Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

Today I’m leaning on Olympic marathoner Meb Keflezighi's goal-setting strategies to help us set good writing goals. They’re pretty close to SMART goals, but I like these examples from Meb’s running experience. It starts with this: A good goal has personal meaning. Meb points out that no one gave him a goal or forced a goal onto him. No one said, “You have to win the 2014 Boston Marathon” or “You have to make the 2012 Olympic team.” He says, "Those were goals I set for myself. When I told myself, 'I want to win Boston,' it just felt right. I knew that chasing that goal would motivate me to do what was necessary to achieve it and that doing so would require me to do my best." He says, "Your goals should have that same pull on you. They should be things you want to achieve for yourself, not to meet someone else’s expectations." Same with your writing. If you find yourself with a goal, make sure it’s yours. Make sure it has personal meaning. Make sure it’s something you want to pursue for yourself, not becaus

In episode 64 I shared reasons to go ahead and open up about your project. After listening to some of the benefits, you might have wondered why we wouldn’t always talk about our projects with people. Why not take advantage of that great input and the energy and fun of collaboration and developmental input? Why […]

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, e

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 a

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 […]

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

“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

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 pans

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 […]

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 […]

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

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

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,

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 […]

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

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 li

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 […]

This one’s for the moms out there who are also writers. Writer moms. My mom was a writer mom. I am a writer mom. You might be a writer mom, too. And I'm sure you know one. Please know this: Writer moms are trying to raise their family while advancing their writing in some way. And it’s hard. Madeleine L'Engle once wrote in one of her Crosswicks Journals: During the long drag of years before our youngest child went to school, my love for my family and my need to write were in acute conflict. The problem was really that I put two things first. My husband and children came first. So did my writing. Bump. (p. 19) I got a chance to hear Madeleine speak one time, and afterwards she signed books. I would have one instant to ask her about that—to ask about writing and motherhood. We waited and inched forward in line until it was finally my turn. I handed her Walking on Water. She asked for my name and scrawled a note on one of its front pages. She looked up and handed it to me. “Thank you,” I said. Then I bl

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

Episode #47: Don't Be Afraid to Evolve The Evolution of Projects Don’t be afraid of letting a writing piece sit until the idea grows and matures to the point where you feel you’ve got a handle on it. It happens with lots of writing projects, as drafts 1 to 20 and beyond take a twist or turn, whether fiction or nonfiction, poetry or essays. Book proposals are an interesting example, especially nonfiction proposals. The author puts together an idea he feels great about and submits it. The agent or acquisitions editor shows interest, but contacts the author saying they like it, but would like to see some tweaks and changes. If the heart of the message or idea remains and the author has the time, energy, and grit, I’d encourage him to go for it. Don’t be afraid to let that project evolve to give that publisher what they think will sell in the market and best serve their readers. The evolution of an individual project is an expected part of the writing process, but don’t be afraid to evolve as a writer. The Evol