Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

Last time we discussed a writing pipeline, representing the phases or stages a project moves through, from the initial idea to completion—including when it's been published and you save it in a portfolio. Now let’s talk editorial calendars. Life Without an Editorial Calendar For years I got by writing on the fly. I'd have a few minutes free, think up an idea, whip out a draft, and with just a little more time that night or the next morning, I could edit the piece into a solid article to send out to a magazine or publish on my website. My approach worked in the early days, when my publishing aspirations and expectations were as small as my kids. As my kids grew, however, the possibilities seemed grander and I realized this random, last-minute approach was not the way to live a creative, sustainable, productive writing life over the long haul. If I wanted to produce a body of work, I'd need to be a bit more intentional and organized. A tool to support all that and remind me what to do next was an editorial c

Have you ever sat down at the computer when you finally carved out time to write, only to discover you have no idea where to start or what to say? You end up wasting a lot of precious time if that’s your approach. In times like that,

Ideas pop into my head all the time: while walking, doing household chores, waiting in a carpool lane, sitting poolside, or even as I'm just falling asleep. If I have paper and pen, great. I can write them down. Or if I have time to pull out my bluetooth keyboard and type them up, cool. We discussed some of my favorite writing tools last week. But if you have a lot of ideas or a rich, detailed memory comes to you, wouldn’t it be nice to record it fully and quickly, before it evaporates or you’re distracted by something else? If you write fiction and the outline of a short story or an entire scene for your novel comes to you—I’ll bet you’d love to have some way to rapidly, easily stash it away. Well, you can. Grab your phone and press record. You can save your ideas easily and quickly if you write with your voice—it’s a solution for any writer with big goals and little time. Voice-to-Text Most phones—iPhone or Android—have a microphone icon on the keyboard, allowing you to speak your thoughts into just abo

I once asked a photographer the best camera to use. Before he shared his opinion, he said a common answer to that question is, "The best camera is the one you have with you." In other words, it doesn't matter how fancy your equipment is if, at the moment a hawk lands on a fence post next to you, your Canon EOS 5D Mark IV is sitting in the trunk of your car. At that moment, you slowly lift up your smartphone and, as quietly as possible, snap the photo with the equipment you have on hand. I think we should view our writing tools the same way. It doesn't matter if a program installed on your desktop computer at home is loaded with bells and whistles, if inspiration hits while you're on vacation. If you're in the mountains with an extra two hours to write, that fancy program back home isn't going to do you much good. Instead, grab a notebook and pen and capture those thoughts with what you have on hand. Don’t Wait for Ideal Circumstances The other day I was trying to prepare notes for a podcast episode I needed

You may already use a system to collect emails so you can communicate directly with readers who want to hear from you. If you’re unfamiliar with email marketing systems, they offer a powerful way for you to interact with your audience.

The publishing world is evolving, and no one knows quite when it will end and what it will look like. As a writer, you've probably been spotting new trends, new entry points, new expectations, new leaders, and new technology, wondering how you can possibly keep up with all that change. Well, you’re not alone. Everyone’s seeing all that new—all that change—and wondering how they can possibly keep up with it all. There’s only one way to have a chance at keeping up—and it’s the same way any of us has a chance at gaining an advantage and keeping an edge, and that’s... To learn something new every day. I know it’s frustrating to hear that when all you want to do is write. “I don’t want to be figuring out fancy software and spending all that time on social media,” you’re thinking. "I don’t want to maintain a website and read about the industry all the time. Why can’t I just be a writer who, you know, writes?” And it’s true that a legal pad and a Bic pen should be more than enough to keep a writer churning out

My mom, a journalist, was talking with a friend. She beamed at my brother. “Charlie, he’s the writer of the family. And Annie? She’s…” Here, I felt my mom hesitate. Then, “Annie’s the athlete.” My brother excelled in everything involving words—from com...

