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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If my underwear ever had holes in it or the elastic was stretched out or the fabric stained, my mother would say, “What if you had some accident and wound up in the hospital? What would people think?” 

Who in any emergency room would care? 

But because of this conditioning or my natural proclivity (I remember dancing ballet on a low tiled coffee table within sight of our open front door as a kid, hoping someone would drive by, be awed, and whisk me off to join the New York City Ballet), or because projecting ourselves into others’ eyes is an ordinary human tendency, I landed in adulthood with my attention well-honed toward “what people think.” It’s haunted my writing, where worries about audience invade even my private journal. I’m as good as the next writer at leaping from rough draft to imagined New York Times review fame, or for that matter, obscure disdain. 

Dealing with my thoughts about what others think is an ongoing, daily artistic struggle.

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I’ve sold my personal essays to anthologies, magazines, ezines, and newspapers over 450 times.  Some are inspirational.  Many are humorous.  Several are informative. Others are educational or travel oriented. I’ve even sold a few to religious magazines although I’m not overly religious. Once I sold a piece about penning Christmas letters to Australian Catholics; the Jesuit priests didn’t care I’m not Catholic nor have I stepped foot in Australia. They liked the advice I was giving. Markets are everywhere. Be persistent in submitting. Yet, first know what you are doing when you create your piece.

Below is a listicle on how to create a composition that will catch and keep an editor’s attention.

1. Crown your essay with a catchy title regardless of whether the editor might change it upon acceptance. Often, my stories in Chicken Soup for the Soul don’t keep the titles with which I christened them for  a myriad of reasons yet the title caught the assistant editor’s attention.  The very first piece I sold them over ten years ago, I entitled “Lessons from a Bitch.” It was about what my daughter learned about life from having a female golden retriever for eight years, until the dog passed.

2. Talk about one event or incident or one subject. Only one. This isn’t a ship’s log or a diary.

3. Self-deprecate. I’ve even called one piece of mine “I Do Dumb Things.”  This appeared recently in a new series called The Bad Day Books. Except for narcissists, everyone relates to doing dumb things.

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Basically, there are three types of international authors. The trio includes:

     1.  Someone who writes a best-selling book the world wants to read.

     2.  Someone whose written work appears in a multinational publication (such as the former International Herald Tribune).

     3.  Someone whose writing turns up in publications based in different countries.

I am the third kind, and this is how I did it. You could, too.

I am an American who did not intend to become an international author of articles and short stories. Instead, I fell into the role. It started in 2014;  I was searching the internet for one of my on-line articles when I made a startling discovery:tthe piece had been reprinted that yearin a magazine I had never heard of in the Bahamas.

The journal’s editor did credit me as the author. However, she evidently thought my work needed a folksier style and more relevance to her subscribers, adding.  grammatical mistakes, reworded paragraphs, and inserted Haiti and the Caribbean into my discussion.  (If you see an article by me with a lot of grammar errors, it is not - or at least I hope it is not - my fault!)

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A new year has started, and achieving your writing goals might seem like a daunting task, but there's a system that can help. I highly recommend using the SMART method, which has helped me sustain a full-time writing career. Whenever I'm goal planning, I stop to think if my plans fit within those guidelines.

That wasn’t always the case. I started my writing career thirteen years ago, and at first I had plenty of time to write. My only goal was to complete a book and move on to the next one. But as time passed, my responsibilities increased. I had to do marketing, administrative work, social media management, etc. etc. Juggling all those tasks meant less time for writing. 

Eventually, I realized that I needed to balance all those important responsibilities of being an authorpreneur with the most important one—the writing. If I didn’t have a book, I had nothing to sell, so I had to get better at getting words on paper if I wanted to continue my career as a full-time writer.

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Directors make movies by shooting one scene at a time. Authors write books by writing one scene at a time. I teach a novel writing class at a homeschool co-op and the students get a little overwhelmed when I tell them we are aiming to finish a rough draft of 20,000-30,000 words. While some of them are pantsers and some are planners, I found that writing down the scenes is a happy medium for both writing styles. For the beginning novelist, or even the more experienced novelist looking for a new and more efficient method, scene-by-scene might be the way to go. This planning method helps writers know where the story is going to make quick work of the first full draft. Even if you don't enjoy planning everything out, you can still use the same technique to have at least a basic idea of where your story is headed. It's like planning a trip using a map (people really should still do this); you know where you're starting and you know where you want to end up. The middle is the fun part where you can stop at your plot points all along the way, but they don't all have to be planned. Surprise can be a good thing for both road trips and novel writing.

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