Ann Kroeker, Writing Coach

Last time we talked about commas. In particular, I brought to you the serial comma, or the Oxford comma. I emphasized the fact that details—even commas—really do matter to writers. This was on my mind because of that court case ruling hinging upon how workers, an organization, and the state of Maine interpreted its statutes […]

If you’re new to writing, you may be unaware of the fierce debate among writers, editors, teachers, and grammarians over the use of the serial, or Oxford, comma. If you’ve been around the world of words a while, you know the tension, the arguments, the passion associated with this tiny punctuation mark used—or not used—in […]

I didn't publish a single post last week. I volunteered to serve at a four-day tournament, and my commitment left no free time. I couldn't write anything new, and I had no blog posts or podcast episodes in reserve. So last week, I published nothing. May I serve as a cautionary tale? Work Ahead on Content If you're a blogger or regular guest columnist for another publication, I urge you to do what I failed to do: write several articles or blog posts and store them up—better yet, prep and schedule them—so you'll have content for the weeks you head off on vacation, catch the flu, or volunteer to serve at a four-day tournament. If you don’t, you'll end up like me and have no choice but to recycle something from the archives or simply take the week off. Now, taking a week off is certainly an option. But your readers like hearing from you. They look forward to your updates. They appreciate your solutions to their problems. They're entertained by your stories. They show up looking for whatever it is you write a

  Before we revise, we need something to revise. We must compose the perfect first draft. How? We write without worrying about every comma splice or misplaced modifier. We write with abandon and get the story down. The Writer Hat During the prewriting and creation stage, we must consciously separate the writer self from the editor self. It’s as if we need to wear two hats—literally two different hats you can wear at the appropriate times. In episode 91, I mentioned my literal editor hat: a Maxwell Perkins-style fedora. The writer hat—especially needed during that first draft creation stage—is more like a baseball hat popped on backward. That image comes to me from Barbara Kingsolver, who wrote: My muse wears a baseball cap, backward. The minute my daughter is on the school bus, he saunters up behind me with a bat slung over his shoulder and says oh so directly, “Okay, author lady, you’ve got six hours till that bus rolls back up the drive. You can sit down and write, now, or you can think about looking fo

Christian author Eugene Peterson wrote a book called A Long Obedience in the Same Direction. He explains where he got that phrase. Christians, he says, are looking for quick results, but shortcuts don’t lead to Christian maturity. Peterson writes, “Friedrich Nietzsche, who saw this area of spiritual truth at least with great clarity, wrote, ‘The essential […]

In chapter 7 of On Being a Writer, my coauthor Charity Singleton Craig highlighted what L.L. Barkat calls the “Fifteen Years of Writing for Your Grandmother Rule” (On Being a Writer, 86). Charity included this excerpt from Barkat’s book Rumors of Water: It is not uncommon for writers to seek a large audience too early […]

As you go about the work of writing, and the business of writing, don’t forget to study the craft of writing. Find ways to continually learn and improve. A lot of writers feel a strong urge to enter an MFA program to do this. If you feel compelled to pursue that, by all means, research it and see if that’s the right next step for you. But what I’m suggesting is you set out to invent a kind of self-study writing course using resources readily available online or at your local library. You'll learn efficiently when you develop a self-study writing course that includes practice and study pertaining to your biggest areas of struggle or weakness. Novelist James Scott Bell wrote an article about how to strengthen your fiction the Ben Franklin way. He explains how Ben Franklin came up with his own self-study course to grow in virtues. Franklin made a grid and evaluated whether or not he was successful in his pursuit of a given virtue each week. In The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin, the Founding Father conc

In episode 86, we discussed first steps you can take to launch your social media presence. I suggested you could start simple and slow by establishing a bare-minimum presence at each of the big social media platforms. I encouraged you to secure your avatar, your handle, your username—ideally using your author name—and fill out your […]

When people talk about building a platform, they often think immediately of social media. I suppose it’s because the word “platform” is often used to describe them: Facebook is a social media platform, Twitter is a social media platform. It’s referring more to the technology that makes it possible for that service to run. But […]

There’s a proverb that says “The best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago. The second best time is now.” It’s true of so many things, isn’t it? We would be in such a different place if only we had started years ago. Building a platform might feel a little bit like that, […]

Last week I volunteered to serve at a speech and debate tournament for junior high and high school students. One of the women I served with asked if I thought writers were expected to speak more than ever before, whether through all the video options that are popping up like Facebook Live, or in person […]

At a writing conference a few years ago, I attended a panel discussion that included acquisitions editors from several publishing houses and a couple of literary agents. I’d been wanting to meet one of the agents, so after the session, I stood in line to introduce myself. I told him I was a writing coach working with several authors who were developing book proposals. These authors had questions about platform. “What kind of numbers are agents and publishers really looking for?” I asked. “And how would I know if I have an author you might be interested in?" He said he couldn’t speak for all agents or publishers, but as an example of the platform size he was looking for, he would only consider authors with a minimum of 10,000 Twitter followers. Platform: Numbers Matter I asked another literary agent the same question recently, especially regarding platform. Though she didn’t commit to 10,000 as the ideal, she said numbers do matter. “It’s not me,” she said. "It’s the publishers. They’re the ones asking for

