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.

Read More

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.

Read More

I was a monk in many ways, an ascetic living a simple life in upstate New York just outside of the Catskill Mountains. I studied martial arts, meditated, worked at a restaurant, and wrote a lot.

I didn’t want love or friendship. I wanted to be alone.

My mother had died a couple of years earlier. My family had been torn apart, and I was seeking respite from the complexities of life: a break from the demons calling me to join her.

I worked on my first manuscript, Dawn, about young love, cancer, and family dynamics. It had all the makings for commercial success. The story was universal.

It was an homage to my mother, who had lost her battle with cancer after a double mastectomy and brutal napalm for the body chemotherapy. My father was alone now. My childhood home outside NYC was under contract to be sold so we had to move, and the Florida home she picked out was also. We had no choice but to leave our home and neighborhood behind. The idea had been to get her out of the rat race and move closer to the beach, where she could rehabilitate. My father had quit his job at a prominent college to become her nurse. She was skin and bones and would often fall, struggling on her way to the bathroom.

Read More

I used to be the bravest writer I knew. 

Although this was true mostly because I didn’t know many other writers at seven years old, this brazen confidence did not stay with me long. As a kid, I fearlessly shared my poetry with anyone who wanted to listen to it, and many who didn’t. But as I grew, I began to feel guarded about my poetry, fearing the reactions, fearing the poems weren’t any good, didn’t say anything new, or revealed too much. I knew, though, that this was no way to write, that the writing that most profoundly impacted me was most likely the scariest for that author to share. I wanted to get back to a place where I had no barriers between what I wrote when I knew no one would be reading it and what I wrote for others to see. Unfortunately, that thought terrified me, so I began brainstorming solutions for overcoming this fear, and the answer I found was process, play, and, shockingly, some silliness.

In Around the Writer’s Block, Roseanne Bane describes the way that play can reduce stress, improve creativity, and help us “make new associations and connections,” which, given that poetry is all about associations, makes Bane’s suggestions especially helpful for my preferred genre. Julia Cameron, in The Artist’s Way, makes a similar argument to Bane, that taking ourselves less seriously and focusing on the “imagination-at-play” can enrich our writing, a prospect I’d find helpful in counteracting the painful and unutterable heaviness of the topics I sometimes touch on in my poetry.

Read More

The writing path can seem all call and no response. Must we be like Emily Dickinson writing our letters to the world that did not write back because the number of submissions precludes a personal or timely response? We speak into the void, and a generic rejection boomerangs back after a delay of eight, ten, twelve months—hardly fulfilling human communication. On social media, it's easy to spot writer laments. The gist of a recent S.O.S. post was “please, someone tell me one reason I should continue writing poetry.” After a robotically quick rejection, a novelist vented, “I F*ing Sent this Query 5 Minutes Ago What The F*.” On Facebook, another bewildered writer just received notification of an anthology acceptance five years after they'd submitted. 

 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. 

Read More

In 2019, at age 79, I returned from a two-week retirement trip to the east coast to attend the 80th birthday party for my 1957 class from Atlantic City High School,to  visit old friends, and to see family in Florida and New Hampshire. On September 27th, I woke up in Florida with severe pain and stiffness in my neck. That day, whileflying north to New Hampshire, I thought it was a fluke, or a consequence of how I slept that night, but later after arriving in New Hampshire, the pain was still there.  I made it through sightseeing in the White Mountains and visiting, but knew I needed to see a doctor. 

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. 

Read More

Writing began dedicated to empty spaces, what few I had. A mother, a medical transcriptionist, a wife, a land owner, and a deeply committed nature lover, I fit writing between worlds often tucked in at the end of a day, words overworked, frequently transient, sometimes alarming. An animal was about to die, for instance, and I would be flailing, seeking meaning, hoping to capture the memory of better times. Nothing could restore the past. But words helped me cope with loss, the bereft feeling of another little life forgotten except for a few thoughts right at the end. Writing slowly became an everyday occurrence. And it began to dominate the order of my days.

Read More

Once upon a time, I had a teacher, a Miss Campbell, who wrote in red ink on the bottom of my essay, “This is rather well done. Is it entirely original?” 

