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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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.

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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.

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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. 

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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. 

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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.

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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?” 

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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.

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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.

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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.

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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. 

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 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.

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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. 

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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: 

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