It’s that time of year when everyone is working on their annual business plans, intentions, resolutions, habits—or even big, hairy, audacious goals, those BHAGS. Or “stretch” goals. A lot of writers are thinking through their goals for the year ahead. You may be measuring and drawing out calendar grids in your bullet journal or shopping for a bright, new, fresh yearly planner. You’re organizing and reorganizing Evernote tags and Notebooks. You’re trying out productivity apps. You’re going to test run a new social media platform. Maybe you decided this is the year to write your first book, so you set up a Word document or Scrivener file with the working title, as a promise to make progress. You can imagine that as a coach, I love all of that dreaming, all that energy, all that desire and hope. I’m so happy you’re making plans and experimenting—maybe setting out to launch a new project. Go for it. Make those plans. Set those goals. Write out your intentions and resolutions. Stretch and get a little audacio

Last time we talked about our writing as a gift to the world, but our writing can be a gift in a more specific, focused way when we write for individuals we know and love. When our writing is sent out to the world, it's usually enjoyed by one reader at a time, so in a way, all of our writing is for individuals. What I mean here is you can sit down and write for someone in particular—an individual who will be the only intended recipient of a given project. Maybe you write a long letter to a family member, or you compose a children’s story for your child or grandchildren, or you write a love poem to your significant other. You might write a note to a soldier stationed in another country, a person in prison, or a sponsored child. One project, for one person. This is where writing is personal. Sure, the projects we send to publishers are important, offering the potential to reach into circles we might never have connected with on our own, carrying our message far and wide. And yet the people who have been pa

In this season of giving, it seems apt to talk about our writing as a gift. "Hold on, now," you say. "I was kinda hoping to make some money at this whole writing gig, so are you saying we have to give our words away?" Whether we're paid or not, isn’t viewing our words as a gift…isn’t that how we begin the process of connecting with people? We toil over our message and send off something for a reader to consider. “Here. I wrote this for you.” I recently published a blog post about the longing we writers have for applause—not for how amazing we write or how heroic we might be for sharing the depths of our heart or pain, but to hear the sound of someone responding to the words we've composed and offered. We long to build a bridge from writer to reader. To connect. Author, poet, and essayist Scott Russell Sanders explains his motivation. In an essay entitled “The Singular First Person," he says, “I choose to write about my experience not because it is mine, but because it seems to me a door through which oth

When building a platform, we might be told to build our email list or increase our social media numbers, so we're tempted to do a lot of things maybe before we’re ready—some people advise writers to buy a bunch of Twitter followers or set up an Instagram account even if we don't like taking pictures. We get so busy trying to follow somebody else’s plan, we forget that before any of those steps, we need to get the basics down. We need to have a solid idea of the main Whos involved. The First Who…Is You! In the last episode, I encouraged you to embark on a memoir project regardless of whether you write memoir or nonfiction of any kind. Even if you write science fiction or romance, if you write, you’ll write better if know yourself well. And one powerful way to get to know yourself is to reflect on the events that formed you in big and small ways—moments when you felt a shift or an insight, moments when you changed. As I’ve said, these personal pieces don't need to be shared publicly, although they could if yo

This week I want to encourage you to dip into memories and memoir. Even though this veers from the more obvious platform series we’ve been in, it may, eventually, reveal more about who you are and what you want your platform to be about. I believe it’ll be time well spent. Think back to an […]

Last week on my blog I shared an excerpt from Mary Pipher’s book Writing to Change the World: I left it up to readers to decide what it meant for them, but I did hope her thoughts would encourage us to listen closely, to realize the power of our words, and then, when we choose to use them, to use our words well and use them for good. The Power of Poetry On Friday, I wrote a post for Tweetspeak Poetry that highlighted the healing power of poetry. I shared an interview with Gerda and Kurt Klein. Kurt was an American lieutenant who arrived at a concentration camp just after it was liberated. Gerda had been imprisoned in the camp and brought the lieutenant into a factory where female prisoners lay on scant beds of straw, sick and skeletal, many with the look of death, barely moving. Kurt recalls his first interaction with Gerda, where she made a sweeping gesture over the scene, and quoted a line from the German poet Goethe, “Noble be man, merciful and good.” Kurt said, "I could hardly believe that she was ab

Your writing platform will have a lot of elements, but it starts with you, the writer, and what you’re about or what’s your thing, your topic, your niche. We’ve talked about establishing an online home, because you want to have a place to welcome people who are searching for your niche or your name. When people arrive, they should have some idea of your focus. “Ah, I see that Alice Author writes about the Arts.” The visitor—whether editor or reader—won’t be surprised to find the image of a painting or a still shot of a stage production on Alice Author's home page. Nonfiction Ned writes about leadership. His website will offer some clues through design choices and content—maybe taking inspiration from leadership book covers or from websites like Fast Company and Entrepreneur. Let’s say Ned decides to narrow his niche from leadership to leadership for entrepreneurs in the startup phase. That’s his niche. And Alice writes not just about the Arts in general but about introducing children and families to the A

If you’re writing nonfiction, you’re probably trying to zero in on a category or topic that you’d like to write about and be known for. You’re trying to find your focus. If you haven’t already been exploring the possibilities by writing blog posts or articles, you’ve probably had some inkling. If not, look for clues. When you’re leafing through a magazine, what articles catch your eye? What do you rip out and stick in a folder? When you’re skimming your Twitter or Facebook feed, what do you retweet or share? What do you save to Pocket or Evernote? What Topics Fascinate, Captivate, or Energize You? Make a list of those fascinating, captivating, energizing topics—the ones you return to again and again. Once you’ve identified those topics or categories, you have some choices. For example, do you see a common thread that ties them together? If so, see if you can create an umbrella under which they can fall. Lifestyle bloggers do this, where under that “umbrella” they have categories on their website—buttons