist in most writers’ prose, an infestation of dead words may be lurking as WHIT (Was, Had, It, and That). 

Early drafts may include grammatically correct and acceptable WHITs in small doses, but most writing becomes burdened by dozens if not hundreds of vague words per chapter, essay, and entire manuscripts. The opportunity arises to amplify and develop tone, mood, plot, setting, and characters by replacing WHIT vague placeholders with concrete and visual verbs and nouns within active sentence structures. 

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