As we seek out mentor texts to imitate or emulate, we encourage the mindset of comparison. When I suggested you search out writing you admire, you’re going to be drawn to a writer you look up to, whose work dazzles when you compare it with your own. Naturally, this writer naturally seems superior to you in some way—otherwise, why would you select this author to learn from? It’s appropriate to admire skilled authors, which is why Ben Franklin's method and straightforward copywork help us learn from the techniques employed by more experienced writers. But as soon as we starting thinking in terms of better or worse, superior or inferior, more or less advanced, more or less prolific, more or less famous…we’re using the language of comparison to label who's better or worse than us at something. And that’s when we teeter on the edge of unhealthy comparison. Comparison: The Good Before we get to the not-so-good, let’s start with the good. The good news is that there are benefits to comparison. Really! Aspirationa

Children used to be assigned copywork so they could practice penmanship and be exposed to great poetry, sayings, and passages from literature. But copywork’s not just for kids. You may recall from Episode 106 that Ben Franklin’s method is similar to copywork: He picked an essay or article he read and admired, took a few notes on each sentence—just a word or two—set aside the original, and some time later tried to recreate the original using the hints he had written down. Like I said, it isn’t exactly the same as copywork, but it’s close. Copywork is more meticulous than that. Like the scribes of old, a person devoted to copywork seeks to create an identical copy of the original text—an exact replicate. Why bother with copywork? You may ask, why would any ambitious, 21st-century adult writer bother with copywork? It may seem like a childish activity. Why revert to past-century elementary-school training when we’re adults seeking to produce a creative, contemporary body of work? Well, one advantage is that

A brief word of warning: this is a longer-than-usual episode. Instead of falling within the typical five- to eight-minute range, this episode clocks in at over 11 minutes. Are you a carnivorous reader? Francine Prose says in Reading Like a Writer: I’ve heard the way a writer reads described as “reading carnivorously.” What I’ve always assumed that this means is not, as the expression might seem to imply, reading for what can be ingested, stolen, or borrowed, but rather for what can be admired, absorbed, and learned. It involves reading for sheer pleasure but also with an eye and a memory for which author happens to do which thing particularly well. (31) When we learn from the best—the greats—they become mentors. We do this by reading with an analytical eye and carnivorous mind to gain insights into what works and apply principles and actual techniques to our own projects. In Episode 104, we talked about interacting with texts by writing in a book's margins, annotating as we go, which engages us at various

We stepped inside the cave entrance and followed our guide down narrow passageways to see its wonders. The Mark Twain Cave, a national landmark just outside Hannibal, Missouri, was the cave Samuel Langhorne Clemens explored in his youth and used as inspiration for the cave featured in The Adventures of Tom Sawyer when Tom Sawyer […]

"If you want to be a writer, you must do two things above all others: read a lot and write a lot.” ~ Stephen King You’ll hear that advice a lot. You want to write? Read a lot and write a lot. Simple as that. But is it that simple? Do we simply open the book, read and enjoy the story or helpful ideas, and automatically absorb the content? Or do we need to read with a plan or a strategy of some kind? Is there a way to take in and retain the content, be inspired by the style, and learn methods to apply to our own work? Is there a writerly way to read? I think there is. So do many others. Let’s start with the content. How do we grasp it, absorb it, retain it? Plagued by Lack of Retention? Someone asked me the other day if I’d read Great Expectations. I had. I read it and remember enjoying it. But I couldn’t recall much detail at all. There's Pip, right? And Miss Havisham sitting around in that ratty old wedding dress? That’s about all I could dredge up. I've read lots of books—I was an English Major, for cr

Memoir depends upon memories, yet memory is a living thing—a slippery, unreliable thing. In her book The Art of Memoir, Mary Karr describes memory as "a pinball in a machine—it messily ricochets around between image, idea, fragments of scenes, stories you’ve heard. Then the machine goes tilt and snaps off" (Karr 1). How can we trust this tilting machine to deliver something whole and wholly reliable? If we want to incorporate even short memories into our work to serve as illustrations, Karr says, “even the best minds warp and blur what they see…For all of memory’s power to yank us back into an overwhelming past, it can also fail big time” (5). She sends copies of her manuscripts to people who appear in her books because she doesn’t trust her “wiggly mind” (5). This week is my grandmother's birthday. If she were alive, we'd be celebrating her 121st birthday. And when her birthday comes around, even though she’s been gone for decades, I still remember the coo of mourning doves in her small Midwestern town, a