Read More

The piece of writing that changed my life is in a cardboard box on a shelf under my husband’s desk. It’s buried amongst other old documents, past rental agreements, utilities bills, and the immunization records of pets long dead. It had been there for so long I almost forgot it was in my possession. One spring morning, while engaging in the gloriously stereotypical act of spring cleaning, it found its way back into my hands. When I realized what it was, my heart clenched, like someone had reached in and given it a hard squeeze. A thirty-year-old piece of writing. Not a story, not a poem or an essay on the current state of human affairs, but a police witness statement. Spoken aloud by me for over four hours and dictated by a highly professional and patient detective inspector.

Advice comes and goes. The best advice today is out of vogue tomorrow. Nonetheless, there are certain cliched opinions that are evergreen. One— my dad used to say decades ago— I still go by. The other one is a quotation by a famous French literary elite from another century.

Read More

Growing up, I pondered compelling questions, such as: What is real?  What if the physical world were merely a curtain on which air, sunlight, and even time were painted?  Even my own existence might be an illusion.

As a small child, I couldn't articulate my existential worries.  This made me feel even more insubstantial.

Read More

My son Jack is twenty-three, lives with my wife and me, and will probably be doing so for some time yet. He’s on the Autism spectrum, and while very high functioning, can struggle mightily in social situations. I’ve become accustomed to his bouts of anxiety when he orders a mocha at Starbucks or greets a stranger at our door. Conversation with him can also be pretty one-way. While he’s capable of delivering a ten-minute lecture on the futility of the Viet Nam War, his attention can disappear 30 seconds into a story he's being told, even from a reasonably capable storyteller like his father.

It would be easy to attribute these quirks entirely to Autism the way a limp is a direct consequence of a sprained ankle, but it’s more complicated than that. A few years ago, he explained that since he was a kid, he’s worried about being too influenced by other people. He wanted to live for himself, not just to please or get along with others. Once you start caring too much about someone else, looking out for their needs and their desires, when would it stop? Better, he reasoned, to go into that Autistic bubble where he knows he can be free.

Read More

Getting started can be a major problem for budding authors. A great story seethes within us, but we need something to push us into action. For me, it was my political science students at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, who planted the seed in my mind that I should write a novel.

Late in my career, I introduced a course on Politics and Fiction that resonated with my students. Every now and then, someone would announce how much he or she liked the way the fiction got them to feel what it had been like for the people in the story to live through the confrontations of their day. One young woman became enthused with a novel about the late 1940s and revealed her wish to have lived in those days. 

As I slowly realized the powerful impact historical fiction could have on readers, discontent began to fester in my mind. I was the author of two successful political science textbooks. But no student ever told me that my textbook had touched them viscerally the way that a novel could. 

Read More

 A grandson of mine is in kindergarten. The assignment in class was to draw a picture of your secret superpower. Kids drew pictures of themselves kicking soccer balls, playing musical instruments, or dancing. My grandson drew a picture of a red-headed boy in the middle of a line of kids where he held the hand of one on each side of him who held the hand of the next and so on. When my son asked his boy Harrison what his picture meant, my redheaded grandson replied, “Dad, my superpower is I make friends with everyone.”

I said to my own kid, “True. Anywhere we go, Harrison will try to make friends.” My son nodded in agreement. And I added, “You know what’s great? That kid of yours already knows himself.”

I began thinking about when I discovered who I was. It certainly wasn’t in kindergarten. Not sure if it was even in college, working, or having my own children. Much later. Maybe about 15 years ago? Fifteen years ago, I began writing.

Read More

Getting started can be a major problem for budding authors. A great story seethes within us, but we need something to push us into action. For me, it was my political science students at Hamline University in St. Paul, Minnesota, who planted the seed in my mind that I should write a novel.

Late in my career, I introduced a course on Politics and Fiction that resonated with my students. Every now and then, someone would announce how much he or she liked the way the fiction got them to feel what it had been like for the people in the story to live through the confrontations of their day. One young woman became enthused with a novel about the late 1940s and revealed her wish to have lived in those days. 

As I slowly realized the powerful impact historical fiction could have on readers, discontent began to fester in my mind. I was the author of two successful political science textbooks. But no student ever told me that my textbook had touched them viscerally the way that a novel could. 

Read More

Often my true stories are accepted because I made the editor laugh. Several editors tell me how funny I am. I wrote an essay recently that was published in a women’s regional magazine. When I reread it, I realized I’d employed a lot of the rules for creating humor, but I’d used them subconsciously. I inherently know them. So, I’ll reprint this piece, which appeared in Sasee of Myrtle Beach and then diagram it, so-to-speak, to show why it’s funny. Many folks don’t think they can compose funny stuff because they’re not funny naturally. I’m not sure if you have to be funny to write funny. I’m from New Jersey originally. You must be funny if born there. So, writing comical schticks isn’t hard for meet but certain gimmicks can be learned. Applying them creates humor in a piece, which always makes an author more winsome. Applying make-up will enhance what’s there. (Have you ever seen Hollywood actresses without their make-up? Yeah, Boy!) Sometimes, knowing more about why we laugh can help a writer become more palatable and more likeable, whatever their message is.

First, here’s my recent story about fashion: Sometimes I Talk to Myself: 

Read More

“Those who dare to fail miserably can achieve greatly.” — John F. Kennedy

Fear of failure – and its flip side, fear of success, are great drivers of procrastination for writers.

However…  

The only way to succeed is to constantly seek failure. Sit with that for a moment.

The. Only. Way. To. Succeed. Is. To. Constantly. Seek. Failure.

This sounds so counterintuitive, but it is an honest, real truth, even if it is one that is not easy to digest. Why? Failure is bad, right?Well, it certainly doesn’t feel good in the moment. It can be downright painful.

Read More

While I have never birthed a human baby, I often benefit from the practices taught in birthing classes: breathe, push. I spend much of my time pushing to be read, published, known, welcomed. I breathe between pushes, sometimes because I'm about to pass out.

Among the things that have carried me through my pushes to write, publish, support other writers, and teach has been the support of having an action buddy (aka action partner). We're both goal-oriented people, full of visions with the chops to carry them out. It happens with greater ease by having a consistent partner who serves as a reminder of our progress.

Her first attempt was not the finest of writing, being all dialogue and no plot. But it did get her juices flowing. After reading a pile of romances and joining a critique group, she tried again. She thought her story turned out pretty good, but after receiving three rejections she buried it in a file drawer. A few weeks later, she received a call from a friend suggesting another publisher. Soon she had a contract, and not long after that, a box of her new books landed on her doorstep. Yippee! Barnes & Noble gave her a book signing complete with chocolates and sparkling cider.

Read More

Most freelance writers know that assignments and money can ebb and flow. After being a freelance writer for more than 30 years, I've learned a few tricks to keep the money flowing my way. Am I wealthy? Nope. But I was able to stay home, raise my kids, and pay the bills. One of the tricks I learned was to make best friends – of sorts – with the editors, especially long-time editors of the publications for which I wrote. I discovered the "best friend" thing by accident. Our friendships, however, didn't blossom overnight. As with many relationships, it took time and effort to build it up - but the effort to help increase your writing sales. 

Editors deal with lots of people every day and don't always remember each writer by name or by story. The first thing you need to do is send articles and stories to different publications. That might seem overly obvious, but I know I continually compile lists of publications I want to write for. Unfortunately, I'm so busy compiling lists and checking guidelines that I sometimes don't sit down and actually write something to send. Editors can’t get to know me if I don't send anything. 

Read More

Whenever I panic about how ChatGPT will affect my opportunities as a writer, I calm down by remembering that I’m a mediocre chess player.

I’ve loved chess since my dad taught me to play in elementary school. I’ve played 1610 games on chess.com. I watch YouTube videos and read books on strategy and openings. I purchased chess lessons from the silent auction at my Unitarian church. After all of this effort and experience, I have become… a perfectly competent chess player. Currently, 249,915 people on chess.com have higher rankings than my 1289 rating, and I could never beat many of these prodigies, wannabe grandmasters, actual grandmasters, club champions, and Kenyan high schoolers. I certainly can’t beat the best chess AI. Neither can the greatest human competitors. Deep Blue famously defeated then chess grandmaster Gary Kasparov in 1997, and AI has since evolved to the point where chess engines like Stockfish and AlphaZero always triumph over top-rated humans. 

Read More