I heard Seth Godin interviewed on a podcast. He said: The fact that the market is noisy is not the same as the fact that your work is mediocre. Mediocre work is mediocre work! And we have a choice instead to dig super deep and bring stuff to the table that is worth talking about. […]

My brother memorized the poem "Jabberwocky" when he was a teenager, and I thought that was so cool. At the time could not think of anything to memorize other than "The Purple Cow," so I decided to copy him. I memorized "Jabberwocky" with its Bandersnatch and the slithy toves and that vorpal blade. I thought I was so cool. Not long ago I heard Neil Gaiman recite it, and I thought he was so cool. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XDLac7sAFsI So you see, poetry can be cool. It can be weird and funny and surprising. It can be serious, sad, and sobering. Poetry, if we let it, can seep into us and change us with its funny, surprising, and serious ways of processing life and ideas. My friends at Tweetspeak Poetry know this well. They invited people to join them in the challenge (and fun!) of memorizing poetry during the month of April. Sandra Heska King not only committed to memory "The Stolen Child," which was the poem the Tweetspeak community tried to memorize together, but she also continued work on memorizin

In the last episode, I urged you to send out your work even though it means you’re risking rejection—because to get a yes, you must risk a no. I even offered a case for embracing rejection as your goal, especially in the realm of literary journals, because by setting a rejection goal, you’re increasing your odds of an acceptance. A Plan to Process Rejection But you might need a plan for how to process those rejections. You can laugh it off as part of your master goal, but it'll still sting. And it hits hardest when your writing expresses deep struggles or raw pain. Writing like that requires great emotional risk, so to be brave enough to send it off should be applauded. To risk all of that and hear “No, we don’t want this” can leave a writer shaken, even shaky. We are not impervious to the pain of a rejection, nor should we be. We will open that email and feel the wave of nausea. As Isaac Asimov said, “Rejections slips…are lacerations to the soul." You have every reason to react in whatever honest, human

You’ve written something, edited it, polished it, and decided to send it out. Depending on your project, you’ll be shipping it off to a literary journal, magazine, agent, or publishing house. When you do, you risk rejection. You’ve probably heard about Stephen King’s rejections from his book On Writing. He says, “By the time I […]

You may be tired of comma talk, but I want to toss one more punctuation post out to you before I move on to other topics. This one’s about the comma splice. To fix a comma splice, you first have to know what it is. A comma splice occurs when you connect or “splice” together two independent clauses with a comma. As a reminder, an independent clause can stand on its own as a sentence, with a subject and verb. For example: The writing conference invited my favorite author. That’s an independent clause. She spoke for an hour about her muse. That’s an independent clause, too. A comma splice would occur when you connect those two independent clauses with a comma so it would look like this: The writing conference invited my favorite author, she spoke for an hour about her muse. This must be fixed, or your editor might pluck her hair out in small handfuls each time she encounters one. Save her this painful experience by fixing the comma splice yourself. Five Easy Ways to Fix a Comma Splice: 1. Period Use a

Now that we’re down to later-order concerns, examining our work at the detail level, I thought we might talk some more about punctuation. We’ve already covered the serial comma, also known as the Oxford comma. Let's cover yet another comma: the direct address comma. The direct address comma will be review for many readers, but it’s a fun one to offer as a refresher. Friends, we cannot neglect this comma or leave it out of our stable of punctuation. With it, we save lives. Without it, the unthinkable can happen. What do you mean, Ann? This comma offers clarity in its own way. And you can lock in its purpose is with the now infamous phrase: “Let’s eat, Grandpa.” The comma after the word “eat” is the direct address comma. With the comma, I’m directly addressing Grandpa, issuing an invitation for Grandpa to join us for dinner. Without the comma, Grandpa is dinner. Some people have been advised to read their work aloud and wherever they pause is a good place to add a comma. This helps a little, but somet

Let’s say your writing group or an editor has given you the high-level editorial input on your content that we talked about in episode 95. They’ve offered structural and developmental edits for your piece. And you’ve incorporated those recommendations—deleting, rewriting, and rearranging material as needed so that your overall idea or message is stronger than […]